Try to imagine 150 people in a room. Does it feel crowded? Dunbar Number suggests humans can have 150 stable relationships simultaneously, which is way more generous than I would presume.
Having a professional responsibility for organizing events and growing communities, I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about how to bring people together, how to form groups, and how these groups function. Combining my personal experience with professional and scientific insight brought me to one conclusion: big things are over.
Life in a particular era and how society functioned back then are usually retrospectively understood. Let’s take a look at the late 2000s and early 2010s: iPhones, WWW, Fashion Night Out, Huge events open to the public, a seemingly endless new space called the internet, and the world is your oyster.
The Internet, once a vast haven to be explored is now a desert. If you see something new and original, you’re in luck. Most often, everything feels like it is on a loop, and optimization has hijacked the rest. Algorithms are carefully manipulated for interest, and having meaningful conversations get complex by the day both due to the performative nature of certain spaces and also since anyone can barge in at any time. However, this is not a complaint; it is just highlighting the trade-off we made. If anyone can be famous by posting online, then anyone can publicly hate on you.
The truth is that the carnival ended a while ago. The opulence of the last decade left a world with increasing rates of loneliness and a decrease in life satisfaction and meaningful connections.
When you start making friends from all over the world via the internet or in person, you tend to develop a flawed mindset that you connect with anybody. This happened around the 2010s with the rise of cheap travel, Couchsurfing, and the World Wide Web. We now have an outdated, bizarre group (class, if you will), whom I call the dotcom millennials—well-traveled bilinguals who feel globally integrated yet locally isolated. While their time is long gone, the core idea lingers. We fail to understand that people we connect with from other cultures or religions still have a lot of things in common with us, or at least we operate from the same paradigm. Thus, most of the time, they’re not necessarily an accurate representation of a different culture or the community they’re coming from. We must realize we end up with people we are akin to. Not necessarily in skin color or sexual orientation but in values and life direction.
As a liberal, this leads me to another question on how individualism and communities function. Whether people like it or not, the West is paradigmatically and irreversibly individualistic. If we accept the gradual historical and cultural motion toward individualism as a cornerstone of social evolution, then as a natural conclusion, we must acknowledge that there is no going back. Of course, one might argue the future will become rather collectivistic, but I don’t see the likelihood of it being grounded in reality. Even in fringe, supposedly collectivistic political movements, we see individualistic tendencies once we scratch the surface. That said, collectivistic traits will make atavistic appearances in odd forms, as we see in biological evolution. More proof is needed to claim that our cultural evolution is headed in this direction.
The paragraph above is why I think big things are over. If we combine the defining feature of individualism and our need for connection and gathering; we need to downsize. Downsize in groups, events, connections.
You might argue that cyberspace is infinite and AI & Apple Glasses will take over the world, but for the time being, our capacity as humans is finite. If we want to make the best of what we have and increase our impact on each other and the world, we must come together in different ways and numbers.
I see downsizing as an opportunity to become more pluralistic. Another marker of the last decade, “diversity,” has been subverted so many times to the point it created both backlash and decadence. Even if we disregard that in the name of equal opportunity, we can not turn a blind eye to the fact that diversity activism has done tremendous damage to genuine pluralism, where we can be surrounded by people who have different opinions than us and people who won’t drop us in a heartbeat if we say the wrong thing, which is how I believe a freedom-oriented and individualistic community can be formed.
If you feel like your events have no further impact than making signal-worthy LinkedIn photos, you might want to reconsider your priorities. Few people care about listening to a guy they can watch on YouTube, but many would love to contribute to a conversation. Most of us want to be a part of something.
Believe it or not, bigger is not always better. If anything, more significant is quickly forgotten. It’s impersonal. Kate Middleton’s conspiracy is not more important than your best colleagues’ woes or what is happening in your town this weekend. We chased This illusion, and the mirage died a while ago. The lingering feeling of emptiness everyone claims to have is the most considerable evidence of it.
Scaling is one of the best ways to build financial wealth, but life’s best things can not be scaled. Meaningful relationships and a community is one of them. Perhaps the scarcity and finite nature of it makes it even more precious. Big things are over.
References
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/02/01/the-end-of-the-social-network
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/512618/almost-quarter-world-feels-lonely.aspx
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/01/16/the-dead-internet-theory-explained
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