All Thoughts Being Equal

This post is a partial follow-up to: Bowling alone, camping together I. Many posts ago I wrote about the so-called "invention of loneliness" and the intentional community of adult Cool People who volunteer at CampQuest Northwest. To be honest it probably wasn't the best editorial decision; the post seems rather disjointed, and CQNW deserves better than that. But it's from Kayla (who's a CQNW staffer in addition to blogging at Crows Against Murder ) that I learned about Camp RAHH. Camp RAHH is "Seattle's Summer Camp For Adults," and if that doesn't already sound twee-or-maybe-unctuously-startuppy enough, check out their website , and their mission statement: Let’s face it… we’ve got a problem. Our dependence on technology and the urgency of our demanding routines can often introduce unnecessary anxiety into our daily lives.  Social pressures to stay on top of everybody’s business - and to excessively share all of our own - can often...

My post on collectivism was a response to my friend Katrina's post, which in turn was inspired by this video about "the innovation of loneliness." My other friend Jon Bash had this to say about it: I'm calling BS on a good portion of this video. Technological fearmongering, extrovert-bias, and attempting to speak for everyone's experiences. Personally: I don't make up stuff to share on the internet, and I'm just fine being alone and socializing with people on the internet (to an extent), thank you. I've heard the video's critique before, but I watched it anyway. The visuals are quite slick, but the content is anything but incisive. The narrator, Shimi Cohen, mentions the "maximum group size" of 150 persons—also known as Dunbar's number —but this is a mean of a value for individuals , that might be as low as 100 or as high as 230, even upwards of 290! The video sort of slides (or slouches) downhill from there, with the usual ...