All Thoughts Being Equal

This post is third in the Summer camp for "adults" series: See part 1 and part 2 . How long can I go in critiquing another, more transparently corporate-retreat-aspiring "summer camp for grown-ups" before giving up and yelling "fuck off"? Read and see! I. At the end of last summer I wrote two posts about Camp RAHH, "Seattle's summer camp for adults." And my feeling by the end of it was less rage than bleakness and despair, except for the one hopeful fact that they were paying money to their host camp, Camp Kirby, and that Kirby is a lovely place that deserves all the money it can get. Now I've come to learn about the broader trend of adult summer camps, and I'm angry again. I think I have a Facebook sponsored ad to thank for this, but first, here's a TIME article from 2013: Like cartoons and cupcakes, summer camp is becoming one of those things adults just won’t leave to the kids anymore. “Glamping” — that is, stay...

This post is a direct follow-up to: Summer camp for adults, pt. 1 – The Rahh of the wild I. In the previous post I analyzed the marketing for Camp RAHH, a so-called "summer camp for adults." The whole thing made me almost excessively peevish, and I want to figure out why. Let's recap what seems to be the problem here. The ethos at play is one where the main problems are external. It's society that's creating FOMO in us; society that demands constant status updates and check-ins; society that forces booze and drugs into our hands, and makes us use them; it's all peer pressure . Them, not us. Society is preventing us from unleashing our truly authentic, uniquely personal selves . But see, all five ( five ) sections in that post were more or less predicated on the assumption that the target demographic for Camp RAHH is sane . The alternative, far more depressing than enraging, is that something is wrong. The prospective RAHHers haven't made pis...

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 ...