Yesterday, while I missed the Wellington Bloggers gathering, I did manage to spend a couple hours with the other moose. It was really good to spend some time catching up. There have been some pretty major developments in both our lives since we last had a catch up worthy of the name – him more than me, which is saying something.
One thing we talked about was community, and I realised that I’m finding the community scene in Wellington to be different for me now than it was back in ’02, when I hopped a plane to the UK. Then I felt plugged in to a solid and powerful network of people and there was some cool stuff emerging out of the collective. Now… not so much. Still all the awesome people there were then, but the way the connections work has changed.
There are communities here now – but I’m choosing to float on the edges of them, even the ones comprised of many people I am glad to call friends. The communities that I was massively invested in before have either disintegrated or ceased to call to me in any powerful way. My social relationships are defined primarily as one-to-one things instead of by membership in many-to-many nets.
Partly this is the shift in my cohort to babies and suburbs. But only partly; there’s something else going on. Not sure what. Perhaps there was a direction, or a counter-direction, that we once had and that is now lacking?
And underlying all of this, of course, is the fact that I am ridiculously busy right now. Pushing hard to get RtB tightened up, at the same time as pushing work to get $$ under control, at the same time as pushing study to get MSc on point… My former data point has been the number of emails I have building up unreplied-to. That stack has got ridiculous now. New data point: I am actually relieved that my finger is busted taking me out of sport for two months, because it means I get a few more hours in the day.
Strange times. I would benefit from more time to reflect than I’m currently getting. But at least I have my priorities straight enough to blog, right? It’s pretty much the only contact I have with most of you after all..
29 thoughts on “In Community”
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I reckon that a few things changed simply because you went overseas, Morgue. The dynamics of a couple of circles of friends I can think of changed nature with your absence. Some of it might have been coincidental – the JAAM group had been drifting in weird directions for a while already, for instance – but you were always a pretty strong social hub and some people simply had less reason to hang out together without you inviting them to the same parties etc.
It’s sort of like how Mel Brooks movies got a lot less funny when he stopped working with Gene Wilder. Wilder wasn’t even the funniest thing in those movies, but somehow he sparked off Brooks in ways that no one else did.
Perhaps it’s that your a lot less fun now? Or a lot older?
I hate to acknowledge that this is due to looking back at the “good ol’ days.” It’s true for all of us I think?
But maybe it’s the old thing…
I get where you comming from bruv. I feel it myself with peeps i know. But then i was not a social network guru like you.
travel changes people and the fact that Nz is so different to where you have been. U grew up and formed new perspectives. It all about he one on one and quality less about the group. Just some thoughts.
or you are old.
Agree with Pearce’s sentiments. Although it may be a combination of effects – the Morgue hub effect, combined with urban domesticity, combined with the moon being in the 7th house…
A few people have already made the point, but I’d also agree that your move to the UK was a factor in the change of our social environment.
You and Suraya left near the same time, and you were both in your own ways social hubs for various things in the groups we associated with.
But, also, we’re all getting older. Social networks that revolve and resolve around employment and/or young families mean a fundamental change away from where we were in our twenties.
In short, we’re getting old. As Jack once wrote, when we first headed out into the world there were always these old guys complaining that they had to work with people who hadn’t been born when the White Album was released.
Now we’re the group having to work with people who weren’t born when Straight Outta Compton landed!
Being old (the shift to babies and suburbs ref’d earlier) is obviously a big part of things. But my antennae twitch at something else that i can’t put my finger on.
(Probably it’s because Evil Darth Vader was banished to mars.)
I’m glad you blog. Your blog, Ruth’s and Susan’s make me feel more connected to some kind of community.
I’ve never been good at communities… always felt peripheral to all the communities I associate with except the Fluffies… I guess because I have always been too busy to make any significant contribution to anything… that hasn’t changed!
Aging and babies etc is related, but is not it. Going overseas is related, but is not it.
It is something else.
I wrote that? It certainly sounds like the sort of thing I’d write.
Social circles shift and dive. When we were off in the UK, we’d occasionally come back and be astonished by the changes – I remember having pub gatherings at the Bristol etc and people saying “Wow, I haven’t seen [other wellingtonian x] since you guys left NZ”. Personally, I often feel quite disconnected from the social scene. Part of this is simply because it’s hard to be social when you need to get a babysitter whenever you go out; part of it is realising that I didn’t actually have a hell of a lot of time for some of the people in my old Uni social scene; part of it’s something else.
Going overseas doesn’t change your social groups (generally); but it does give you the time-lapse view of the slow eddies of social contact.
And to expand on that: in Uni and shortly after, social contacts tended to be in group contexts. Hanging around after lectures, parties, flatmates, going to the pub, etc. I still have plenty of such group social contexts: they’re with the people I spend most of my time with, i.e. coworkers. Such group social contexts require less effort to keep up with – the decision to burn a spare hour between lectures by going and hanging around the Octagon, to use an example (that, admittedly, I didn’t use much myself) from Uni. Compare to getting together with a friend for coffee; at present, I work under 500m from one of my best mates and we have a hell of a time finding a spare lunch hour to hook up for a chat. So I’d say that the effort differential between group and individual contact makes a difference. Ditto the sheer logistics of it: previously (about up to the time I left the UK, actually), I used to live within staggering distance of most of my friends/peer group. Getting together was a matter of a chance word or quick text message (“AT PUB. YOUR ROUND”). Now I’m about 10-15k from most people I would count as friends – which isn’t a particularly big deal, but all these minor disincentives pile up.
The splintering of social networks that seem sturdy and fully integrated within one’s early and mid-twenties happens almost inevitably as one moves towards one’s early and mid thirties for a number of reasons, but here are what I believe are the most prominent.
* Group politics. Exacerbated by the fact that any given group of males and females will pair up, sex up, split up, and then repeat the cycle a couple of time. This only has to happen a couple of times before a gathering, a party, stops being a party and starts being an alcohol fuelled forum for the passive-aggressive “airing” of grievances. Also exacerbated by the inevitable flatting-together that occurs within networks of friends. There is no surer way to cultivate tension between otherwise convivial acquaintances than shunting them into a human warren for a year to learn all of each other’s annoying and inconsiderate habits. To summarise, this means that the once simple “Hey let’s all go camping together” suggestion is now complicated by the hour-long negotiations “No, we can’t invite Timmy, he and Julie always fight . . .” Ya ken? [Sideline: Have you ever noticed that single sex social groupings tend to continue to meet up with greater regularity (e.g. a basketball group, a role-playing crowd) than a gender diverse group (stupid phrase, like there are eight different genders you could be. Drrr)]
* A group of people drawn to each other are often drawn more to the dynamic of the group than the individuals within the group. To whit, with time, the people within the group often realise – say an event occurs without Dave – that they don’t actually have anything in common with Kari, Bobo and Bob, beyond a mutual enjoyment of sitting round and drinking with Dave. Ergo if Dave’s not there, no flowing conversation – and you, Kari, Bobo and Bob realise they could just have one-on-one tete-a-tetes mano-y-mano with old Dave. This is similar to the group politics issue, but less . . . hate-fuelled.
* As you’ve already mentioned, the time-poor (hate that phrase), suburb-living, committed-relationship, kids, friends-skiving-off-overseas element commits largely to the break-down of social circles. It’s just impossible to get everybody in the same place and same time anymore.
* As someone in their early/mid twenties, the forging-of-identity thing is happening more acutely – which means more group activities, as one is drawn to the diversity of such gatherings. Also, this tends to be a friends-as-family stage of people’s lives, where having left the homestead leaves a welcome but distinct absence of routine and familial socialising. It makes sense that young’uns are drawn to large social interactions in a surrogate capacity. The older you get, the more you start to forge your own homestead. To whit: getting engaged.
OT: Jack – yeah, you wrote it on your blog post of 20/02/2007. I read it, giggled madly, and immediately started to use the following quote as my sig on a number of forums;
“You know when you just started in the workforce, and annoying old people would moan about how it was weird to be working with people who hadn’t been born when the White Album came out? Well, now we’re working with people who weren’t born when Straight Outta Compton came out, man.”
Completely without giving you any credit, of course. Ta! =)
I love how many people in their early 30s describe themselves as ‘old’, like we’re all so wizened and we’ve all been through so many things and seen so much.
It’s like we’ve reached our 2nd teenage and think we know it all, all over again.
I wonder what our grandparents’ generation would make of us when we talk like this. 😛
Incidentally my “good old days” are right now – I can’t think of another time that was better in my life.
hum… you are all now thinking about it to much and it will become bigger than it needs be.
So we’ve reached a stage where people are nostalgic about the early parts of this decade. Our children will probably be nostalgic about breakfast.
Nostalgia? Hardly. Recognition of change, dude.
Dude. You’re talking about a direction that we once had that’s now lacking, other people are talking about these young punks who can’t even remember when some crappy album came out, others are name-checking The Good Old Days…
It’s all very “we’ve lost something important but we don’t really know what,” which is exactly what nostalgia is.
I think it’s this whole “Ahh we’re so old!” thing that’s pissing me off. We’re all still at the beginning and people are talking like it’s over already. All that’s missing is for someone to say something disparaging about “modern music”.
Yeah, I’m with ya. There are flavours of nostalgia at work in this general discussion. I just don’t frame it that way, though.
The ‘we’re so old’ thing – isn’t it said more in jest than in seriousness? And it’s a pretty unavoidable check when you realise there’s a whole set of younger folks with their own youth culture that you don’t understand.
But hell yes. We’re still at the beginning. The middle of the beginning, perhaps, but the beginning overall.
We’re in a generation that refuses to take ourselves seriously, at least outwardly, so I often take this sort of jesting as heart-felt.
I think youth culture is getting younger and faster all the time, and that young people – yes even many of us thirtysomethings* – have less knowledge of the past than previous generations did. And I see nostalgia everywhere, even if it’s just a shallow “check it out they’ve started making Mello Yello again, ah childhood” sort of thing.
That new Mello Yello is repulsive, btw. It probably always was though.
*Horrifying to realise that we are now that show’s demographic. That’s WORSE than being “old”.
The reason I say I’m old is more an acknowledgement that I’ve now reached an age where I can do what I want without worrying about getting hassled by members of my peer group for being desparately uncool. I.e. It doesn’t matter if I’m uncool, I’m already uncool by virtue of my age.
And I agree, we’re still at the start of our lives, but if you listen to the media (which is darn hard to escape) who’d know? Which could be part of the reason people say they’re ‘old’.
And I’m not totally sure I’d agree young people have less knowledge of the past than previous generations either. Do you know how much of a knowledge of the past older people have, bearing in mind that history is everything that happened before one was born?
On the other hand, perhaps all those old people did spend more time listening to their grandparents, because in the absence of a TV, they couldn’t say ‘shove it grandma, you’re as boring as all heck!’ and watch Bugs Bunny instead 🙂
Janet: according to the media, the most interesting people = the prettiest faces.
Yes (most of, but not all) history is what happened before you are born, and yet I know who Peter Fraser was and why he is considered important despite him having died 25 years before my birth. Similarly, the American Democratic Party primaries are happening in a country thousands of miles away, and yet I know who the major candidates are and how well they are doing despite never having seen them in the flesh. How on earth could that be? 😛
Ever since the 1950s there’s been a push for the cult of the young and the new, basically because capitalists realised that teenagers were a strong market to target. This has extended to all things.
A chick I know mentioned a while ago that her gym trainer told her it was great that there are bars that middle-aged people can go and drink. “What do you mean middle-aged?” she said. “Oh you know, 23, 24,” he said, apparently without irony.
I don’t quite despair because I know some very smart and switched-on young people, but the trend as I see it is that the present is out of date and the past is irrelevant.
“Yes I’m a social bigot – but for the left!” – Woody Allen
Pearce – I agree – The problem is the f**king media report the trends and their interest is to promote trends that involve dumbing down, and feeling useless and past it.
I was all psyched up to rant about the media and their insidious nastiness for probably pages, but instead I’m going to go imagine a world where people aren’t made to feel inadequate for stupid manufactured reasons.
Sigh.
Agh I think my comment disappeared into the ether! Sigh. I’m going to read my book now.
Your comment exists. It happens to me all the time on this blog. Just hit refresh and your comment magically becomes visible, like tears in rain don’t.
Pearce. You’ve said something I really have to take issue with.
The Mello Yello of our childhood was a sickly sweet syrupy substance. The 21st century Mello Yello has a more tart, lemony flavour. It tastes a lot better than the Mello Yello of old.
And I shall fight to defend it, and it’s place in the pantheon of fizzy drinks. You have besmirched it’s honour, and I… nay WE, demand satisfaction!
There is much here that is wise.
Also, I think regular commenters Joey and Pearce are secretly hot for each other.
Scott: wow, the Mello Yello of old must have been REALLY vile. Half a glass of the new stuff made me queasy.