the price of community is inconvenience
the price of community is inconvenience
stuart schrader
It’s a Friday night and I’m sitting in a truck bed with my friends. It’s the kind of weather that doesn’t even bother showing up, a type of nothing that makes everything feel like more. We’re passing around a blunt and drinking out of travel mugs and telling stories. We’re all very attentive and I’m very busy with remembering this exact moment as I sit in the corner and grin like an idiot. I’ve probably said, out loud, “Isn’t it crazy that we’re all friends?” like fifteen times at this point. We’re all used to it by now.
Two hours or three days or a week before that moment it can be assumed that I was imagining fifteen ways not to go to said thing. It’s a stupid cycle. I obsess over the moment until I’ve tried to imagine every outcome of it and those outcomes convince me not to do it. I was very moved over by the narrative that I am too bloated to attend a function. I am stiffly frozen over by the thought that some interaction might, god forbid, be awkward or cringe or annoying. You drink too much at a bar one time and then convince yourself it will happen every time. The possibility of a bad experience is suddenly worth a lot more than the promise of any at all. You know what happens in your bed, horizontal, on your phone. There is absolutely nothing there that surprises you. That’s why it always wins.
I think that is the important thing about community. It asks, and it keeps asking and if you say no it will learn where there is a door and where there isn’t. It’s why I feel irate when a friend says they will come to something and doesn’t. Or why I can’t fathom why my mom would act bewildered when I introduce a new character to her in my life. ‘Don’t you have enough friends?’ That sounds obscene. I hope that can never be true. I hope that I have the privilege to be annoyed by my friends for as long as I am alive. I know what it’s like to look around and see there are no doors. When the only person you know that is dealing with something difficult is yourself. It feels very capitalistic; you are on this earth to endure alone and you shouldn’t trust anyone other than yourself. I’d do that if I had no intent on learning anything outside of myself.
Maybe I just take everything too personally, but it feels particularly bad when people around you have no effort of community. Community doesn’t stop at your significant other, by the way. It’s everyone around you and everything else. I try not to make narratives about other people but if your narrative is the fear of being alone and you spend the time you have with people who love you talking about how you wish a boy or girl will love you will be alone. If you lack the decency to turn down your own voice and listen no one will end up hearing you. You’ll be sitting there applauding your own echo, your own ability to be hyper individualistic and nonchalant and alone
excerpt from ‘Small Town Organizing for Anarchists’ zine
C.S. Lewis said friendship has no survival value, but it gives value to survival. Now survival itself has become the prize and the lover, the job, the curated life. Friendship, community, and yearning for others is cringe and outdated. A desperate want you’re supposed to bury under irony and stay mysterious. But yet here I am saying: stop ignoring your friends. Stop ignoring the place you live.
It’s something even the older generations don’t get, which is probably because of the Bush Era and its push for the nuclear family and suburban lifestyle which somehow pushes individuals living in plastic houses closer together while disregarding any aspects of community at all. Hyper-individuality has bled into younger generations and made everything cringe and scary. Communal responsibility is someone else’s problem. Don’t look the homeless person or the cashier who doesn’t speak your language or your friend’s friend in the eye because it’s unnecessary. I’ll tell my mom I want to ask my neighbor for salt and she tells me that’s dangerous. Best case scenario they give me salt, worst case they murder and kill me which is, by the way, the worst case scenario for literally any scenario ever.
image from Anti-Eviction Mapping Project zine
Self-inflicted mortification is both online and in real life and everyone is scared of being cringe. Posting on Instagram is cringe and going on runs in cringe and going to the library is cringe. Being in big groups of people outside is cringe. Our political environment is cringe, true, but apparently so is engaging in it in any way. To deviate even slightly from the script of hyper-individual cool, terminal nonchalance is to humiliate yourself and the script itself is enforced. The surveillance state and social self-consciousness conspire to keep us alone. The humiliation is the system disciplining you. Every act of collective care is cringe and we are all starting to believe it. The brand that you try to build for yourself is now the ‘self’ and you are always selling something.
The surveillance state watches you, little rat. They give you crackers, water. They measure your reactions. And if you don’t act right, they step on you. Make friends with other rats. Die in a group, at least, so the pain divides itself among the bodies.
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