As you can probably tell from the blog header I designed, I'm not a graphic designer. And as such, I'm not sure what I'm conveying with the header, so I thought I'd at least make my intentions clear.
Let's start with the map-like background. It's excerpted from a social network map of The Abundance League Doris Spielthenner created using data from a member survey. Maritza Schafer and I (hosts of the Abundance League monthly meeting) created the survey with Doris' help. We asked members who they go to for help in various areas such as event planning, communications, fundraising, and technology as well as for personal reasons like emotional support and to talk about social concerns. We asked folks to list members and nonmembers they go to for help and support as well as how they know the person (the affiliation, like through work, etc.).
Well, Doris is a crackerjack social network analyst with a data fetish, so she was happy create social network maps of Abundance League members using the survey data as input. Doris, awesome job! And I was curious to see if our little social experiment was headed in the right direction.
I should give you some background to explain what "headed in the right direction means." My friends are a unique collection of social scientists, artists, and activists. My perspective about the interplay between social structure and culture and the powerful part they play in determining the quality of individual and collective experience has been shaped in this milieu. The Abundance League emerged from this milieu as an experiment to self-consciously architect - using ideas from social science and personal experience - a social structure and value system meant to generate good experiences and, on small local scale, increase well-being through purpose-driven social support.
As a founder, I was motivated to experiment for two reasons. First, because I wanted richer life experiences. I knew from a number of peak experiences that incredible moments were possible and that they centered around people and groups operating in a certain mode, one filled with openness, play, inclusiveness, creativity, authentic connection, and shared passions. This begged a simple question, "how could experience this more frequently?" It became obvious that I could not do this alone. These were collective experiences.
Secondly, as someone who shares the goals of environmentalists if not the mode, I'm convinced that the byproduct of a society that prioritizes health and happiness would be environmental sustainability. I think environmentalists and sustainabilistas have put the cart before horse. In general, they advocate a reordering of our material world to achieve sustainability. This seems like treating the symptom rather than the disease to me. And it leaves open the possibility of a "new and improved" consumer culture - the same poor experiences, but made green. Umm, no thanks.
Sure, society needs to change how it produces things. However necessary, I think it's totally insufficient. I believe the consumption juggernaut and the resultant environmental degradation are rooted in social structure and culture. Social structures and values drive behavior. Our current setup - reinforced by billions in advertising, government economic policies that support growth at all costs, a celebrity obsessed media, and car-dependent metroplexes - prioritize production and consumption while arguably doing little to support health and happiness if not actively working against it. If society prioritized supporting people in great life experiences, we'd get happier people, better social outcomes as a society, and, oh, by the way, the load on mother earth would lighten up quite a bit too.
The practice of sharing illustrates this perfectly. Imagine that tomorrow you woke up in a society where sharing was a priority, where the infrastructure, social structure, and culture made sharing a pervasive, ordinary, everyday experience. Obviously, you'd be living in a world that only yesterday consumed and wasted far more resources, but it would also be a world that offered people many more chances to help and connect with one another, behaviors known to support well being.
In any case, I'm interested in the topology of abundance, the social structure of happiness, and exploring a culture that complements and supports this structure. And having great experiences daily. Re-architecting industrial processes and greening consumer goods won't make us any happier nor does it guarantee a reduction in resource consumption. I believe that consumer culture, no matter how green, will still undermine human health and cripple our planet if it continues on it's path of continual escalation (increases in per capita consumption) and assimilation (increases in participants globally).
OK, that explains why I was curious about the map, back to the mapping project itself. So Doris presented the results to members about a year ago at FAS.research, where she works and where we hold our monthly meetings (thanks FAS!). The results were encouraging. The key finding of our not overly rigorous research project was that members connect to a large number of people outside of The Abundance League for resources and that there was a small, but strong core group with high trust and access to one another.
Doris summed this up as "strong core, trust / access - rich, emergent periphery." This gave us some indication our modest experiment, while still in a early stage, was evolving, albeit slowly, in the right direction. A sustainable, adaptive community has a strong, stable core with access to people, ideas and resources outside of the core enabling individuals and the community to co-evolve within a larger social system. At the individual level, a sense of security from group membership combined with a sense that there our opportunities beyond the core group should be a psychological positive. The graph accompanying this post supported this conclusion.
That explains the map background, I hope. The orange thingy with the lettering inside of the map is a riff on the header of the Economist magazine. Economics is classically defined as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. It's also know as the grim science. Well, we're entering a new world where it's increasingly recognized that a truly rich life, above a certain minimum standard of living, are centered on things that are available in abundance - like love, belonging, good relationships, purpose, creativity, hope, and opportunities to help one another. And even our supply of time expands with a life lived deeply. We more often have the presence of mind to experience time as a hologram, with our past, present, and future synthesized seamlessly into moments of beauty and transcendence.
In any case, the lettering and map attempt to make a statement about The Abundance League, that it's an experiment in social and cultural design that could lead to better life experiences for participants, and richer, more abundant lives. That being said, I'm open to better ideas for a header!
Food! Delicious, nourishing, beautiful food! In and of itself, it's essential to life and a basic pleasure. But as we've all undoubtedly experienced, it has a special power to bring people together. The meal as a social ritual seems to be part of all cultures.
