As the world gets more complicated with online banking, Artificial Intelligence, and other forms of instant money and information, what I’ve found is that what humanity is really in need of is community. Not virtual reality, virtual interactions, and virtual relationships, but real-life human contact that can be found almost anywhere people gather. And it happens when people stop looking at their computer screens, large or small.
I have taken up walking the family dog every morning to the local park and working out on the exercise equipment there. And in the process, I found a community of shared interests. First are the dog walkers. The ice is broken between dog walkers over conversations about dog breeds and dog habits. Then the conversation moves on to other aspects of the dog walker’s lives. They form a kind of shared interest group, a community of dog walkers, walking, and friendly conversations.
“Oh, aren’t you the guy from RLNews?”, they end up saying as they emerge from the fog of their personal isolation. It’s usually my hat that gives it away.
The same is true of the people who are into physical fitness. The ones from the neighborhood halfway houses, some marked by their addictions and stints in jail, offer polite “good mornings” on their morning jogs.
New faces show up and say hello while working out on the elliptical or chest press devices that come from the surrounding area and talk. These people and the young families who are discovering the children’s play area in the newly renovated Anderson Park all form connections, which in turn form small groups of community – a phenomenon that’s quite human.
In this post-pandemic era, people are finding that new apps are no substitute for in-person relationships with family and close friends. Sure there’s Facebook, TikTok, and WhatsApp, but it’s still the opposite of real human connectivity. They make the money transactions impersonal with routing numbers, passwords, and security measures that relegate people to numbers because of what? Because it’s easier to rob a bank with a cell phone than it is with a gun. Banks don’t trust people and are afraid of being robbed even to the extent that many in-person tellers are now forced to ID every customer even if they know them by face, this only reinforces the kind of mistrust the system creates. And distrust has run rampant these past few years
Conversely, simple facial recognition, an essential part of human recognition patterning, is active at the park, walking along Paseo del Mar or the local coffee shop, and building a trusting community. Facial recognition is one of the innate human traits that has evolved over the millennia for survival purposes to determine who was a part of our tribe and who wasn’t. Who was friend and who was foe.
Most people are specifically equipped with the ability to pick out a familiar face amongst the thousands of people they interact with at a store, airport, sporting event, or even a large concert. This is curious because, for the most part, people are pretty much the same. The differences are in the unique details of the facial triangle between the ears and the chin– the shape and color of the eyes, the shape of the nose and lips, and the color of their skin are all indexed into a part of our brain hardwired for recognition, friend or stranger. Some of us are better at it than others – I remember that face but I can’t think of his name. I think dogs do this by smelling each other’s butts, that’s another topic.
So, community involves having something in common, a connection and we do have many categories for these connections– family, friends, business associates, people we know while taking the dog for a walk, etc. Some of us have a larger capacity in our mental indexes than others but facial recognition is an inherent survival mechanism for all of humanity. So much so that it’s at the core part of racism; why a white witness to a crime misidentifies a person of color, for instance. Up until you can include people who you don’t have the same face color as yourself you may have an unconscious bias towards them.
A part of the problem with virtual learning or homeschooling is that children are isolated and don’t create those human connections and socialize with kids who are different from themselves. I still have friends that I made in second grade and my daughter’s best friend she met in grade school, just got married.
However, walking your dog to the park, going to social functions, and running into all sorts of people, does expand one’s sense of tribe, and communal connection, and as we emerge from the isolation of the recent pandemic, bouts of racism and political divisions created by MAGA stolen election delusions, we may just find we have more in common than what separates us. At least that’s my hope for this holiday season.