This week’s newsletter from Chris W ’s Unknown Unknowns was just filled with one mind bomb after another. After falling down many a pleasurable rabbit hole, I kept returning to Nat Eliason’s essay on De-Atomization is the secret to Happiness that Chris linked.
Chao I love how you give names to phenomena like this! I definitely noticed atomization in the rock climbing gyms in Los Angeles county. We used to have only a few gyms that were admittedly quite dingy but had tightly knit communities that climbed together and became friends in the parking lot. Then the BIG gyms rolled in and there was all this space to spread out. People would plug into their earphones instead of talk to the person climbing next to them. We were all climbing alone, together. Then came folks getting offended when anyone would give them climbing advice (aka beta). THEN, in an effort to bring people back together again, affinity groups started popping up but they are very singular in who they cater to. If you can be a part of these groups, you can enjoy community again. But only with other people who qualify to be in that group. So I wonder: what about everyone else? Are they just destined to be atoms that never reconfigure?
Atomization and Reconfiguring
Thanks for sharing abt Tom Morgan’s relevance realisation
I need the terms to describe a few isolated weirdly expansive experiences I had this year
Chao I love how you give names to phenomena like this! I definitely noticed atomization in the rock climbing gyms in Los Angeles county. We used to have only a few gyms that were admittedly quite dingy but had tightly knit communities that climbed together and became friends in the parking lot. Then the BIG gyms rolled in and there was all this space to spread out. People would plug into their earphones instead of talk to the person climbing next to them. We were all climbing alone, together. Then came folks getting offended when anyone would give them climbing advice (aka beta). THEN, in an effort to bring people back together again, affinity groups started popping up but they are very singular in who they cater to. If you can be a part of these groups, you can enjoy community again. But only with other people who qualify to be in that group. So I wonder: what about everyone else? Are they just destined to be atoms that never reconfigure?