Of mice and manifestos

choosing connection when the world is conspiring to isolate you

I’ve been on a John Steinbeck kick of late. Started with Cannery Row (an all-time favorite), moved on to Tortilla Flat (also delightful), and last week, I blasted through Of Mice and Men in one sitting. That one devastated me. Goddam.

It’s funny how when I’m immersed in a work project, as I currently am with writing the Lightpage manifesto, whatever I happen to be reading becomes part of the larger conversation. Inspiration ends up coming from places I’d never expect. In this case, I’m finding a ton of resonance in Steinbeck’s slices of life from depression-era California, as well as some cool parallels that deepen the themes Kasra and I have been circling around in our conversations.

There’s a deep loneliness that pervades every character in Of Mice and Men. The social structures in this world (economic, racial, marital, etc) and physical environments reinforce that isolation at every turn. It’s every man for himself in this little corner of the valley.

That’s part of what makes George and Lennie so special. Unlike everyone else, these two genuinely have each other’s backs through thick and thin. They stick together. It’s the only real friendship that can be found anywhere in this world, which makes the book’s ending all the more tragic.

Another thing that stood out to me is that these characters talk about their dreams, but in wistful or bitter ways. Most of them would love to own a lil piece of land. Tend it themselves and reap its fruits. And for Lennie, it’s all about dem rabbits. None of their dreams are particularly wild or unrealistic. Nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a few years of intentional work and saving.

Yet no one seems able to move towards what they want. Not really. They’re caught in perpetual inertia, where instead of taking concrete steps to break free, they turn habitually towards creature comforts. They drink. They go to the whorehouse. They gamble. And when the money runs out, they come back for another month of working the fields. Over and over. It’s some wheel of samsara shit.

But there are glimmers of hope. In the rare instances where these dudes open up to each other and share their dreams earnestly, something in the system shifts. New possibilities arise. Alone and isolated, their dreams feel like escapist fantasy. But working together, pooling resources, they feel plausible for once, like that lil plot of land might actually be within reach.

This is a big part of why I’m so bullish on personal manifestos btw. When you clearly articulate your desire, your vision, and put it out into the world, you tend to attract people who want the same things as you. You create the conditions for connection and cooperation. You make it possible for your dreams to unfold in a way you could not orchestrate by yourself, in isolation.

Last week, I stumbled across a big feature story in The Atlantic called The Anti-Social Century, all about how our modern environments and cultural norms reliably lead to isolation and loneliness. The world we live in isn’t the Salinas Valley in the depression. It’s so much safer, more prosperous, more abundant. Yet by every available measure, our communities, institutions, and sense of social wellbeing are swirling down the drain, fueled by the pull of creature comforts that we pursue in isolation. We’ve engineered vast swaths of our economy to capture and hold attention, to pull humans out of participation in the physical world and into the seductive glow of screens.

In one of our calls, when I asked Kasra what the biggest ripple he hopes Lightpage makes in the world, he said he hopes it helps people build deeper relationships. For it to help people feel more connected to their real world partners, friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc.

That’s it. Full stop.

It’s funny. I reflexively expect tech founders to wax poetic about the grandness of their visions, and how they want to reengineer complex global systems at scale. So it struck me as quietly revolutionary to say “no, this tech is meant to help you slow down, and connect you back to the people in your life.”

None of us knows what’s coming our way in the next decade. The only thing anyone seems to agree on is that economically, politically, and culturally, shit is only gonna get weirder and more chaotic and unstable.

In my own life, I’ve been spending less time on screens these last few months (and way less time on twitter in particular). I’ve been making friends locally here in Tucson. Doing lots of in-person recovery meetings and playing pickleball and such. As someone who’s traditionally been Very Online, and who's spent a lot of his life isolating himself, it hasn’t been easy or comfortable to break out of my digital cocoon. It’s like those muscles have atrophied, and building them back up is taking real work.

But the more I focus on my small handful of real world connections, the more I feel a sense of groundedness and stability that I never felt online, even when things were going well with dozens of digital friends and thousands of followers and email subs. Even though the news leaves me feeling unsettled and freaked out about the future, the more I invest in local relationships, the more it feels like we’ll all be okay, regardless of how batshit insane things get in the years ahead. As long as we stick together and have each other’s backs.