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In this episode, Dani tells us all the places she learned about community from and what they’ve taught her.
For links & recommendations, see full episode notes.
Dani is honest and refreshing in her takes on the world and society. Listen as she explains how she’s come to understand the world through kindness, both towards ourselves and everything else.
[0:00] Hey there everyone! It’s me, Dani. Welcome to my podcast, Understanding Kindness! Today’s episode was really inspired by Pynk Spots episodes 3 and 6 where they talk about community. So, today we’ll be talking about…community! There’s lots of recommendations in this episode (woot woot) and we’re gonna cover a lot in a short time. If you really want to delve deeper into how I came to this knowledge, as always, make sure to check out the recommendation for whichever specific topic catches your fancy. Let’s just get into it for now, welcome to this episode of Understanding Kindness.
[0:41] (Theme).
[0:48] Our Native segment today is inspired by episode 3 of a podcast called Not Invisible: Native Womxn on the Frontlines. Regan de Loggans is a guest on this episode. They are involved and write for the Indigenous Kinship Collective, which may sound familiar because I mentioned checking them out in episode 18. In this episode, they discuss mutual aid and MMIWG2ST (which you also heard about in that episode). The Collective has a zine on Mutual Aid where Regan explains what it is, the history behind it, and how to not co-opt traditional practices of mutual aid. In a brief description, mutual aid is the use of skill sharing with members of your community instead of exchanging things for money. It’s not based on transactions, it’s based on community strength from community knowledge. Another big point brought up in the episode was the inclusion of “G2ST” in the MMIWG2ST acronym. Regan brings about the point of what the letters actually stand for: G for girls; there are missing and murdered 8 year old Indigenous girls that have gotten little to no recognition because of their Indigeneity and brown skin. There are 2 Spirit and trans Indigenous folx who are missing and murdered and who have gotten little to no recognition because of their brown skin and gender non-conformity, which is a literal concept that does not exist outside of our minds. These are people whose captures and murders have gone unrecognized. That is unacceptable and adding the “G2ST” to MMIWG2ST is literally the least we can do for them. Regan also calls out the need for stronger community, in their personal community, but also in general, in order for us all to begin to heal. I’ll be coming back to the idea of mutual aid later in this episode today. And you bet both the podcast and the zine will be linked in the episode notes.
[2:52] {Singing} *Shout-Outs*
Exciting news today! We’ve got another patron joining us! So, a gigantic shout out to both Meg B. and Vidas H.! Thank you so so much for your support of me and this podcast! I am forever grateful to you both!
And now, onto your regularly scheduled programming.
[3:24] So, for our main segment I want to talk about the importance of community, what we gain from it, and how to cultivate it. I’m gonna bring in a few different points of reference that I’ve personally learned about community from.
Let’s talk about human animal behavior for a moment here. When we’re born, much like many non-human animals, we require at least one, but usual[ly] multiple (at least for us), other human animals to care for us. We literally cannot do anything for ourselves at that point. We need people to feed us, soothe us, bathe us, move us, and love us. Thus, we need a community of people invested in our survival in order to live. As we grow, we still need others to help care for us. There is something special that takes place in these young years of our lives. We learn from everyone and everything around us, as we have since our birth, but now we begin to participate. Literally everything that happens to us and around us is a source of learning for our little selves. How to make our favorite dish. How someone comes to our aid when we’re crying out for help. How someone offers us food when we express our hunger. How someone helps soothe us after getting worked up. We see how to act and behave as human animals from how the human animals around us behave and act. How they respond to certain circumstances. There’s something called attachment theory (which I heard about from Nic of Pynk Spots and have personally done almost no research on), but I do know, from Nic, that it’s based around how the individuals caring for our young selves meet our needs. For example, when we let a baby self-soothe when they’re crying, that baby is learning that no one is going to meet their needs when they need help. If we learn that babies need others to help care for them, and that they’re literally always learning and taking in stimuli, how can we consciously allow them to self-soothe? I want to be clear here that I am not shaming anyone who has used self-soothing as a tactic when raising a child. We were told that this was a good way to handle these situations by experts. We, even experts, are flawed beings, and unfortunately forget that we do not know everything, so sometimes we get hasty and excited when we find out new things, but we must learn that mistakes can come with haste, and we can take those mistakes and make them opportunities to learn.
[6:06] Even as adults we are constantly learning from everything around us. Literally everything. There’s an episode of Unlocking Us where Brené talks with David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, about the brain and how memory works. Eagleman tells us that the brain is always taking in stimuli. Everything that we sense is taken into our brains and stored. It may be stored for a long time, called long-term memory, or a short time, called short-term memory. If I’m remembering correctly from the Cognitive Psychology course I took, everything passes through our short-term memory, but some gets passed into long-term storage; repetition makes this more likely. So, the more something happens (ie. the more we’re made to self-soothe as a baby), the more likely it is to become ingrained in us. Our earliest memories are also the most well cemented memories in our brains, thus why this relates to how we interact in relationships, aka attachment theory. In general, one off instances don’t tend to overshadow lots of repetitive instances. This is something we tend to learn as we receive more stimuli throughout our lives.
[7:18] Now to bring this into community: we see, feel, hear, smell, taste, sense everything that happens to and around us from our literal birth. We know that we need care from others to survive. Therefore, it should be a relatively simple concept (at least in my opinion) that we need community, and this does not change as we grow. Sure, some of us may need less help for some everyday things, but mostly we tend to need or at least benefit from help in almost every way. Also, our minds are limited to our own experience. But the beautiful thing about being a human animal is that we can learn from others’ experiences and that in itself becomes part of our experience here. Listening to another person’s story is an experience, and we should take heed of what others have learned from their experiences. That’s the beauty of community- we don’t have to experience everything for ourselves if we’re able to learn about them from others. This is how the cycle of community continues.
[8:27] Another podcast episode that I want to bring in to help us understand this need for community is True Sex & Wild Love episode 43 titled “Civilized to Death with Dr. Chris Ryan”. In this episode, Dr. Ryan talks about his new book Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress. Now, I have not read this book yet, but listening to this podcast gave me a brief insight into what the book is about. Dr. Ryan discusses how hunter-gatherer societies thrived in communal living. They never experienced the ailments that we’re now burdened with in today’s “civilized” society. Yes, we’ve made great leaps in discoveries and medicine, but that actually is a symptom of the ailments our current society creates. Dr. Ryan expressed it using the metaphor, “it’s like someone starting your house on fire and then coming back with a bucket of water an hour later.” Great, thanks for the minimal help, but you could’ve just not set my house on fire to begin with. We’re seeing that this society that tears us apart from each other, holds up rugged individualism, calls weak anyone who seeks or requires help for any given situation, is literally killing us. We’re becoming, as the book puts it, civilized to death. What I got from the discussion on the podcast alone, was that we need immediate change, especially now in the time of a pandemic. As we’ve progressed through this pandemic and quarantine, I think we’re all seeing the need for community. We all know of someone who is completely isolated, who has no one in their immediate household quarantining with them, and we know that they need us. We need to reach out to them, to our relatives, our friends. We need to be in this together. And not just in this specific time of need, but always.
[10:21] As Regan de Loggans mentions in the Mutual Aid zine, this is a lifetime commitment to community, to supporting one another to support the whole. “Community knowledge is community strength.” This does not work as a band-aid to quell your current sorrows about not being able to gather; it’s about realizing how much we need gatherings and support as a species and vowing to change our lifestyles for the betterment of us all.
[10:52] Now let’s turn more to the psychology part of this. Community benefits our mental health and our mental health affects our behaviors. Once we see and understand that being around, interacting with, learning from others has immense benefits to us when we are all collaborating towards the good of us all, it’s much easier to see the case for community. There are countless The Happiness Lab episodes that talk about these specific benefits to us individually and how it can help us in a much broader sense. I won’t be going into so much of that detail here, so check out The Happiness Lab podcast if you’re curious about those. We’re going to work from already knowing about these benefits and with the knowledge I’ve shared with you earlier in the episode. When we take care of ourselves, it’s difficult to do so without help from others. We need social interaction, right? We are social animals after all. What’s the benefit of cutting us off from those ties then?
[11:48] Hmm…that’s a really great question. (Well, thank you, I thought of it myself). I’m debating whether to spell it out for you now, or to let you think on that one for a bit. I’ll start spelling it out and see how far I’d like to take you, meaning you will still have to do some thinking work on your own after this. I believe in you! Well, let’s start with a “nuclear” family, meaning parents and their children. So, no matter how your nuclear, or immediate, family looks, everyone involved in it benefits from the interconnectedness of it and from just having other human animals who are included in it since we each bring something unique from our own experiences in the world. Now, in the US there is a very large and prominent culture (usually pushed through media, but also governmentally) around moving out of your nuclear family household, many times in the form of going off to college, but also just that you need to have your own space (which many times is reasonable because at this point many of our parents or those that raised us have ingrained trauma of their own that affects us, their children). I’m not saying that it has to be this way; the journey to a place where we can all overcome our trauma and stop perpetuating it will be a long one, but I find that we make it more difficult than need be and the sooner we start the better for us all. Coming back to community can begin to help with this.
[13:17] What actually is the purpose of pushing our little 18 year old selves out into the world and away from those that care most about us? I’ll hark back to the episode I did titled “Find the Money”, episode 9. Let us “find the money” in this scenario. When we push these little 18 year olds out into the world fresh out of high school, whether they’re going to college and dorming there or finding an apartment that they can afford on minimum wage pay, what are we implicitly saying and doing to them? We’re saying you need to learn to be on your own. You need to learn how to cope with struggles, whether they be school work, social life, money issues, on your own. What we’re doing is creating an individual who will perform in a capitalist society. If they’re off to college, we’re telling them to take on debt that they will spend years of their life working to pay off. Even when we know that many people, despite getting a college degree, never get a job in their field of study. In fact, that’s a common joke in many majors in undergrad! Even when we know that people don’t tend to have the same job their entire life anymore. Even when we know that many jobs now require even more study in graduate school, and thus even more debt that they will continue to have to work to pay off. On top of all that, what happens after college, after they’ve acquired that debt? Well it is becoming much more common now for 20-somethings to move back in or stay living with their parents. We know why that is too, right? They can’t afford to live on their own because of all this debt that they’ve acquired! Many times people come back to community out of necessity, but when they’re back they can see how essential it is.
[15:08] And what about those that don’t go to college? Pushing them off to live in an apartment, either with or without roommates (which I understand can be community for some), this tells them the same things that are told to those who do go to college: you need to learn to be on your own, how to cope with struggles on your own, you need to be an individual who will perform in a capitalist society. But again we come to the question, if they are living on their own, what is the function of that?
[15:36] If we send someone to live on their own that means they’ve got to pay for rent or a mortgage. Which means they will have to work, most likely 40+ hours a week. They’ll probably need a car too, or maybe at least a public transport pass, which will cost money, which means they have to continue working. They’ll definitely have to buy food for themselves, which means they have to continue that 40+ hour work week. They’ll have to pay utilities, they’ll have to buy furniture, buy clothes (sometimes even work clothes without being reimbursed). When we push them out to be on their own, we’re telling them that they must give at least 40 hours of their LIFE a week to someone else in order to live. On top of that, we’re told that we’ve got to marry someone (which does cost at least some money), buy a new house and all the additional costs that come with that, have children (and we all know that’s so expensive), then continue on this want/spend cycle for the rest of our life. Why is this the script we all follow? Why are we telling our children that this is all there is? That this is life? We all know the common trope that parents never want their kids to leave and are overjoyed when they visit. We know that if resources were pooled, everything would be easier on everyone. So why do we push them out in the first place? Hark back to that money. We need to create individuals who will continue to generate profit, either by directly putting money into the market by purchasing something, or by giving our time to a company so they can continue to make more money for the capitalists’ pocket. Yes, now I’m no longer talking about 18 year olds. I’m talking about everyone who gives their time to someone else for money. We’re all being taken advantage of for the gain of someone else, someone that probably doesn’t even care about us directly, let alone know who we are.
[17:41] Luckily there are people who know the whole person we are and who care deeply about us- our families, our communities. We need to pull each other in, not push each other out. Find those in your community who have drifted, and welcome them back, take care of them. Maybe try to find your way back to your own community, or find a community that welcomes you with open arms and supports you. We’re lucky enough to have thousands of years of people’s experiences to learn from on how to live communally. Mutual aid has been practiced by BIPOC for forever. We can learn from all of the knowledge about this that has been out there for forever. We can create lifelong connections with those in our communities, help one another, care for one another. Seek to give others your time, your energy, your knowledge, and your attention, rather than money. Start to queer your life by doing things differently. Stop giving your money to the capitalists, and when you do have to spend money on something you need, divest it to BIPOC communities because that’s really the least we can do if we have to operate under this system. That is the least we can do though. What it really comes down to is creating and sustaining relationships to strengthen our communities. You have so much to give, and you have so much to learn. Live life with that knowledge in mind always.
[19:14] We’ve kind of been all over the place this episode, I want to gather up all this information and try to make it all more concise to leave off today. There are countless examples, accounts, even studies that show how much we benefit from community. Indigenous peoples all over Earth have been living in communities and practicing mutual aid since forever. Marginalized people all over Earth have been practicing community living and mutual aid. We can learn a thing or two from all of them. Honestly, how do we think people lived before money was a thing? Intellectually we know that we benefit from others, we get help from others literally everyday, multiple times a day! Nothing is stopping us from beginning to change our lives to ones that we know will benefit all of us in the long run. Yes, we’ll have to get over some hurtles along the way, but I assure you, no matter how big the hurtle looks now it’s worth the effort because backing down from a challenge or struggle always comes with baggage. We’re not in this alone, and when we begin coming back to community we can see that we aren’t and that we never were. We need community, and my plethora of recommendations in this episode is a testament to that. This knowledge is out there, we just need to listen and watch it all make sense.
[20:38] {Singing} *Recommendaaaationsssss*
For our recommendation round-up today, we’ve got the Not Invisible podcast episode 3 with Regan de Loggans. Regan sheds light on many issues that they and the Indigenous Kinship Collective have been covering on their platforms. From adding the “G2ST” to the MMIWG2ST movement to a zine specifically covering mutual aid (which will be in the episode notes too if you’d like to give that a quick read), Regan de Loggans talks about that and more on episode 3 of Not Invisible.
Next, we’ve got the Unlocking Us episode with David Eagleman. Eagleman told us a bit about the brain and memory. If you’re interested in learning more about how our brain internalizes everything, creates new pathways, and more, listen to this episode of Unlocking Us (which is now exclusively on Spotify).
Then there’s the True Sex & Wild Love episode 43 titled “Civilized to Death with Dr. Chris Ryan”. In the episode, Dr. Ryan tells us about how the ailments that we seek treatment for now are all results of our civilization, and they’re resulting in our imminent deaths. Listen for more insight and interesting anthropological knowledge.
The Happiness Lab is an amazing podcast with many, many episodes discussing individuals and community. This is a great one to listen to if you’re curious about the science and psychology behind us and community living.
And finally, today’s episode was inspired by episodes 3 [YouTube & podcast] and 6 [YouTube & podcast] of Pynk Spots. So, if you’d like to hear open and raw discussions about the need for community, check out those episodes, which you can find in both podcast form and in video on YouTube.
All these links will be in the episode notes.
[22:30] If you enjoyed this episode, help support the podcast! All this content is free and I’d love to make it my job one day, so if you’re financially able join our patreon or send a one-time or recurring donation through paypal! You can also share an episode with family or friends, and give UK a kind rating and review!
Check out UnderstandingKindness.com for all episodes, transcripts, and blog posts. And why not take a listen to my other podcast, Better When Awkward, co-hosted by my childhood best friend Jasmine!
Get in touch with me by emailing UnderstandingKindness@protonmail.com, or through social media. You can find all links in the episode notes.
For now, be kind, be compassionate, be understanding, and question everything. I’ll be here. Thank you for listening to this episode of Understanding Kindness. [End transcript]