Every year before Christmas, my family sits down together to make some pierogi.
I never make them on my own, because they’re pretty time-consuming, and you can buy great ones pretty much everywhere.
But as a family activity, making pierogi together makes perfect sense.
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But why stop at the family? When I meet my friends, it’s usually to consume something together - drink a coffee, have dinner, watch a movie, listen to some music. Best case scenario we’re doing some sports.
What if the default was instead to meet so that we can make things?
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Replying to @TylerAlterman
When I first wrote this tweet I thought about purpose as opposed to just having fun together and consuming things. In that sense, cooking dumplings together is a shared purpose, building a barn is a shared purpose, just living your lives is a shared purpose.
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When I lived in a student dormitory we would just roam around each other’s rooms uninvited and hang out together through our best and worst.
Now meeting the same friends requires coordinating two weeks in advance, cleaning up the whole place and ideally cooking something special
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Oh yes, this would be great! A low-key please pop by button, I haven’t prepared anything special to eat or cleaned up the house specially in advance, but we can have a great time just chatting over coffee and maybe order some takeout if you’re hungry. twitter.com/tjrwriting/sta…
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It goes so deep, the expectation to only show your polished side.
Recently my mom mopped the floors when visiting us, and it made me feel so guilty. You’re not supposed to show your mess to anyone, let alone have them clean it, even if they’re close to you and happy to help.
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What if instead carving out some special time to meet people, free from any obligations, you could just invite them to your everyday life and do all the things you have to do anyway but together, with laughter and joy?
How much less lonely we could all be in a world like this?
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What if instead of just sitting, watching a movie and drinking we could meet our friends to build a treehouse, plant some flowers, bake some cookies, decorate some Christmas cards, knit a blanket, program a LED mirror frame, paint a landscape and have fun while doing it together?
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Most people's (and society's) inclination is towards a kind of inertia. Some people sleep through entire decades.
The pleasures of most people are passive. The most embodied thing you can do is seek active things to do with your time. Doing changes you.
Do them with others.
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Replying to
Lack of optionality? Sounds like the same dynamic where everyone wants to start a village, except for people who actually grew up in one.
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Replying to
Are you actually living this way or mostly fantasizing? Most people can’t actually handle this much time entangled in each other’s lives. You think you’ll sing and dance and create. But mostly what you’ll do is gossip and fight and be perma-immersed in petty feuds and squabbles
Some people do like it. In my experience it’s about 20-40%. The rest can tolerate such intimate entanglement maybe a few days to weeks a year. The sociability of our species has been wildly exaggerated.
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spent like an hour today debugging a water heater problem with a housemate
it was nice
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