🤰🏽🧐🕸️ 225 - Alyssa Allegretti on Sacred Domesticity and Hard Times in The Liminal Web

It's so easy to criticize the coaching industry because there's a lot of slimy behavior happening there. But there's also a much smaller, kind of underground movement happening, dominated by brilliant women and queer people who have pursued this way of engaging with progressive community movement because nothing else was available to them. People who are self-educated and people who pursue alternative education because the more legitimized academic institutions, you can't be apparent to those institutions. You can't be a core person to go to those institutions.

You can't be a neurodivergent person with a lot of trauma from your school eight years and go to those institutions. There are all of these kinds of barriers. Some of the most interesting conversations and experimentations are happening where it's easy to at a glance just be like, whatever, that's just mommy vloggers. That's just a bunch of women who have a gap in their resume who are teaching above their pay grade now because what else are they gonna do to provide themselves with a sense of meaning?

And whatever, all coaches are just manipulating the part of us that wants to better ourselves. It's so easy to miss out on what's actually happening here. Greetings Future Fossils, and welcome to episode 225, a podcast that explores our place in time. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and even though I'm promised to make up for lost time by releasing this one week ago, the structure is the content.

When it comes to the conversation we're having today with Alyssa Allegretti of adaptivedaydream.substack.com, a discussion about one of the most important features characterizing the economy that all of us enjoy or suffer in various ways in 2024. Namely, invisible labor. Yes, it has taken me longer than I promised to get this episode out as usual because of the joys of post-COVID co-parenting topic that we discussed at great length. I also wanna say that crucially one of the big things that we explore in this episode is the challenge to find time for some of the most fundamental of human activities, namely philosophy, scholarship, leisure, play, activities upon which everything else depends because discovery and knowledge work are in important ways impossible to characterize in advance of their various boons and therefore hard to support.

There is a sort of message in the medium of having this independently produced and crowd supported podcast about the challenges of parenting and of living online as an unaccredited intellectual in the spaces, starting to emerge following the legitimacy crisis in institutions and other structures that afford us are proxy credibility. This show could not exist without your help because frankly, non-disciplinary inquiry is something that is extremely hard to explain in grant applications. However, I have gotten a little older and a little wiser recently and Future Fossils has given birth to a much more carefully delimited applied project called Humans on the Loop, growing out of the question of agency in the age of automation, wisdom in the creation and use of technologies, storytelling in the era of AI spellcasting. These are the kinds of conversations that I consider of utmost importance right now.

So I will be sharing much more about that project in the weeks and months to come. You can find a description of the origins of this project in the show notes as well as information about the people that I am inviting as collaborators and ways that you can help me slow them in public discourse around a kind of wizard school for the age of AI. All of that said, I wanna bring this back to this week's topic, Melissa Eligreddy, someone I met on Facebook, much like Scout Leader Wily and other wonderful weirdos that have appeared on this show, someone who emerged into my attention through their insightful and provocative contributions to social media discussion. And for all of above mentioned reasons, I have a special place in my heart for people who strive to reconcile the mundane work of adulting and the noble quest to help one another understand what it is that we're doing here in our participation with the ripening nose view.

Yeah, this is a very personal conversation, very candid. I talk about some stuff that I've been a little hesitant to discuss on the show, but I'm glad that we get to include this. Elisa is a professional organizer and a single mother and her insights into how to find the sacred community every day and find depth and richness in the mundane and domestic, I think, are really crucial and are an enormous part of, again, the invisible labor that has always supported this project, the people who contribute to the show unnamed and without whom this is completely impossible. If you would like to be one of those people, I'm happy to name you alongside the latest monthly sponsor, Callie Azel Barrow.

Thank you and thanks to the couple hundred other people that are helping me keep this work going. MichaelGarthilp.substack.com, patreon.com, slash Michael Garfield, take your pick, stick around at the end of the episode, you'll get a little teaser trailer of some of the conversations we have coming up over in a month or so. We're gonna go back up into the Empyrean Philosophic Stratosphere with the next handful of discussions I'm really excited to share with you. And thank you for tuning in, for subscribing, grading, and reviewing the show.

Enjoy, Elisa, Algredi. All right, we're going, Elisa, thank you for finally syncing up with me, finding time amidst the madness. Yeah, same, thank you for having me. Okay, so context is that you are just so eloquent in your Facebook feed, like that you say such insightful and often excoriating things about really nuanced and charged social issues, but as a way of ramping into that, talk about who you are and where you come from and how you have developed the interests and the mind that you have and take as long as you like to tell your story.

Thank you, that feels very luxurious. Part of who I am is a layperson and a Facebook intellectual and Facebook intellectual has become its own sort of thing in the past 20 years. And I think it's easy to be disparaging of that phenomenon without recognizing that a lot of people who have found their footing, sharing their writing on Facebook, engaging with one another's ideas, finding the right teachers for them at the right time, stepping into their own role as a teacher. We couldn't have done that otherwise because we are bogged down by certain systemic limitations and issues of socioeconomic stratification.

So I began sharing writing on Facebook because I was a brilliant and creatively starved stay-at-home mom and a lot of my writing was developed, typing with one hand with a baby on my breast literally and having to cope with some judgment from my partner at the time about that and judgment from people in my real life community about why I was spending so much time on that platform and why it was important to me. And in many ways, I'm still developing my voice through the pushback I receive in the Holy and unholy comments section and then also through trapping patterns of social discourse in spaces on spaces like Facebook and how those patterns play out over time. So I've been writing on Facebook since I was 16, actually, because I went to a middle college high school and had access to a .edu email address, which you needed to sign up for Facebook at that time. It was just for college students.

Facebook has been this deeply influential source of personal development and professional development now, intellectual, spiritual, interpersonal development in my life. And at this point, much like you ever do talk about this, I'd like to get out because I'm noticing that the pitfalls of the kind of reckless outrage and projection and transference that happens in these spaces is too detrimental to my mental health and emotional well-being. But regardless, yeah, still very grateful. And that's a big part of how I came to do what I am doing now, which is broadly in the realm of sacred domesticity.

So all the way right about all sorts of social issues, and I'm still very much learning, definitely, not a leading expert of any kind. All the way right about all sorts of social issues, the crux of the work that I do for money right now is around housekeeping and home making as a microcosm of these larger systemic and cultural things that we're all chewing on, but also as a valuable area in and of itself to work with our own inner material and the material that arises in our most intimate familial or cohabitating relationships. Also as an avenue for practicing relationship skills in relationship to home and housekeeping, non-human beings. And yeah, the presence of these sort of non-human forces in our life.

And there's a pretty big range in terms of what I do. I actually still just clean houses for supplemental income. So I'm scrubbing other people's toilets for many hours per week. And that's its own sort of mindfulness exercise and exercise in self-discipline and presence.

I also have a very sick body while I'm doing that. So that's a whole mind book. And then I do more standard professional home organizing work in person here in the Asheville area. But I do that from the lens that housekeeping is a legitimate avenue for mental health care support and to anchor other kinds of positive changes people are making in their life in professional development or changing seasons around parent head or their own physical ability.

So I'm often co-regulating with my clients as we clean their house. And you and I were joking about this before you press record, stepping into a consensual role of transference where I can be good mommy for people who maybe didn't receive kind parenting around housekeeping, growing up, or people whose brains really struggle with executive functioning, which housekeeping tasks require. So they just need another person there to break down the process for them, especially if they're living in a home that is drowning in clutter from many years of shutting down around it or an inability to let things go or other extraordinary life circumstances like cancer or some other kind of traumatic event that caused the housekeeping to be put on a back burner. So yeah, part of what I'm doing is being good mommy as I joke, not joke.

And people can reparent themselves when I'm showing up and I'm holding down the process for them in that way. I do online sessions as well. Sometimes that looks like me just literally sitting there over Zoom with someone providing body doubling while they clean their own house and you clutter their own house. And sometimes we go really deep and people cry and shake and get nauseous and have a big insight about their mother, their father, their relationship to their own creativity.

Other themes that arise are around grief and capacity for pleasure and fulfillment. Yeah, so I'm gonna pause there. I have a fairly clear view in my own mind of how I have ended up on the margins, the combination of choices that I made, not to go after the same things that everyone else was going after that have placed me very far out on the quote unquote long tail. Whereas my college friend, Stephen Phipps said, no man is an island but some are very long peninsulas.

And then the commitment to doing something different, no one was really telling me in a language that I understood anyway when I was younger that this was sabotage. Like if you wanted stability that this was, but then there's also just structural stuff. And there is this issue that I'm constantly embroidering in my own public social media of armchair intellectual is such a slur, but independent scholar, let's say. And although I maintain, and I'll link to a bunch of pieces where I say this in prettier language than I'm about to, that society needs people in these positions who have unique life experience, who's they're standing from a position outside of that mob of people that are all trying to attain the same things, that they offer something of extraordinary value, but precisely because it is new or different or hard to put into a quantitative framework that those people are illegible.

And here we get into the theory part, and maybe you can bounce something more personal off the theory statement. Obviously this is a huge part of the problem, the pathology of patriarchy in the sense that people use the term patriarchy to mean a system that is inherently pathological, in that it does not observe, does not recognize the value of children, women, the elderly, the quote unquote insane, that basically everyone whose contributions to the social fabric are illegible to the status hierarchy encoded in the value of one's productivity based on your ability to perform inside of an optimization function that ignores every externality, ignores every horrible side effect that you produce, ignores where you are extracting this value from, and the cost to everything else. And this is present when I was working in academia, there were great papers coming out, Alison Morgan and I think Aaron Klassett and Dan Laramore at CU Boulder were writing about how the shows up in academic spaces were like simply by virtue of having kids, your academic career is straight fucked, that especially in the United States paid parental leave as scarce and that the publisher parish framework of academia makes it so that having a child is a decision that you're making not to excel in your career in this incredibly competitive thing. And I just see that everywhere, it's not an academic problem, it's a civilizational problem.

And so I guess what I'm asking is how much of this in your story of the fact that you're making these incandescent observations about mind and life and society, the midden that is Facebook has to do with the decision to become a mother and how much of it has to do with the fact that you pursue profound and difficult things and how much of it is just contingency. And that's the story I wanna hear before we go any further. Yeah, part of my experience was of motherhood not being a decision. So that kind of intensifies all of this for me personally.

I experienced unplanned pregnancy at 23. So right after I've completed my undergraduate degree and before I could even consider the possibility of pursuing more academic training or alternative avenues of personal development and spirituality or anything, before I could even consider that or before I even really knew myself, I was suddenly confronted by all of the limitations of motherhood. And then that was intensified even more by shortly after that, my baby was four months old finding myself a single mother. So going through that at a young age without a partner, without an established career, with a lot of cushy white middle class, safety net kind of privileges as well, all of that being in the soup.

I just see how there is this thirst inside of myself and inside of so many other people to on a more basic level just fulfill the role in their family and in their community that is of greatest use to those close to us and to the larger world to do our own tiny little part in contributing to social change. And how there is of course a relationship between personal, interpersonal, familial, and community level change and larger social change. And it's still deeply valuable to be doing what you can within the limitations of what is available to you. And to provide a little more context for your listeners, part of the reason I'm here is that I wrote a post on Facebook yelling loudly about the liminal web being a sausage best.

And then Michael and a couple other people in that community or a Jason community, I don't know if people are even using that term to describe their community anymore. But part of what happened is that Michael and a couple of other men in that community reached out to me and opened doors and handed me the mic, which felt amazing and also a bit terrifying because I was just angry, I didn't have the mic and once I had it, I didn't know what to do with it. But yeah, it's just so obvious when you're in a position, like I was young, single mother and that sort of thing, that it's completely impossible to pursue a career in intellectualism or spirituality or personal growth or community organizing because these spaces are intrinsically unfriendly to parents, to people who hold various other marginalized statuses or experiences. And so yeah, when I wrote that Facebook post, I was just, what are we doing?

These are community, it's so amazing that we have these communities coming together through excitement about ideas and different ways of being and seeing and it's not just armchair intellectualism, a lot of people in these communities are doing shit with their lives and they are well aware that ideas have to translate to action. Although I think the people who are dominating discourse in these communities, they can lack self-awareness of like how and why they get to do that and at the cost of who's labor supports my ability to develop this platform, whether that's like their wife or just from a broader social lens, like who is too busy scrubbing toilets to pay for their rent and take care of their children and therefore cannot develop the kind of competency or impressive body of work necessary to gain any notice in these communities and to contribute more diverse voices to these communities. So I'm starting to drop some threads here because I do have pretty bad brain fog from my chronic health issues. So maybe you can help me pick up the thread and give me something to keep going.

I don't think you've lost the thread at all. Let's see, in that post that you're talking about, which we'll link to, you say, all the things you're just talking about, how you gave up on this particular, first of all the liminal web, just so that we're not playing insider baseball, Joe Lightfoot a few years ago, wrote this blog post about loosely constellated nexus of independent scholars working outside of the conventional institutional frameworks. And this was a very biology we call it a parafyletic group. These are people that arguably have nothing in common, except for the fact that they're on one side of a bell curve, a privilege where either they're independently wealthy or just extremely successful web content producers and therefore get to pursue whatever investigation they want, or they have nothing better to do.

So anyway, Lightfoot wrote this thing about how the only thing that's actually holding them in category is this preoccupation with the question of time between worlds and how the world that we grew up in was already on the way out when we were born and fucking Nietzsche was talking about that. Dostoevsky was talking about that over a century ago and we're still in the denial phase as a civilization by and large. And so this is a group of people that is preoccupied with that, but you say that I gave up on this group because it's a sausage fest. The next sentence, case in point, would you like to know how many times my children interrupted me while I was writing that for a sentence?

Six times. And that's this right there is where I really developed a fondness for you as a person because in my one bid at a normy career of some prestige and reach, I know it's all relevant, it seems like I have had all this time to generate a body of work, but this show has never paid the living wage ever in eight years and only exists because I was, like you said, living in a matrix of what remains of American middle-class white support, right? That's why I spend so much time trying to articulate how angry I am that state and market forces have eroded the family and have eroded the village and these kinds of things. And so we're in a position now where the very thing that made me go for a grown-up job in an institutional environment was also the thing that alienated me from that environment and made it impossible for me to work in that space.

And the moment that forced everyone to start working remotely was the moment that I started losing my mind because I was required to do work that demanded deep focus and working 24 hours around the clock to do what I could to keep my partner from losing her mind with our two small kids and operating on three, four hours of sleep at night for five years. And nobody at work understood except for the people in the lowest paying positions. And I don't know, maybe I've lost the thread. But there's something about, I respect you because you are doing this.

There is something in you that is striving to exercise your mind and to contribute to society in a broader sense and has figured out how to reconcile the public sphere and the private sphere and the non-duality and the relevance to everyone of this, the personal spaces and the domestic spaces because this conversation is only happening because the kids are somewhere else right now. And that basically I was like, I see you with the weight belt that you're wearing while you climb this mountain. Yeah, this question of work-life integration. I feel like the most viable alternatives and solutions for that are happening in spaces that are looked down upon by the more male-dominated, I don't know what to call these communities.

There's the liminal lab, there's the IDW, there's the systems thinkers and blah, blah, blah. And again, case in point, I have no idea what the philosophical base is for any of these thought camps or communities because I don't have time to care about that and space for it. But yeah, these communities often actually don't even know that a lot of these viable solutions, experimentation and alternative ways of doing work and family life integration are happening in female and queer dominated spaces like the coaching industry. Like it's so easy to criticize the coaching industry because there's a lot of slimy behavior happening there.

But there's also a much smaller kind of underground movement happening there dominated by brilliant women and queer people who have pursued this professional avenue and this sort of like way of engaging with progressive community movement because nothing else was available to them. And any of people who are self-educated and people who pursue alternative education because the more legitimized academic institutions, like you can't be a parent and go to those institutions, essentially. You can't be a poor person and go to those institutions. You can't be a neurodivergent person with a lot of trauma from your school adiers and go to those institutions.

There are all of these kinds of barriers. Some of the most interesting conversations and experimentations are happening in these locations where it's easy to at a glance just be like, whatever, that's just mommy vloggers. And whatever, that's just a bunch of women who have a gap in their resume who are teaching above their pay grade now because what else are they gonna do to provide themselves with a sense of meaning? And whatever, like all coaches are just manipulating the part of us that wants to better ourselves or the part of us that wants to be saved or enlightened, it's so easy to miss out on what's actually happening here.

And a lot of the people I work with are women and some men or male socialized people who just feel like the domestic realm is not for them or have been taught that the domestic realm is not for them. So that's the minority of my clients. Majority are women. Majority are professional women and creatively self-employed women.

People dancing with chronic illness and things like that. And yeah, they're all talking about this need for work life integration. And in a way, the conversation that happened around remote work and COVID was like a bunch of white guys and like rich people who had never been as violently confronted by that limitation. For people like me, it was like, yeah, no shit, this has been my life forever.

Like y'all are just now catching on to this impossibility. So what I've been trying to do is to make my home life, my work life and to draw from this endless well of inspiration that is available to me through just showing up and paying attention to what I'm uncovering in my relationship with my children, my relationship with my home, how that interacts with all these other important things happening in my life and in the larger world. And mixed results because yeah, as you said, the only reason we're able to have this conversation right now is because our children are somewhere else not interrupting. And to some extent, there will always be a need for like children to be somewhere else for us to focus on work and personal development and adult things.

And also I carry a deep grief that it feels like the best parts of my life are parts of my life where I'm not allowed to bring my children and they're not allowed to interrupt me or you or they are not witnessing, they're not witnessing that grief ritual I went to with the other adults. They are not witnessing adults experience fun and pleasure and relaxation because in order to do that, we feel like we have to get a sitter and like all these gatherings and offerings that arise in these divergent progressive alternative spaces, organizing themselves around a shared desire for social change, they don't even think about things like having a childcare worker on staff usually. So that's really disappointing. And I think part of the pain point here is you find these divergent alternative progressive spaces and feel such hopefulness that you will be allowed to be fully human there and then are met with the same kind of social stratification that are present in the mainstream society.

It's just like the same old shit over and over again. I saw it in the activist me when I was in college. I saw it in the polyamory community right after I left college. I saw it in the like back to the land earth worshiping community out here in Western North Carolina.

It's just like again and again, this kind of basic issues of social hierarchy, social currency, accessibility group, outgroup policing, so on and so forth. So part of what I really enjoy about my work is not only that it dissolves the false boundary between the sacred and the mundane and the professional and the personal and the interpersonal and the more collective systemic levels, but that it challenges these limiting ideas we have about who is and is not allowed to contribute to divergent progressive social change. Like a lot of my original teachers were Christian conservative white mommy bloggers on YouTube. And I had to do a lot of cherry picking there, but we still had something really valuable to offer in terms of like radical ways of being in family life and in terms of enhancing the quality of our day to day life and how that is essential to living a life in accordance to our deeper principles and values.

Yes, okay, so earlier this year when I was leaving a book club on Robert Blais Iron John, which is a mythopoiac investigation of manhood in the modern world. And again, had no idea I was stepping on landmines by even suggesting that people read this book together, but you just can't help it anymore when the cultural spaces have been popped and lie open and exposed to every other cultural space mixing all kinds of stuff. The book spent a good amount of time on something that was really personal and painful to me and speaks to something that you were just talking about, which was how the industrialized world takes parents, specifically fathers, although now since over the last 50, 60 years that more women have been entering the quote unquote workforce, that economically legible workforce. Now it's a bit more evenly distributed in this way, but that in order to participate in that world, you have to leave your kids.

And the men who were our fathers and the men who were their fathers and many of the people in our generation, regardless of identity, their work is invisible and mysterious to their families. And this is contributed to a fragmentation of the family and severing of the transmission of tacit knowledge and of expertise and wisdom. And to this day, my dad who's tired but still mentors business leaders around the world. And now that I'm in my 40s, I'm begging him to teach me the stuff he learned in his career.

And his response is, that's not what you're, it's not for you. These are, these are for people that have like thousands of employees. This is not for whatever you are. And yeah, and so I don't know if this is quite how you experience it, in my case, I want to rebel against this.

I am not bothered by the fact that it's hard to focus with my kids in the room, unless I surrender myself to the logic of I need to get this done. And this is more important than being with my family and allowing my kids to have context on who I am and what I'm doing and what I'm contributing to the quote unquote world other than them, to the extent that like, and there's something like very early on as a parent, I read this thing about an anthropological perspective on indigenous cultures where the author whom I forget was saying, one thing that's obviously very different compared to the industrialized West is that there are not grown up things and kid things except in a few special cases. That obviously there are rooms into which only men or only women go, but that the life of quote unquote economic production for that community, be it hunting, gathering, weaving, building homes, all of the things that are done to make and to secure, the children are involved in those things. And I have to ask how much of the dismissal that people receive for being unable to contribute to the important stuff is actually just a self fulfilling prophecy because it was decided at some point that they don't.

And so these kids are not actually getting to observe the way that these things function. And so they're not actually getting to learn these things. And so obviously they don't have as much to say. So this is something I would just like to double down with you and understand your angle on what it might look like to have a more cohesive intergenerational fabric in our lives and in our work.

I think I'll start by talking about invisible labor. So there's this framework of invisible labor that has been developed to help people name specifically, like name the way that domestic labor or quote unquote female roles, female contributions to families and communities are made invisible. And one way you might develop that framework is by saying, amen and speaking very generally and broadly here in terms of inherited social roles because we are opening a can of worms. Yummy worms.

Yeah, just speaking broadly, broad strokes, generalizations. Fathers labor outside the home is made invisible. Mothers labor inside the home is made invisible. This is the recent intergenerational legacy we are working with.

And whether or not there is a more even distribution of labor is highly questionable. A lot of the conversations women have among themselves are around the fact that they are now expected to do fucking everything. So it's not just, oh, now I'm working outside the home and everybody showing up to contribute to the loss of domestic labor while I'm outside of the home. It's like I'm expected to do everything and my labor is completely invisible.

And there are all sorts of nuances here too, right? Such as the effect of martyrdom or like where we get to opt-in and opt-out of our social role and where we don't get to opt-in and opt-out of our social role, how we are cast into these roles and where we get to exercise consent or do not get to exercise consent in the role we play. So yeah, there is a lot of nuance for lack of a better word there too. And yeah, I do ask myself a lot how I am complicit where I can decide to just be like, you know what?

The way I'm going to address this impossibility of work-life integration is to treat my writing like my third child. So it's not more important than the children clamoring for my attention in this room right now, but it's also not less important. And I can practice shifting in and out of giving my children my full attention and then giving my writing my full attention. And as my children age can continue to tell them things like, I'm giving my full attention to my writing project right now and you can have my full attention as soon as I finish this sentence.

Or if it's more helpful, I can practice just making my writing a lot less important than my children's feelings and needs for attention right now. And trusting that I'm not that important, my work is not that important. And it'll be okay if I were to die tomorrow, somebody else, there are already so many other people doing this work and somebody else would do it if I were dead. And I would regret much more failing to bring a quality of presence to that moment with my child.

And yeah, I do think that a lot of the struggle we experienced in domestic life is a result of the kind of tyranny of the nuclear family system and the isolation of it, not only from extended family networks but from our work life and from our larger community life. And yeah, I think about take your child to work day. When I was growing up, my dad is a software engineer and he worked for a big software company in the 1990s. So like big corporate building with a gym and a snack room and stuff like that.

So it was like a very well organized take your child to work day a huge event that still sticks out in my memory because it was a mystery, what he did at work all day. And I did not make a connection between his life at work and the provision of our family life at home. I was also homeschooled. So there's that that's a whole other story that's coloring my perspective on domestic life and domestic liberation and the way that our culture makes domesticity and family life an ideological stance or ideological reality filter.

Yeah, there I do think that this kind of thing, the spirit of take your child to work day is a quiet rebellion. And ironically, it is something that people on the like radical conservative right do a lot better, I think, than people on the radical progressive left. I have a sort of half baked theory that the left is tends to be proliferated by black sheep. So like a lot of it tends to be like a high concentration of people who took the role of black sheep in their family and that a lot of us have a lot of pain around family values, family life and roles and responsibilities in the family system in the domestic realm because of that.

So I learned from people with more conservative viewpoints in this way because they know how to do things like start a small business painting houses and then pass that down to their son. They know how to do things like always include the child in chopping the vegetables for dinner. They are much more likely to understand and invite the value of intergenerational spaces being the norm rather than being like the thing that only happens sometimes because of like the benefits of the way that children allow the adults to reconnect with, again, for lack of a better word wholesomeness, I know this is a really moralized term, but yeah, children allow me to connect with them more, having children present allows me to connect with a much more kind of wholesome existence and the mundane is the medicine we need when we're engaging with this constant, never-ending trauma response of confronting the biggest issues of our time and constant, never-ending trauma response and outrage that we find in social media discourse. Like whenever I start to feel overly traumatized by being a Facebook intellectual, I'll put something out there that's what did you have for breakfast, tell me about your day.

And people will respond to these things like, oh, I just had one of those days where I wore my favorite PJs in bed all day and then binge watching this show, just like small talk and small talk has been so healing. So I think just re-imagining to like what an act of social life looks like and modeling that even after something like a church community, even if you have a lot of religious trauma and you're upbringing, just being like, okay, what is more universal? What gets to the essence of how we already know how to do community life and family life and how can we queer these models in a way that invites more divergent and diverse ways of doing family, but also recognizes that if it ain't fixed, don't like if it ain't broken, don't fix it. Does that make any sense?

Yeah, so I love lingering in paradox. That might be the unofficial slogan of this show. I wanna draw some attention to something that I've been wrestling with in what you're saying. You're right that I recently kind of rage quit Facebook and said, it's been 20 years, I'm not building your pyramid anymore.

And I was hanging out with my mother who has been wheelchair bound for a very long time. She's a very sensitive soul. And I said, you spent too much time on Facebook. And she's like, yeah, I don't get it.

People just pile on me for saying these things that she's not a loving person, I don't hate anyone. And then I said something about being loving and compassionate and inclusive, or she made the mistake of talking about children as monkeys or something. And someone, she said that's something that your parents say is a term of endearment, but made it out to be like a racist statement and told her that she should die. And I was like, you really, you should understand that this is a shared limbic system and that you're sharing it with people who don't have context about you as a person.

And that can't be healthy. And yet she spends most of her days in bed out in the rural extent of Kansas City. And this is her opportunity to commune with people. And so part of my 10 steps back was 10 steps into being more present with my kids, being more present with my wife, being more aware of my surroundings, actually living in my town.

Like I quit all of the Facebook groups that were just generic interest groups, but I kept all the ones that were Santa Fe specific because I'm like, maybe I will meet people. This is still the place where you're saying, it's still like a church or something where you're gonna meet people that are in your actual geographic vicinity. And then maybe it can be what it always should have been. And I think was intended to be back when you needed an EDU account to sign up, which was a way of getting acquainted with the people in your area.

But the thing that I've noticed that you're talking about the left and the right. And one of many horrible experiences I had in institutional space, getting thrown under a bus for suggesting that we hire a friend of mine to do work that I knew he was good at. And I said, like he's done this organization a lot for free already. And I feel like we owe him one.

And also my boss explained to me that when it comes to contracting, it's a much more informal thing. And we just hire in network. We just find talented professionals in the city that can pull this off. And they made a whole scene of this about how we were gonna get skewered for unfair hiring practices.

And we needed to actually conduct an open global call for a few hours a week of work. And it cost us, it cost our organization probably hundreds of hours to sit there and create the listing and evaluate all of the time. And it wasted the time of people in Turkey who were trying to apply for this job that they were no good at. And there's this thing about, you were talking about being with your kids and how like when I'm with my kids, I am connected to something very deep and wide and it's what it is to be in a family and it's what it is to be an animal and it's what it is to be part of a lineage and all of these things.

And also when I'm in an institution, there's something like that feeling but it's a much more recent thing. It's a much more frankly ideological thing. It's a sense of participating in the human project in progress, the incumulative culture in helping bring ideas into the world and the institution of science and all of these things. And it's easy to understand how people get swept up into almost like a Starfleet kind of era, like this is the greater thing.

It's also, and I could be wrong about this and I'd love your reflections on this particular kind of nexus of stuff in this question in specific, which is I get the sense that it's much easier to expropriate those feelings of belonging into some sort of fascist operation through convincing people to devote themselves to the market because it's global betterment or to science because it's the great human project than it is or the state, right? Like the state comes in as a proxy for family and so people go off and they fight wars in order to protect their families because they've attached family to state. So that's where I feel this tension between the so-called domestic and the so-called public spheres is in the way that those different structures satisfy some kind of attachment need and you've written so eloquently about attachment and now's where I'm gonna ramp into that. But first, Alyssa.

Yeah, I've been watching all of this stuff for many years now and it's still a kind of newborn baby in terms of my ability to accurately name what I see happening but it feels visceral, right? It's like animal body, mud family. Like there's this whole other skill set that we need to pay a lot more attention to in any grandiose endeavor, whether that's like alternative intentional community life or starting a land family or working within a professional or academic institution or like among communities like the scientific community, family dynamics are something that at least some people in those groups need to be aware of and need to be able to shed some light on because it comes up over and over again and there is a lot of transfer of attachment, material happening. But then any of these layers of human family life, I, a lot of what you, the kind of like should show I'm imagining that you have seen and dealt with in your professional life or in these institutions of academia and I feel like I can relate to that experience on the level of just small town life that I'm sitting in out here in, I don't actually live in Asheville, I live in Burnsville, North Carolina, which is a really small, true Appalachian culture, but then also very Baptist influenced white Christian culture.

And then there's also a lot of hippies and artists and permaculture farmers and people like that out here. So fascinating place to watch inside or outside of dynamics and really get to know my own belonging wounds and watch myself play out attachment, material and attachment, drama with my community relationships and where that's intimately interacting with the ideological influence of the internet and this is like very present in family life and community life. I got a divorce in part because my now ex-husband went down the Q and on rabbit hole, right? So many people got divorces during that time because of this.

So that very important to recognize the influence of the internet as this kind of like other presence in family and community life because it isn't separate and there are many paradoxes there, as you said, because I think it's tempting and many people do take this stance of just unplug, one be like that's causing nothing but harm and this isn't real and I dissociate when I do that, when I engage too much in these online communities and online spaces and I respect that decision. Maybe I will make that decision myself in the future, but for now I continue to feel like no, it's more rooted in reality actually to just be like, okay, that's part of the human family system now. There's there are these ideological identities. So it's not just that we're transferring our attachment material onto the people in our community, but onto these ideological positions and factions and movements.

And yeah, like the way that somebody relates to Trump for example, might evoke feelings of the daddy or bad daddy and I think that not the whole reason why, but part of the reason why he's become such a compelling character in our cultural consciousness. It's impossible for some people to imagine that Trump could land in someone else's body as good daddy when he lands in your body as bad daddy or even as daddy who's sexually acting out in the family. And you're like this little kid who's trying to call out the sexual abuse or dysfunction and all the other adults in the family are like, no, what are you talking about? He's good daddy.

So you can easily see how these sorts of issues get twisted. Again, there's no real separation between domestic life, family life, interpersonal levels of relationality and cultural levels and like larger social systems and things. So you need all of those toolboxes, all of those toolkits to navigate these worlds well and the relationship between all of them. Before we started recording, I was talking a bit about how in my line of work, I am essentially channeling the housewife, the housewife as a cultural icon and D.A.

who for many people brings up mother wounds or who for many people evokes intense feelings of female socialization roles and responsibilities, female oppression, housekeeping as a source or tool of female oppression. So I've been trying to do what I call cosplaying, like cosplaying the housewife to draw more attention to the fact that social roles become like a ritual space to process some of this deeper familial level content. And that can be as accessible and benign as noticing how paper clutter in your home might represent your relationship to authority because bad news often arises in the mail, like a bill or as a poor person. Like always receiving notifications that my Medicaid has expired or my food stamps have expired or you need to reapply for this or that or now you're gonna get a charge for something that you didn't know you were gonna get a charge more.

Part of why I am approaching housekeeping the way that I am is because I recognize that there are, as you said, these like limbic system capacities and in capacities at play in family life and community life that need to be gently stretched in a way that's not going to put people out of capacity all of the goddamn time. And you would be amazed, you would be amazed what happens when a home that's been suffocated by unprocessed grief, the entanglement of unprocessed grief in clutter. What happens when you clear out that clutter and a person is suddenly sitting in an empty, beautiful room? They break the fuck down.

That is so difficult to tolerate peace, ease, fulfillment of desire, pleasure, even in our own home environment. And that is the skill that we need to like actually engage meaningfully in social change. I wanna try and find a way to connect the very last thing you said to this other thing that's been on my mind since you started talking just a moment ago, which is you're right, there is no putting away this new layer that we are, which is a, can call it a global layer or we can talk about transitioning from global to planetary. I like that, I like seeing it as, like planetary offers a way of thinking about it that's multi-scale, whereas globalist thinking seems to erode everything and siphon it up to the biggest level, flattens things in a way that planetary doesn't.

But, and therein lies the sort of trap. When you're saying, yep, we are all of these things, but there is this other sense in which, ah, but most of my millennial friends and Gen Z friends live in something like diaspora, but it came from nowhere, right, like we're in this loose correspondence web of people that we rarely see face to face, if ever, like our relationship is entirely mediated by machines. When I look back on what Facebook gave me, 20 years of Facebook and festival nomadism as a career choice, if I can even call it a choice, it just seemed like the only viable thing for the longest time. Much like Facebook seemed like the only viable way to make a living for the longest time.

What that gave me was a chronic sense of longing for people that I can't reach out and touch. In that sense, again, nothing new really, that is a very old story when we're talking about attachment traumas, but there's this sense that, I told you, I have a very visceral personal relationship to clutter and trauma leading to clutter in the family. And the way that sense of connection that the world wide web provides us, that sense of having found your people, that even if you never get to hang out with them in person, I think was the single largest contributor to it taking 20 years for me to get married to the woman I met the same year I logged on to Facebook in the first place, that there was always something else there, there was always the possibility of another more satisfying relationship around the corner. There was always the possibility of a better city to live in.

And consequently, that is the manifestation in my own life of the same kind of dissociative dynamic that I witnessed in other members of my family, whose trauma led to the papers piling up and the clothes and all this stuff. Far be it for me to get Jordan B. Peterson about this, right? So yeah, well, but my sweet mom, the thing that she likes about him is the very thing that she struggles with in her own life, which is First Clean Your Room.

And I look around at Santa Fe, and this is a town run by a mayor who was the founding editor of Fast Company Magazine and sees this town first as a vacation destination and second as a place where people live. And there's this thing, like when I had Chris Ryan on the show when we were talking about exuming the human from our institutions. It was the same thing, yes, all of these things are connected now and frankly should stay connected in some way, but the way that they're connected now is profoundly unhealthy because it encourages us to ignore the mesocosum of the human scale in favor of that next reward, that thing that's just over the horizon, that other way that you could be, that body that you don't have, that consumer item. Like these things, yeah, one of the reasons I really respect you is because you understand in all of these different pretty talking ways why organizing the home is organizing the mind, is facing the shadow, is participating in the planetary body politic, but it's also not enough just to like claim that equivalence because the circuit board is patched wrong right now in society.

I'll stop there. Yeah, we're in an interesting phase of internet culture around examining domestic life and the social messaging of domesticity because the trad wife has really gained a lot of attention recently and like late diagnosed, adult diagnosed, neurodivergence has gained a lot of attention in recent years and how that interacts with housekeeping, issues of ableism, things like that. And people have rightfully pointed out how funny and paradoxical it is that the trad wife is imparting to us the importance of being a homemaker as like their sole source of purpose and fulfillment while also vlogging, right? So they're also professional women.

So I'm not able to like gracefully draw a more coherent connection between that and what you just shared, but I do know there's a point of connection there. So maybe that will come to me a bit later. Okay, so how do you feel about that? Cause obviously there's a cynical way to see that which is that basically like only fans or something, right?

Like to be a trad family blogger influencer means that your left hemisphere is constantly looking for ways to turn your family into a commercial product. Correct, right? Yes, it's almost there's this cultural encouragement to make yourself a brand identity. So the self becomes a brand identity and then the family becomes a brand identity.

Part of this movement we're seeing right now around the professionalization of domestic work when it comes to vlogging, culture, the internet world, the content creation and things like that is that yeah, that kind of like intense abstraction of family life and collapsing family life with ideals, not just ideology, but with rebranded fantasies of domestic bliss and purity culture and intense moralization. And part of what's happening with creators like K.C. Davis of domestic blisters on TikTok. And I think her other work is called struggle care.

She wrote a book called How to Keep House While Drowning. It's a really beautiful book about yeah, keeping house during times of depression or declining mental health. So there's this counter narrative arising too that is dissecting the moralization of domestic life and the dogmaticism and performative kind of like the dogmatic and performative content we're seeing in that realm. So then of course I come along and people like take one glance at my memes and they like try to put me into either of those camps.

They're like, oh, you're like, tried, why the Jason or don't understand ableism or I'm laughing about it, but so deeply distressing. Yeah, so there's this sort of heightened politicization of domestic life that has been happening really forever, but just in my life has been very relevant because my family was part of the homeschool movement in the 1990s, 1980s, which arose as an answer to all of the social changes happening in like the 60s and 70s that felt like a threat to family life and traditional family values. So the homeschool community before the internet was organized according to the more kind of radical progressive unschool community and then radical, conservative, religious families and my family belonged to neither of those groups. So I was watching both of these groups throughout my childhood try to negotiate their ideals and ideology with their family life.

And then when social media came along and bloggers and influencing content creation exploded, it was like the dial got turned all the way up on that abstraction and ideology and idealization and romanticism and purity culture. And now it's like there's this cultural push and pull around, sometimes I personify this using the framework of hotness mom versus sanctimani. So one faction spucked it, let's day drink and just like completely collapse into the impossibility of domestic life and the systemic limitations and the isms happening here and just give a big middle finger to it. And the other faction is let's strive for perfection and hold ourselves to high standards of personal responsibility at the expense to authenticity or our own mental health or familiar loving.

I think that's a real shame. I think it's a real shame that like that. Those are the only options most people see in terms of how we can approach domestic life in a meaningful way that is going to bring with our values and personal development. Yeah, so it's but what it does too is it enhances the quality of the day dream of domestic bliss in a way that I actually think is quite helpful because it points to a core desire that many of us, if not all of us, many of us carry, which is for something just the ability to enjoy our own lives, the ability to spend more time with our family, the ability to receive the nourishment, sanctity and safety of home, the need for true belonging rather than pseudo belonging.

And also to some extent allows us, through these more extreme examples like the trad wife, to understand how to navigate the tension between desire and reality. Like how close to reality can I make the dream? Like how much can I get away with in terms of making reality, like this dream or fantasy I carry? And so really I'd like to see us allow ourselves to sense into the possibility, if not of domestic bliss, but of domestic liberation and of reclaiming domestic life for our own benefit and the benefit of our communities, even as we can hold with great tenderness and care, the issues of socioeconomic stratification, history of enslavement of humans and these all these like class issues that come, gender issues that come with an exploration of domestic life.

Yeah, so it's like being with the impossibility and possibility of what we can create in our lives now, in part through the funhouse mirror that social media culture provides us with. And that paradox that we keep mentioning, to be more specific about that, it is that yes, internet culture creates a kind of dissociation from family life, real life in person, community, but also allows us to connect with like-minded people we otherwise wouldn't be able to connect with. I know I would have lost my mind. I'm still losing my mind, but God knows where I'd be if I hadn't been able to find communities like the one circling future fossils.

And a lot of my most cherished and beautiful friendships in my real life community were made possible by the fact that someone was exposed to my writing and they wouldn't have otherwise known I was who I am. They wouldn't have been attracted to me because on the surface I look like a basic white suburban mom to be able to show up inside out in this way on Facebook and to attract people who otherwise would have just completely overlooked me in these spaces in the actual area where, not to mince words, what is actually is a high school cafeteria in a lot of ways. Like if you don't have the puritanical lifestyle achievements and the earth skills and things, fuck you, you don't get a seat at the table. So people like me who have more soft skills and who present as more conventional in things, we get overlooked and marginalized and talked over and ignored and projected onto.

And the internet has allowed me to stake my claim and take up more space in my real life community in a way that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. So yeah, I don't know. I think that's the complete thought for now. Okay, then I wanna just ask that question again in a slightly different way.

I'm so grateful to finally be able to talk with you about this stuff because this is just frankly stuff that does not come up on the show a lot and yet I think about it every fucking day, all day. And all of this other stuff about time loops and aliens and so on is like through the lens of this, which is, okay, given everything you've said, I heard you speak to opportunity. A lot of what I have made future fossils about is this finding the golden mean between an accurate assessment of risk and an embrace of curiosity and like this love and fear thing and being like, look, a little fear is good, but don't let fear run your life. And there's something in, yes, to Facebook as advertised, I spoke as a meta-infrared social media broadly for life online.

Yes, all kinds of new amazing things are possible. And says my father from the position of privilege of never having to use social media to make a living who uses it precisely as advertised for retired boomers. He's like, you share too much. You talk way too much about this really personal, vulnerable stuff, but you're way too candid online.

It's gonna cause problems for you in your career. And first of all, he was right as far as my career is institutional. It doesn't, like that disclaimer of when I've used you not represent those as my employer means nothing to people that are actually in that bind, representing an organization, it means nothing. But there's this other thing where I was like, but for most of my adult life, what employer, right?

Like the people that are paying me are the people that want me to be vulnerable online. And I wonder the thing that I live with every day the confusion is like we were talking earlier about take your kid to work. Okay, but I work in a fucking Chernobyl, right? Like these children do not have, I don't have the psychic immune system required to actually work in this space.

And yet kids love it, they take to this. It hijacks their reward systems. I wonder if my kids are not gonna be making the kind of opposite statement to me when they're grown. If they're not gonna be asking me, Dad, why didn't you use us as leverage in order to secure more supporters?

Like why didn't you show our cute little faces in your videos and so on as a way of gaining some kind of competitive advantage so that we could live more comfortably growing up so that we had more money. You are dying on the hill of protecting us from sexual predators and surveillance capitalism. I remember years ago, Dadarov, my friend Daniel Rosenberg in the Netherlands, we were having a conversation about the end of privacy and around the time I was playing around with Google Glass. And I was like, yeah, I think those people conflate privacy and security, what they actually want is security because sharing your location is one thing if you're worried you're gonna get mugged for your money.

And it's another thing if you're like a prostitute who's worried that they're gonna get kidnapped and murdered and you want your friends to know where you are versus I don't want any barber-stry sand of thinking. Yeah, so I guess what I'm talking about is like the opportunity risk, dyad or pair and how it's just obvious to me that I want my kids to participate in my life as a cultural creator and as a quote unquote public intellectual, Facebook intellectual, whatever, because that is me, that's who I really am. And yet I need therapy for trying to do the thing that millennials do which is to bring their full self to work without compromise. I was told in no uncertain terms that's not what we want you to do.

As John Hammond said of Ian Malcolm, a deplorable excess of personality. And so from the other side of it, I want like you are one of the few people that I personally know, however, intermediated, for whom your domestic life is your bread and butter. And I'm just, yeah, I'm curious how you reckon with what it means to be so splayed, so transparent. I don't know if you ever heard it, I'll share it with you later.

That song I wrote transparent is about this. We would be scared if we weren't sharing this. That was the point with Daniel Rosenberg. It was like his kids in mine by the time they were in high school.

The internet is not gonna be like, oh, we have pictures of you doing something stupid in high school and we're gonna blackmail. Everyone's gonna be a Mexican standoff. Everyone will have been that transparent through their childhood. And so it doesn't, it's not gonna mean the same thing.

So am I, like this is the mind-fock that I'm constantly dealing with, which is, am I showing my age by worrying about my children's innocence in this space that is inherently predatory and yet also everyone is out here in this open shooting field. And how do you live with this? Yeah, I think about this all the time too, as a content creator, as a content creator who's work centers on domestic life and sometimes parenting, trying to get a little braver, actually, about integrating my experience as a parent into my writing and my work. As a first generation kid who grew up on the internet, I'm 34, so I don't remember a time when I wasn't growing up on the internet.

It was such a fundamental part of how I developed my identity as a young person. And yeah, just as a parent who is watching my kids watching me, my nearly 10 year old is very excited to know that I'm going on this podcast and to have heard me on a couple of other podcasts I did this past year, he thinks that's pretty neat. I don't think I've ever seen anything that resembles hero worship in his child's eyes until he heard me on a podcast. And I don't know if you've heard this stat, but the career choice that most children say they want to pursue as an adult is a YouTuber.

What's no longer like astronauts and bus drivers and teachers and veterinarians, it's something crazy, I don't know the exact stat, but like 60, 70% of elementary aged children, something like that, say that they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up. Because I started, oh, and similarly I can relate because my mom did not understand why I was so transparent on the internet and what the benefit might be to exposing myself in that way. And I had to have a very real conversation with her about the relationship between secrecy and shame and how previous generations had developed a survival mechanism wherein they learned to hide everything deemed shameful in order to protect their social capital and social currency. And I'm not doing that, but because this shame is killing me.

And also basic human experiences aren't shameful. So that was a big generation gap between me and my mom. And it's only been since I started actually making money through internet about my parents and to understand a bit more why and how this was an actually useful thing for me to pursue. So that sort of, but the disintegration of the boundary between private life and the public sphere or private life and professional persona is something that we can see and play around with a bit more now that there is this funhouse mirror of social media influencing happening and like the coaching industry and things where that's so much more apparent.

It's like you become your brand identity so on and so forth. Your life is your business, your business is your life. So for myself to get back to the more personal and interpersonal layer here, what navigating all of this looks is reminding myself over and over again that my children are not my brand, that they are not my accessories. They're not accessories to my brand aesthetic or something that I must practice congruence between public self and private self as a way of staying within the bounds of my own integrity and that I can use the public image I create to hold myself to account to that congruence between private self and public self.

And that part of the way we can learn to safeguard our communities from the negative influence of slimy thought leaders, whether they're online in person or both is by scrutinizing the potential gap between someone's public persona and private behavior. And because I was so young when I became a parent and the internet and social media was a very different place all those years ago, I have experienced firsthand what I know a lot of younger people are experiencing when my children will experience when it comes to the cringe of having every dumb thing you've ever believed existing on the internet and webinized and demonized. And sometimes in very serious ways that actually destroy your ability to make money or professionalize your work. And yeah, it's like the feeling of a cringey home video or cringey yearbook photo, right?

But that's just your digital footprint now. It's like even like what I believed two years ago feels like this to me. And people do crazy shit, like they'll dig into your past to try to villainize you further in their psyche and things. It is very violating.

And I do draw a lot of connections between Facebook as a street performance, how that's part of my livelihood and sex work. It's obviously not a direct comparison, but in a very basic way, that's what I'm doing. I'm like selling my labor, my persona, my, again, like the sort of like role that I'm playing in someone's like, I've learned a lot actually from reading accounts of sex workers and how they navigate personal and professional boundaries. I often have to tell clients what I am and am not game for.

The same way a sex worker might. And people might assume that because I'm a domestic worker, that means I'm game for everything. The same way they might assume that about a sex worker and things. Also, there is like a lot of stuff happening there in terms of the commodification of female desirability and female value to men or to other people.

Virgin and the horror dichotomy also comes to mind. You can commodify the horror. You can commodify the virgin. You can commodify the muse.

But it's all ultimately going to be, to some degree, objectifying. And the best you can do is opt in and opt out of where your autonomy is there and how much you get to benefit from it, where you're doing that on purpose, where you can delight and receive pleasure from it as well. And a lot of people tell me that what I share on Facebook is vulnerable. And oftentimes at this point, I don't experience it as vulnerable because I have gone through years of exposure therapy.

From the time I was 16, just like essentially airing all the things I was told was dirty laundry. So everything that I was told was shameful. I just put it out there for employers to see my extended family, to see my community, to see. And that was deeply fucking healing for me.

And deeply fucking healing for others. And it did destigmatize a lot of these things. To be more specific, I have vaginismists. So a lot of my early writings were about vaginismists and sexual trauma and ancestral trauma and patriarchal misogynistic legacy around female sexuality and who doesn't does not own female pleasure and desirability.

And yeah, so transparency can be radical, can be transformative, can be a kind of collective ritual transmutation of cultural and familial trauma. And we should be living in public to a degree. A lot of the problems that we see in family life are festering in the isolation and lack of scrutiny of the nuclear family, the fact that you can shut out the community and public scrutiny from what is happening in your private life and your family life. But it doesn't cause the dysfunction, but it certainly makes it a lot worse, a lot of the time.

So part of what I want to teach my own children is how to, first of all, navigate the ideological wilds of online life and how this stuff can hijack your brain and your perception of reality and affect your intimate relationships. And I also am constantly checking in with myself about what does feel vulnerable. A lot doesn't feel vulnerable at this point, but some of it still does. And I've become, as I've done more like somatic nervous system type work, more and more sensitive to my own, like how my own nervous system is reacting, responding to that space.

So ironic we're talking about this right now because I just lapsed and had another bout of participating in outrage culture on Facebook this morning, like literally right before we got on this call. It's so easy. It's so easy. I've done so well for so long.

It's been months since I've been tempted. I don't know what got into me, but I was just like, pick in fights this morning and emotionally discharging on my this morning. So yeah, there are all of these little micro adjustments that I practice around like tracking my own nervous system reaction and responses and what I actually am comfortable with in terms of exposing myself to the inevitable scrutiny, which again can be a positive thing or negative thing, or useful thing, neutral thing. And but then also like the violent reactivity and projection and non-consensual transference that will inevitably occur.

So if it's feeling like too much, I take that much more seriously now than I used to. And I'm constantly giving myself grace for doing things like posting something and then taking it down, making it public and then making it private, changing my mind, tapping out rather than feeling like I need to keep engaging with someone else's bullshit because I want to be misunderstood using it as an avenue to access the deepest wounds inside of myself, using it as a practice space for showing up in the way, being the change you want to see in the world or being the change you want to see in your community. I've seen you do this in your comments section too, being a role model for how you can set the tone. What is a better way to engage with social discards?

Discourse, what is a more self-aware and self-responsible way? How can we develop some etiquette here in terms of being like, hey, I'm noticing that I might have a blind spot here. Or I wonder if it would be okay if you just didn't chime in right now because I'm focusing on my thread with this other person and I'm finding it hard to talk to both of you. You know, these sort of humanizing micro-exchanges that can occur on social media, that directly translates to your ability to navigate your real life intimate relationships and community relationships and professional relationships.

Well, so. Do not get credentials for it though. You do not get credentials for it though. No one gives a damn that you have managed to be the reasonable adult online in outrage spaces for 20 years when it's not specified by your job description.

Oh, you'll be pro-exporting. You'll be pro-exporting because of the, again, like good mommy, bad mommy, good daddy, bad daddy. And that's happened in my real life, community relationships too. I just went through a brutal community breakup last fall.

And part of what happened was that people were expecting me to be the adult all the time because I had a lot of practice with that in part through Facebook. And I didn't know they were expecting me to do that because I don't experience myself as powerful in my community. And be like, what happens when mommy needs to have a tantrum? My experience was like, oh, now I'm the one freaking out and y'all are unavailable.

But you like want me to show up with perfect responsibility and maturity all the time for your community tantruming. Do you get punished for being capable of regulating yourself? Yeah. It'd be more mad at you because you're the adult.

How with you now? I'm like, we'll keep boarding it over. You must have security already complex if you're more practiced at this than me. And again, I'm so far from perfect.

Like I said, I just lost my shit on the internet this morning. I am humbled, don't worry. But yeah, there's like this mistrust in a person's ability to access their own humility or mistrust in the possibility that someone might actually give a shit enough to be trying to be self aware as well. And there's a lot of misunderstanding about what personal responsibility accountability actually looks like, not only in social media discourse, but in our real life communities.

People get very hung up on accountability and what that looks like among adults, no less, is I'm holding you to account. And at best, I can be comfortable with you holding me to account. And what social media has taught me is that is not how adults relate to one another ideally. Ideally, how we relate to one another is we hold ourselves to account and trust in one another's ability to do that for ourselves.

And it's so far beyond calling out or calling in. And it has also taught me that I need to be a lot more careful about who I'm close to and that I don't need to let people in who don't trust me to hold my own self awareness and my own personal responsibility or who seem to require me to constantly hold them to theirs. Now, at this point, I get the sense that folks in these conditions, not only are the web three crowd to the extent that, yeah, this is, this should be paid. Like moderation deserves recompense.

Being able to provide an example of how to regulate yourself in the great shared stampede, the emotional herd behavior is worth something. But at this point, I feel like a punch drunk for boxer. Like, I don't deserve payment anymore. I deserve pension.

I shouldn't even be doing this anymore. I used to work at a place, the longest running employee with someone, this wonderful grandmother figure who had been working behind the front desk for over 30 years. And I was just like, why are you still here? That's not fair to you.

I'm sure that there's no retirement plan for a Facebook intellectual, I guess is what I'm saying. And that seems like the right, kind of as far as like landing this conversation, because yeah, to the extent that this is a show in which I argue for a regeneration of eldership in society, what are we gonna do? I don't know anyone that thinks they're gonna retire. Yeah, it's like, even people I know in their 50s are saying like, if I found out I have cancer, I'd just throw myself off a mountain.

So that I'm not a burden to people. Like, is that the apotheosis of the modernists ethos toward which we have been striving? Is that the delivered goods of the rational enlightenment that we've made it to a place where as soon as you break your leg, they shoot you? What the fuck?

Yeah, what the fuck? And part of the reason why I'm so passionate about bringing more attention to human family systems, domestic life, household management, all the different layers of how we can relate to our attachment material to humans and non-humans and culture, is because of that broader context of what am I gonna do when I'm old. The retirement is not available to me, even with the privileges that I carry. A lot of us are fine fucked with all the privileges that I carry, we're all really fucked.

And I've touched on some of the different sub-communities that I've been learning from over the years, but I haven't mentioned more explicitly that I learned a lot from queer community and queer culture and how queer culture does chosen family because of the necessity, right? Like a lot of queer people, especially from older generations, have been cast out by their blood family and their church communities and where they grew up. So the queer community is really modeling for us as a society, what chosen family can look like? The polyamory community too, which I've had all kinds of experiences in and put all sorts of things about, just in terms of, yeah, a limitation and possibility.

And there's lots of overlap between the queer community and the polyamory community. But yeah, what these sorts of social movements are practicing from setting the example for is what does a queerification of extended family look like? A lot of dreaming into relying on one another in old age or dreaming into breaking down the walls between nuclear family homes and living in a more collectivist communal way. A lot of these dreams are based mostly in idealism and not so much in the reality of what skills are actually required for that to function well or what can be guaranteed in terms of human limitation and human flaw and what are the patterns we see play out over and over again in every attempt to do community.

And, but yeah, that's part of what I believe is we're gonna survive this by having strong friendships. We're gonna survive this by counting on the fact that human family, human families will always emerge. In any crisis, in any configuration, in any circumstance, there is something we all carry that allows us to remember what human family is and looks like and can be. And part of that on the community level, family level and social level, like societal level is metabolizing difference and recognizing that the family system is always, I think, we're in the realm of like, mysticism and personal opinion now, so take it or leave it.

But I think family systems are always seeking a kind of equilibrium. Family systems are always trying to resolve the trauma in one way or another. So I have a lot of faith in that and a lot of faith in my own ability and in the ability of the people I'm finding in my life now in large part through the internet to learn, to learn how to do family life in a way that's more sustainable and that is not so dependent on financial security but is more interdependent on social currency. That's a far more inspiring place to end it than I was expecting we would end up with that question.

Alyssa, thank you so much. Obviously, we're gonna send people to adaptivedaydream.substack.com. We're gonna send listeners to the conversation that you recently had with our boy, Layman Pascal for the integral stage. Anything else, any closing remarks?

I know, just appreciation. Thank you again for having me. This was really enlivening and fun for me and it was really lovely connecting with you in this way because we haven't actually spoken like this before. So yeah, great to see your face.

Likewise. Hey, thanks again for listening. If you enjoyed that, again, please subscribe. Great review.

It is the only way that I seem to be able to attract new kindred spirits into the ambit of this conversation. I'm not doing this show as an end unto itself but as a means for the facilitation of public discourse and if you've stuck around long enough to hear this, then I take it that you value this work and would like to see it thrive. So thanks in advance. Coming up on the show, we have a couple of really wonderful guests, my friend, Sarah Finn Huntley, who is part of episode 29 on raising robots right.

One of the most fundamental conversations I've had about technology as parenting is back on the show to talk about her upcoming book with David J. Brown, a field guide to DMT entities. I could not be more excited to share that conversation with you. Also, Bill Saril, a polymath who was a long-term friend of Philip K.

Dix, a pioneering biochemist and bottomless reservoir of interesting theories about the hyperdimensional structure of time, easily one of the headiest and most ambitious discussions that has ever occurred on the show. Yeah, anyway, two great people, two great interactions, really looking forward to sharing those with you. And also stay tuned for, yeah, right here, right here. And with that, I have no time for any more news because duty calls.

If you would like to rent my brain, I am now offering conversations as a service on a retainer basis, helping people surface the kinds of questions that can transform the work you do. Find more information about that by emailing me, my go-go-guardfield-gmail.com. Thanks and have a wonderful, interval.