A thing that happened in October was the first anniversary of my volunteer role in an online community of late teenagers and young adults. A time good as any to reflect back.
This is a group I joined originally because I felt I shared values with the founder and wanted to see if I could learn from his community. It turned out that they had demand for the kind of mentoring that I'm good at, and it provides me with a modest sense of purpose.
There are about a thousand members registered, about fifty of them active week over week, and at least two or three newcomers per week who seek guidance in various forms: most commonly, how to self-regulate, how to self-motivate and how to find their own sense of meaning amidst the various challenges they face coming into adulthood.
Asia and Europe are now surprisingly over-represented. I had expected that current political trends would attract more online refugees from Northern America, but I welcomed the corresponding shift in focus areas and life priorities.
In hindsight, here are the three main lessons I am taking away from this period.
The first is a prediction that this new generation will be all right, eventually. For sure, they face tremendous challenges that did not exist in our times (corporations competing for their attention, many new opportunities for addictive behavior, very few remaining paths to home ownership, job market uncertainty, much more dire climate prospects, etc.); yet, they excel in three areas that were completely out of reach for my generation:
- they know much better how to sort through bullshit, and they navigate reputation and evidence systems much more fluently; in particular, they are much less sensitive than I thought (and that we were!) to arguments from authority.
- they did not grow up in a rising economic tide and mellow social environment and they have already accepted they will have to work hard and fight for their rights.
- they are much more comfortable talking casually about body, mental and spiritual health, as well as life rituals to keep oneself healthy and sane.
The second takeaway is me being an old man shaking his fist at the clouds: gosh, these people are so absurdly self-centered! It is emotionally exhausting. Few conversations really take off unless they start with a member complaining about something that they want themselves and are not having (including metaphysically), or something they want to achieve personally and cannot (or don't know how to do yet).
It is even somewhat cringe (“cringe” = second-hand embarrassment) how unashamedly selfishly many of these conversations go, with folk barely acknowledging each other, other than through “me too” remarks (with an ostentatious hope to harvest shared suggestions from one of the other volunteers) and “here's a big / powerful / remarkable thing I did” posts (commonly, something involving bulging muscles after a workout).
The saving grace here, and the reason why I share the above in good humor, is that they are also wonderfully quick at noticing the benefits of shifting their center of attention away from themselves. More often than not, it takes just a few days before a new member starts sharing their thoughts and suggestions towards other members, and it feels to me that they even like it. Whether they are properly registering the idea of “pay it forward” or whether they derive some sense of purpose from these interactions remains unsaid, but the net effect is there: this community largely runs itself. And that, to me, feels exactly like it should.
The last takeaway I'd like to share is my general uneasiness at the format.
For one, this is an online platform where people do not show their face to each other. Despite the occasional voice conversations, folk know very little about each other and the community culture does not invite them to. The anonymity creates a modest sense of emotional safety, perhaps necessarily so for members coming from repressive locales, but this anonymity and the lack of in-person contact also robs the members of the opportunity to forge stronger emotional bonds. This part is hard to solve because almost by definition, young adults cannot really afford to travel.
The second source of my uneasiness is the overall strong inequality in the members' expansiveness. Some people write a lot and frequently, most others don't. It is unclear to me whether everyone who would benefit from this community's support is truly given time and space to share their situation and feels listened to. Coincidentally, the most loquacious members are also not always the most effusive, and they sometimes verge on volubility. The result is walls of text that have a distinctly negative emotional load (usually charged with pain and frustration, sometimes desperation, much more rarely toxicity). I feel there are not enough stories with a positive or optimistic outlook that compensate for it, and I sometimes worry for the vibe visible to new arrivals. We have work to do in this area.