The Baked Goods Theory is a clever and necessary fix for a broken system, but the fact that we need it at all is itself the tragedy. For most of human history and across most of the world today, community wasn't something you engineered or scheduled or theorized about. It was the unavoidable byproduct of simply existing near other people, of shared streets, shared markets, shared life. Nobody needed a framework for weak ties when the architecture of daily existence made isolation the thing that required effort and connection the thing that required nothing. Then came a series of deliberate design decisions: the suburb, the highway, the single-family home, the car. Together they quietly engineered the inversion. Now connection requires enormous effort and isolation is the default. We schedule human contact. We join things. We build theories. We do individually, with great strain, what previous generations had automatically just by stepping outside. The choir is real and the mechanism works, but the deeper truth underneath your theory is that we are collectively doing enormous effort to manually reconstruct something that most of humanity had for free, without naming it, without theorizing it, and without ever once having to bring it to a dinner party. The suburb at 6pm isn't empty because people are antisocial. It's empty because we built a world where everyone inside those houses has been probably convinced that this is what freedom looks like.
I find it quite hard to find communities which would have many people and would meet regularly - team sport would be the closest probably, but it requires already some decent level so that team would start gathering for trainings regularly. Have you found some other communities besides choir?
The Baked Goods Theory is a clever and necessary fix for a broken system, but the fact that we need it at all is itself the tragedy. For most of human history and across most of the world today, community wasn't something you engineered or scheduled or theorized about. It was the unavoidable byproduct of simply existing near other people, of shared streets, shared markets, shared life. Nobody needed a framework for weak ties when the architecture of daily existence made isolation the thing that required effort and connection the thing that required nothing. Then came a series of deliberate design decisions: the suburb, the highway, the single-family home, the car. Together they quietly engineered the inversion. Now connection requires enormous effort and isolation is the default. We schedule human contact. We join things. We build theories. We do individually, with great strain, what previous generations had automatically just by stepping outside. The choir is real and the mechanism works, but the deeper truth underneath your theory is that we are collectively doing enormous effort to manually reconstruct something that most of humanity had for free, without naming it, without theorizing it, and without ever once having to bring it to a dinner party. The suburb at 6pm isn't empty because people are antisocial. It's empty because we built a world where everyone inside those houses has been probably convinced that this is what freedom looks like.
I find it quite hard to find communities which would have many people and would meet regularly - team sport would be the closest probably, but it requires already some decent level so that team would start gathering for trainings regularly. Have you found some other communities besides choir?
it depends a lot on context — work often works for most people, a lot of people do book clubs or dance
Sounds good in theory but it’s not sustainable in practice.