In Pursuit of the Domestic (and Mental) Sweet Spot between Closed on All Sides, and Open on All Sides
June 14, 2021
Passing through downtown Spokane in the mid-1970s, walking my bike across an intersection on my way home to the low rental cost north side of the city, I noticed (it was hard not to) a young woman standing still and wordlessly screaming on the sidewalk I was walking towards. People passed around her, and she just stood screaming. I stopped and put my right hand on her left shoulder, and asked, “Are you all right?”. She immediately (and surprisingly) popped right out of herself and calmly looked at me, and stopped her scream. I took my hand off her shoulder, watched her for maybe ten seconds more to confirm that was the end of it, and I then went on, getting back on my bicycle.
I get this same impression from many Americans (and people of other nationalities) these days – that they are standing stock still, locked fairly firmly into some odd, isolated mental state, and are screaming (unfortunately, not wordlessly), mental capacity (that Mullainathian and Shafirian bandwidth again)1 all tied up tightly, doing themselves and no one else any good.
I don’t think the ‘lockdowns’ and the rudely organized censorship of the last year or so helped matters at all, but this self-focus at the individual scale, this flocking of birds of the same feather at the group scale, has been gradually increasing in steadily urbanizing and specializing America since those fateful and critical 1960s remarked upon so persistently by Robert Putnam.2
I now live near a small town with two very well-known private colleges within its boundaries and visiting there is, in principle and in its associated dominant emotional atmosphere, just like crossing that Spokane downtown intersection to come upon a standing and screaming young woman. Although this college town is almost a perfect monoculture of political, social, and professional attitudes, many people there still post identical placards at the front of their lawns voicing identical mottoes already subscribed to by most, if not all, of their neighbors. The image below captures the situation. Many of the residents of this small, cozy college town clearly have the mistaken impression that their myopic view of things extends infinitely past the horizons while it really is, at best, only partly valid as far as the municipality’s city limits.
Many modern people evidently really need, I think, as a simple matter of maintenance of their mental health and bandwidth, to ‘get out more’ physically and mentally over both the short- and long-term, come back to themselves, and stop their (to date) endless screaming.