God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

-Genesis 1:26

People wish to be settled

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

We all have the longing to be around other people. Modern life as we experience, does not orient itself around this fundamental need of ours. You could say, in fact, we are incentivized to disregard it. You could say it’s a form of deconstruction of how we have lived for millenia, but that would require a cabal or conspiracy. There is none here, just plain old economic incentives and human frailty. We are our own worst enemies. This lifestyle that doesn’t satisfy our needs seems to be particularly acute in my generation, Millenials. The generation that in their own mind, can do no wrong, and in everyone else’s mind, no good. We may not have been the first generation to spurn this built in need of ours, but we have refined it into an art form. Now give me my avocado toast.

We don’t stay put

Let’s start off the discussion by comparing generations. If there’s one way to quickly distinguish the habits of Millenials vs Boomers, it is to say that Millenials value experiences, while Boomers value physical things. Millenials rent, Boomers buy houses. Millenials have less kids and have them later because it messes up our life plan, however ill defined that plan may be. Or we have no kids, and our nation doesn’t reach replacement. For Boomers, a family was the plan and they were set on making that work.

Like Aaron Renn said in the Masculinist #48, people in the Boomer generation were given a series of steps that if they followed them, they were essentially guaranteed to succeed. This no longer holds on the main for the world that Millenials have inherited as they have reached adulthood. Get a college degree so you can get a good job makes less and less sense every day, as the excesses of the college-industrial complex have become apparent. We have been incentivized to uproot ourselves from our families and friends to go to a new city, in order to obtain a degree that may or may not be used in our eventual job. We spend 4 years, making new friends and bad decisions, while taking superfluous courses for thousands of dollars where we essentially teach ourselves the material because the professor is in publish or perish mode and has no time for us idiots. Then, when the excesses have run their course, we uproot ourselves again to move for our job, where everything we need to know for it is taught to us in the 1st 6 months. We are a mobile people, following orders while taking no time to think about where the orders lead us. A generation of semi-conscious U-Haulers. We wouldn’t know community if it walked up and said hi nice to meet you, would you like to get coffee? (something with soy in it, we’re Millenials remember).

We are semi-nomads, searching for something permanent and lasting amongst a sea of commodities. And EVERYTHING is commoditized now, including significant others and gourmet meals. We are long on advertisements for things we don’t need, and short on the thing we do : stable community. We make so many acquaintances, very few long term friends. Those friends we do keep we see once or twice a year due to the distance. We have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, meanwhile we’re clueless about Dunbar’s number and how more isn’t necessarily better. Quantity is not a quality all its own, as some have said. Social media hasn’t shortened the distance between us and our fellow man, it has exponentially blown it out of the water. We understand each other less and less as we drown in a sea of information. Instead of seeing how other people live their lives in authentic interactions, we see the curated ideal of what they wish their life was. It is not the real thing. This isn’t life abundant.

Think the problem only exists in Millenials? The recent film Nomadland explores the phenomenon of older adults (Non-Millenials) who live what amounts to a vagrant lifestyle on the road, following the available, low skill work wherever it leads. What’s interesting about this movie is that it parallels the age of the gold rush and westward expansion across the United States that was one chapter in the story of the nation we now call home. It was an age where people uprooted themselves to better their economic situation. Some were motivated by greed. The great archetype of the time was Wyatt Earp. The movie Nomadland begins with the dissolution the town of Empire, Nevada that existed as a town of factory workers but ceases to be when the local mill shuts down. This happened over and over again in the 1800s. History never repeats, but it does rhyme. What’s so interesting is that with the 1:1 correspondence between Nomadland and our American mythos of the Wild West, we see the twilight reflection of our own time. Go where the best job is, forgetting other considerations. Strike it rich at any cost. Neglect community, family, stability, roots. And we find others forced into this lifestyle, not because they want it, but they need to in order to survive. A nation that incentivizes its people to neglect community is not a nation that will survive forever.

Millenial Hospitality

This unrooted lifestyle we live should show signs of having a negative effect, right? There should be evidence that it’s unhealthy. Well, there is. There’s something we need to understand. Life is a series of tradeoffs. It is the rarest of rare to get something for nothing. The choices we make in how we order our lives will materialize eventually, for good or for evil. The nomadic life we live, moving apart from family, differs drastically from our ancestors, with negative consequences. An easy way to see the fallout is trying to find Hospitality in the proverbial haystack. I began to notice this in college, and have continued noticing the pattern ever since. While the vast majority of college students rent or live in student housing (renting), I can’t recall but one example of when I visited a friend’s place and they offered me something to eat or drink. Sebastian Maniscalco got it right in his hilarious bit on ringing the doorbell and what it meant 20 years ago vs today (link here). People don’t react to company like they did before. Company just doesn’t come over as often. One extreme example I remember was hanging out with a friend at the duplex he was renting out, then without even a word, he left me alone at his own place to go hang out with a girl… The level of extreme disownership of everything that hospitality entailed was evident. When you don’t own a place or think that you will be there long, the drive to show hospitality goes down. It’s a structural fault in the way we’ve chosen to live. We won’t be entertaining angels any time soon.

You can’t have it all, until you can

Hospitality is necessarily tied to the concepts of a home and community. But we don’t want to stay at home all the time, even if the Coronavirus forced us to do just that. We crave adventure too. The pendulum doesn’t need to swing from lone hunter-gatherer lifestyle to homebody. Our global world, stitched together by supply chains and massive airlines affords modern man the ability to travel where once only Marco Polo could do the same. Though many Americans can only speak one language due to English’s dominance as a lingua franca worldwide, still many have a passport with stamps in it. Foreign travel opens your understanding of the world. We even have a new class of workers called digital nomads. The rise of the internet laid the foundations for people to live this kind of lifestyle, constant travel while working remotely on the internet, often as a freelancer.

What are the tradeoffs? The baby is gone with the bathwater. We weren’t meant to be on perpetual adventure. Just like your portfolio cannot be entirely risky assets if you want to survive financially, you need adventure, but you also need a home to come back to at the end of the adventure. This is a theme that J.R.R. Tolkien explores in the Hobbit and further in Lord of the Rings. The world wasn’t in Bilbo’s books, it was “out there,” as Gandalf said. Still the novels end with Bilbo/Frodo at home, reminiscing on the times of adventure they just experienced. There’s this dual reality that pervades the novels : That any adventure is a true adventure when you have a home to return to. So we see that adventure is not bad, but the brand of adventure our society tells us we can have is a fool’s game.

The Greatest Commandment

We as humans made in God’s image are like him in many respects. God existed in community since before the foundation of the world. Perpetual joy, love, and adoration. Out of the overflow of His being, God created us. Therefore, we mirror him in our desire for community. God has never been alone, though he stands alone in glory. The more that we spurn community for more temporal things that social media or our boss tell us are worth our life’s pursuit, the more we diverge from God’s best for your life. You cannot unmake God’s good design.

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

John 13:35

How can we feel the weight of this verse, and obey it, if we neglect the “one another?” The we of life is essential to becoming fully human.

…Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.

Matthew 25:40

So then, building a community becomes an expression of our love for the Lord, because if you love him, you will obey what he commands. And finally…

And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near.

Hebrews 10:25

What encouragement is a brother that is here today, then willingly leaves tomorrow? His encouragement is brief. I’m speaking not only from the scriptures, but secondarily from my own painful experience. I have people I love and know well, all over the country. I can’t move them all to the same city so we can all be together. Even if I could, would they want to, simply for my sake and plan? There is a real sense of grief I feel that having gotten to know them, I can’t continue in communion with them in any real, embodied way due to the distance. At least on this side of eternity.

So what are we to do? Find a place and a people to commit to, over your career. Find a church over a job. Stay, serve, build. Glorify God in a community, as He is in community with himself, and with you through Christ and the Holy Spirit. Christ died “for the joy set before him”, which was heaven full of His redeemed sons and daughters, with Him and adoring Him forever. Let that vision captivate you, and mirror it here on earth to God’s glory.