Consider the following concepts:
Lifestyle: a pattern of behavior.
Institution: a group of people that facilitates a pattern of behavior.
One way to approach trying to live better is to examine our lifestyle: What do I eat? Do I exercise? What do I do for work? How do I use my leisure time?
Another way is to examine what institutions facilitate these patterns: who do I eat with? Who pays me for working? Who do I hang out with in my free time?
Have you ever thought about the fact that it is much easier to do something when other people expect us to do it? For example, I used to be in the Air Force. At various points in my career my unit would do early morning runs. We would get up at 6 in the morning and run together for 30 minutes or an hour.
I didn’t like getting up so early in the morning. But it was so much easier to run in those circumstances than it is now because I was expected to do it. Expected both formally, in the sense that I could be punished for not doing it, and informally, in the sense that there was a group of people who expected me to be there.
I have previously talked about the concept of social fragmentation. Let’s define it as:
Social Fragmentation: having little overlap between the institutions that facilitate different aspects of our lifestyle.
That is, we have a bunch of different circles of people we engage with for different things, but we don’t have many people in that share multiple circles, or institutions that facilitate multiple patterns.
One problem with social fragmentation is that it can weaken expectations. In the case of my Air Force runs, the fact that not showing up could hurt my job (and not just make it harder to maintain my health) made a big difference.
So one problem with fragmentation is that it can result in our institutions having a weaker effect on our behavior. Thus, our behavior can become worse in some way.
Now I want to introduce another potential problem with our social background, which I will call social disorientation:
Social Disorientation: having weak or absent institutions that facilitate long term patterns of behavior.
So, for example, we might have a company that encourages us to work on a day-to-day basis, but they might not really care about our career progression. We might have a school that guides our study for a few years, but is there any institution that has expectations about our growth as a person?
One of the reasons I became disillusioned with the Air Force is that it became clear that the military didn’t really care about me as a person. They care about my immediate behavior, and they care about their overall distribution of people performing different roles, but they didn’t really care about whether I was progressing in a way that made sense for me.
In hindsight, it’s kind of ridiculous to think that they should. But if not them, then who? My church? My family?
To some extent, the answer to both of these questions is yes. One thing about Mormons is that they are pretty good at getting in each other’s business. But as I have discussed here, the church’s involvement in our day-to-day lives might decrease as it embraces a global identity and focuses more on the gospel and less on culture.
Thus, while the church might expect me to behave in a certain way, and (Mormons, at least) talk a lot about eternal progression, the church isn’t going to provide much guidance about every kind of lifestyle pattern. Being in the church might encourage you to get married and have kids (important long term patterns), but it probably won’t have much to say about your career choices.
In the past, families moderated nearly every lifestyle choice. Even today, most people have some kind of familial expectations about their career. But the influence of our family on our career may not be totally satisfactory. Why? Perhaps the reasons are similar to why we often don’t want our families involved in our love life.
Recently, Mercedes and I have been watching a show called Sex Education, about some teens learning about sex and relationships.
One of the themes is that the main character, Otis, doesn’t want his mom (a sex therapist) involved in his love life. I suspect part of the reason is that he doesn’t think she can help. Also, I think that part of the hormonal cocktail people experience during their teen years encourages them to want to distance themselves from their parents.
I know that when I was younger, I really didn’t want to talk to my mom or anyone else in my family about my romantic life (not that there was much of one to talk about). At various points I had a group of friends that I would go on dates with, and would talk about those kinds of things with. But I definitely didn’t want my family involved.
Interestingly, the Church does set up special congregations known as Singles Wards (aka, the meat market) that do pretty good job of helping people make romantic connections.
Maybe this can be a model to think about how institutions like the church or family should facilitate long term patters (like family building and career progression). That is, it might be best not to engage too directly. But a long-term institution (orienting institution?) can engage by facilitating engagement with other, more directly related institutions that help us achieve what we are trying to do.
That is, a family can make sure you have access to a job and friend groups (where you might find a spouse), but they shouldn’t always try to be your job and friend group.
But the main point isn’t that families should remain in the background. The main point is that many people don’t really have much of anything in the background providing them guidance and resources to develop over the long term. Families and churches can play this role, but there expectation that they will is much weaker than it has been in the past.
One of my objectives with the Tribe concept is to reawaken this sense that people need institutions not just for short term patterns, but for long term patterns. We need people that expect us to grow, to gain skills, to progress in our careers, to find love, and to have children (or otherwise contribute to continuing the cycle). And because these institutions are weakening, we need to talk about them, to make them explicit, or they will continue to wither.
And by this I don’t just mean talking about them in the abstract. We need to identify those people that care about us in that way (and that we care about) and let them know that we care about their long term development. We also need to look for ways to contribute to this development when possible. Within our relevant institutions, we need to help orient each other.
