So my goal here with this project is really to build a community.
These recordings, these vlogs, are just here to get things started, and to help me develop my ideas, but my main goal is not about me sharing my ideas.
It is about building a community.
So why? Why have a community for this? I grew up very individualistic in my philosophy, and believed in really doing things alone when I can.
And I still love self-sufficiency and taking care of myself and being self-reliant.
Even if our priority is helping other people, still, being self-reliant and self-sufficient, it helps us to help other people.
But I’ve also learned over the years the limitations, some of the limitations, of doing everything by myself.
And when I look back at my life, some of my best memories, most of my best memories, are shared with other people.
As much as I’ve enjoyed the times working by myself, it is with other people that we really create the most meaning.
So indeed, if my task, my quest, is to create a life of meaning, it has to be done in combination with others.
What can the community do? For one thing, simply having other people to share our experiences with is a huge benefit.
Even if a lot of this work is work that must be done alone, where we’re working on ourselves.
No one else can automatically do this for us.
We have to do this work ourselves.
And yet, by sharing our individual work with each other, we can help each other.
The feeling of being isolated and alone is one of the saddest feelings in the world.
And by sharing our experience we can realize how much we have so many similarities in our experiences, and can find overlaps where the lessons that one of us learns can be applied to others.
And also the support, simply the support, of listening to each other and relating based on our own experiences to what other people have gone through makes us stronger together.
This task of developing meaning is something that is a very shared thing, as much as it is individual.
We can’t make somebody else change their habits or change their mindset.
You can’t just directly control other people and their mindsets.
But the development of a good mindset is something that cannot be entirely separated from our interactions with other people.
So all these different forms of support seem to come together as all part of community.
There’s just listening to each other.
Connecting other people’s experiences to our experiences so that we show the overlap, and we provide the support for each other.
We can learn lessons from each other, because all the time that each of us has invested in life experiences, making mistakes, making adjustments, learning, each of us has invested all the time in our lives towards either actively developing or even just accidentally through experiences, we have accumulated all this time and all this experience.
By sharing it with each other, we can save each other so much time and combine the forces of all this time into a collective wisdom.
And finally, it’s simply fun.
It is more fun and enjoyable to live life shared with others that have some kind of overlapping interest.
So for all these reasons, that is why I am working on building this community.
So far, there’s no subscribers, there’s nothing.
This is purely the beginning.
This is purely a training ground for me to practice and to start building some kind of material, some kind of raw elements, maybe some kind of foundations, to start building what can be, can later become, a shared effort.
But whether or not, you know, how many- whether nobody joins or whether many people join, the spirit of community is always going to be a part of what this is all about.
[Clearly I’m still learning about exposure settings at this point! It was a very bright day, but it appears darkest of all. Maybe a metaphor for community isolation.]