Can I Live a Deep Life When Only Focusing on My Local Community?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:04.640 | I think we have time for one more question.

00:00:07.440 | This one comes from Ezra. Ezra says, "Is it really a deep life if it's entirely focused on my

00:00:15.120 | local community?" As Ezra then elaborates, "When you talk about the deep life, it sounds to me

00:00:22.400 | often utilitaristic"—I think you might mean utilitarianistic—"in the sense that all the

00:00:28.880 | buckets you mentioned have the purpose of making me feel good, satisfied, connected, etc. But what

00:00:33.760 | about the people we do not get in direct contact with? Shouldn't that be part of a deep life ethic,

00:00:40.880 | one that urges us to care about all of humanity? Of course, it makes no sense to talk about social

00:00:46.160 | injustice and then ignore the needs of the people in our immediate neighborhood, but shouldn't

00:00:49.280 | that be a step after looking further?" So Ezra, when we're thinking about the different buckets

00:00:57.680 | of the deep life, it sounds like we're honing in here on the community bucket.

00:01:01.120 | I do often talk about, when I give examples about overhauling that area of your life,

00:01:07.600 | getting involved and giving back to people in your immediate community, but I think you're

00:01:14.880 | absolutely right that there are broad interpretations of community as well

00:01:19.120 | that are important. So at the most narrow interpretation, community is going to be your

00:01:24.480 | family. All right? These are my kids, my wife, my siblings. This is a really big priority. I want to

00:01:32.640 | make sure that I am serving them, I am there for them. Then we move out to a slightly broader scope

00:01:37.280 | and you get to your friends. These are people I know and like and spend time with. These are my

00:01:42.480 | friends. I want to be there. I want to serve them. Someone has a kid. I'm going to go over there. I'm

00:01:46.720 | going to help them. I'm going to cook them dinner. Someone gets sick. I'm going to be there to make

00:01:50.080 | sure that the errands get done, that their car oil still gets changed. Broaden out further and you get

00:01:57.440 | to your geographically proximate neighborhood and community. Okay, here's the town I live in.

00:02:03.200 | Here's the suburb I live in. I want to be involved, right? This is where you might also have

00:02:09.120 | community group involvements. My church, a volunteer effort that I do. So now you're dealing

00:02:15.840 | with, these aren't maybe your close friends, but people who have some sort of geographical proximity

00:02:21.280 | to you. Beyond that, relevant to your question, the scope will broaden to serving people in the

00:02:29.120 | broader human community. And this is where you might be involved in causes or issues that have

00:02:35.200 | no real relevant geographic proximity to you. I'm working on climate change issues. I'm working on

00:02:44.800 | issues with injustice in prisons or something where now you are outside of, these are people

00:02:49.520 | that are actually related to me or around me all the time. And I think that could be really

00:02:53.360 | important as well. And when you're doing an overhaul of the community aspect of your deep life,

00:02:59.120 | that needs to be in the mix. The one thing I will say though, and I'm far from the first person to

00:03:07.120 | note this, is that moving in order from the narrowest scopes towards the largest scopes

00:03:14.960 | is almost always the recipe for making the most sustainable long-term impact. If you jump past

00:03:24.400 | your family, past your friends, past local organizations and your geographically proximate

00:03:29.280 | neighborhood straight to global issues that you want to be involved in, that's a risky move.

00:03:36.480 | Because you don't have this foundation. You don't have this foundation of what it feels like to

00:03:41.920 | sacrifice on behalf of others. You don't have the empathy. You don't have the patience born of this

00:03:47.040 | actual, much more, let's call it human-compatible type community service. I say human-compatible

00:03:52.480 | just because it's what we're wired to expect, to actually see eye to eye and spend time with

00:03:56.160 | the people that we are serving. You want to build that foundation, then you can better serve the

00:04:00.640 | larger causes. You get your local house in order and then you can go build houses for others as

00:04:06.160 | well. This tends to be the right way to do it. Now the internet, because it has erased, obviously,

00:04:12.160 | the obstacles of distance with low friction digital communication, has created a moment

00:04:17.440 | in which we can skip those early steps. Up until about 30 years ago, I mean, this was what community

00:04:24.240 | was going to be because it wasn't easy to be involved with a cause halfway across the country

00:04:29.280 | because you couldn't talk to the people over there. You couldn't find out about it. But now

00:04:32.080 | you can be on Twitter opining on anything, anywhere. You can be right in the mix on national

00:04:39.840 | political issues, national causes, international causes. This is really new. 30 years ago,

00:04:45.520 | you might be upset with the president, but you didn't really have a lot of time in your life

00:04:51.200 | spent talking publicly about the president or what you don't like about the president because who was

00:04:55.840 | going to listen? Your neighbors and your wife at some point would say, "Okay, I get it. This isn't

00:05:01.040 | interesting. But today you could be on Facebook, you could be on Twitter, you could be on Instagram.

00:05:03.680 | Everyone's involved at all these different levels." That opens up a lot of opportunities for a lot of

00:05:09.360 | good. It opens up a lot of opportunities for a lot more people to get involved in advocacy. That's

00:05:13.600 | all great. But as with all things that are new, there are dangers. And I think this is the danger

00:05:19.600 | here is that if you're 23 and you jump past all those lower scopes of community so that you can

00:05:25.040 | weigh in on Putin, that is going to be an unstable foundation for trying to give back and trying to

00:05:32.640 | serve. On the other hand, if you have the patience and empathy and experience of serving your family,

00:05:37.600 | serving your friends, serving your local community, and then on top of that, can really get involved

00:05:42.320 | in something that's larger scale, something that you would have had a hard time being involved in

00:05:46.320 | in a pre-internet world, that involvement is going to be, I think, not only much more successful,

00:05:50.160 | but also more meaningful for you. You're going to be able to extract more out of it. You're going

00:05:54.400 | to be able to approach it with more of a moral maturity. So I don't mean to turn my answer here

00:06:00.400 | into a rant, because basically all of this stuff is good. No one is going to be upset at anyone for

00:06:05.840 | doing giving back to the community at any scale. And it's better to be doing some of that than

00:06:09.680 | none of that like so many do. But that tends to be my advice. Don't forget the old fashioned human

00:06:14.640 | compatible, I can see you, look you in the eye. I am servicing and serving you, even though

00:06:20.480 | sometimes you say things that annoy me and we don't belong to exactly the same tight ideological,

00:06:26.480 | geographically sorted tribe. Like, yeah, my neighbor down the street is odd as far as I'm

00:06:31.840 | concerned in this way, but you know what, I'm still helping them because they're going through

00:06:35.360 | a hard time. I think it's really, really important. And we should not allow the easy access we have

00:06:40.720 | to the sort of low friction advocacy that's on unlimited scale. Don't let that get in the way

00:06:47.200 | of the harder local eye to eye community service. Do them both start with the local,

00:06:52.880 | but then also move on to the global. That would be the recipe I'd recommend.

Can I Live a Deep Life When Only Focusing on My Local Community?

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