Introducing: Our Great Communal Mess

The place where we dig into all the reasons why community sucks and all the reasons why we should do it anyway.

For years, we've been maniacally focused on a single premise: Relationships are key to our wellbeing. That’s true at the level of individuals (hi, mental health), and at the level of societies (hi, functioning democracy). We will surely talk about why.

But that's not our focus here. Our focus will be on all the things that make being in relationship hard, and clunky and sometimes intolerable. It will be on what to do with the people you cannot erase, and why you shouldn't try to, and the steps you can take to muddle through with a little less scar tissue. It will be on what happens after the feel-good story: when things inevitably suck again, and how to move through it, so that — with any luck — you can get to another feel-good moment. We will not brush off disappointments, or frustrations, or treat the most headache-laden work as an afterthought.

Too often, we treat friction as a system-glitch: something that we can opt out of if only we surround ourselves with the right people; something that, with the right tools, we can pre-empt, or control for. The problem isn't friction; it's what we do with it.

Read on for our opening volley. (This one’s from founder & ED Lennon Flowers, but you can expect posts from all of our team over time.) We hope you'll subscribe.

Welcome reader. Don't leave your mess at the door.

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Don’t Fear the Friction

Credit: Avigail Schotz & 1417

It’s Sunday morning. I’ve just gotten my 11-month-old to sleep and for the next 12 minutes, my three-old-year will mercifully occupy himself. I pick up an untouched stack of New Yorkers, curious whether I still possess the attention span to absorb more than a paragraph or two. I flip to an article on AI companionship, and what we gain and what we lose when we treat it as a tool for curing loneliness. It explores what’s becoming familiar terrain: the rise of Chatbot therapists and AI-generated crisis response, the instant validation that comes of relaying your sorrows to ChatGPT.

In the last day, my husband and I have barely said a word to one another, as we both do battle with a low-grade depression that flares when under-slept and over-spent. I’m preparing for a convo with someone important in my life, for which I am searching for a better ask than, “stop being the way you are.”

I think of all the pitfalls that attend even our most intimate relationships: the stumbling blocks of awkward silences or rapid subject changes or furrowed brows, the conflicts that simmer in silence, the tendency to fill in gaps in information with false assumptions. AI offers us the feeling of being understood, and better yet, affirmed. It doesn’t tell us that our perspective is but one, or ask us to consider our situation through another lens, or name its own hurts when we name ours.

In the contest between relationships with humans and relationships with bots, there is no doubt that companionship with one is easier than the other. That’s the problem.

Long before ChatGPT arrived on scene, Sherry Turkle at MIT pointed out the link between what was then an emerging loneliness crisis and the ways we’ve outsourced the role of being human to sociable robots. Since then, the evidence has only grown: Our attachment to frictionless, one-directional relationships with chatbot therapists and AI coaches erodes our mental and social health.

Our pal David Jay put out a terrific piece recently, which included a round-up of studies that point to that effect. The good news, he says? Humans are better at being human than bots are at mimicking them. Don’t fret, he reassures: AI is a long (long) way off from being able to mimic our ability to respond to social cues.

To demonstrate, he points out that it’s one thing to beat a human at chess; it’s quite another to teach a child to love chess. The latter requires a deep knowing of the kid at hand, and the ability to think predictively about particular relationships amidst a sea of complicating factors. “This ability to create the conditions for positive emergent outcomes in our relationships is one of our greatest cognitive superpowers.” Strong concur.

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For the last 15 years, my work has hinged on a single premise: Relationships are key to our wellbeing. That’s true at the level of individuals (hi, mental health), and at the level of societies (hi, pluralistic democracy). You can expect to read a lot about why in the posts to come.

But here’s the rub: Relationships are also hard, and clunky, and bound to disappoint. If we’re not honest about that fact, then anytime they go awry, we’re apt to think it’s our fault – that there’s something wrong with us. Or else we point fingers – there’s something wrong with them. We retreat. We spend more time in front of screens than with other people. We begin to conflate positivity with health, coding positive affirmation as good, conflict as bad. Our social anxiety increases. In fight or flight mode, we become primed to read everything as harm. We struggle to differentiate harm from discomfort, and become highly suspicious of any perceived slight. We turn to the friction-free safety of a chatbot. We retreat further.

We tend to think of the problem of social disconnection (if we think of it at all) as a problem of "those groups" "out there." It isn’t.

Think of a relationship in your own life that dissolved in the face of conflict.

Think of a project that’s been stymied because of a relational rupture. (Someone missed a deadline. No one communicated the impact, but everyone was frustrated. People began to avoid or cancel meetings, and the tension grew. Or: One person got credit or blame. Where there was once camaraderie, there was now resentment. Energy waned. Or, or, or.)

Think of a moment you've struggled to move a connection from something that felt transactional into something that felt transformative.

Think of (almost) every room you've ever walked into: the scan for something or someone familiar, the almost instantaneous, unconscious assessment of which parts of you will be welcome here and which won't, the knowledge that your belonging is contingent on the performance of something.

There is no such thing as a relationship without friction. If we fear friction, we will fear each other.

The problem is not friction itself; it’s what we do with it. Do we pretend it isn’t there? Do we attempt to eject and erase it? Do we panic and escape from it? Do we inflame it, looking for the perfect score? Do we point fingers or spiral into shame, refusing responsibility? Do we sanitize it, settling for the blandest admonishments, or choose to be performatively agreeable?

Or do we check our understanding, choosing to examine and correct our misperceptions (both our own, and others')? Do we pause long enough to appreciate the things we couldn't see: the human who was having a shitty day, the person whose invisible identities and stories of struggle mirror, and diverge from, our own? Do we offer explanation rather than excuse, and are we willing to receive the same? Do we choose to own what's ours?

Now think of a moment someone surprised you with their response, revealing a capacity you didn't know they had.

Think of a relationship with a partner or a friend who stood by you at your most fragile or frustrated.

Think of someone with whom you shared something you mostly keep under lock and key, and were met with the words, "me, too."

Think of a relationship or a project in which a moment of disagreement or conflict threatened to derail it, and instead strengthened it.

The following day, the half-finished New Yorker article still sitting on the side table, my husband named for the first time what had been bothering him. It wasn't the thing I expected him to say, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that that was what was lurking beneath the heavy silences of our preceding day. But it made perfect sense. I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed mine back.

That conversation that could have gone so terribly wrong? It ended up being hugely helpful: allowing us both to name the moments we'd missed each other and why, and to correct some of the assumptions we'd been carrying since. We remembered we loved each other, and more importantly, we remembered why.

Friction can be every bit as generative as it can be destructive. We’ve consistently found that the subjects and experiences that leave us feeling most alone can lead to some of our most powerful conversations and relationships.

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Our work at Trust Labs is about helping people to get in and stay in relationship – especially when it’s hard. Our premise is simple: If we’re to take community seriously, we have to take seriously the things that make it suck.

This space is dedicated to that wrestling: to excavating the paradoxes that make relational work so challenging. Like how about the fact that honest reflections and expressions of vulnerability are the means by which we build trust and come to see ourselves and each other more fully – yet it requires trust to reflect honestly and express vulnerability. Or to use an example that’s currently in vogue: Sure, shared action is a path to building trust – but what happens when mistrust interrupts our pursuit of a common goal? As every student who’s ever worked on a group project knows, misunderstanding and resentment can quickly derail both project and trust along the way.

We promise to avoid cheap takes. Ditto esoteric debates, or the kind of lofty rhetoric that sounds nice, but is wildly out of touch with messy human realities. We’ll do our best to talk openly about our own Achilles’ heels, and the costs that came of hard-won lessons, and the things we continue to struggle with, personally and organizationally.

Some of what we'll talk about here will be practical, pertaining to the most common pitfalls of relational practice: how to ask better questions — the difference between those meant to satiate your own curiosity and those that open a conversation; the concept of “non-defensive defense,” and how to acknowledge critique or negative feedback — especially the kind you disagree with it — without falling on your own sword; what to do when someone says something inadvertently harmful, without shaming the person or derailing a group. We may even touch on the mundane, because haven't you noticed how things tend to die in details?

A lot of what we'll talk about will focus on getting to the root of entrenched resistance: How do you figure out what’s really going on here? When should you choose to stay in the arena and when is it time to let go? How do you increase your own and others’ capacity for heat, and when is the goal to turn down the heat and how?

We’ll share stories and case studies and mine our own experiences for data. We’ll draw on familiar (and less familiar) leadership tools and frameworks, and when we don’t know something, we’ll tap someone who does.

Not everything has a happy ending, of course. Sometimes, being in community means looking head-on at a person we don't like, and who doesn't like us, and accepting that we cannot debate them into feeling differently, or ask them to see a part of us that they refuse to see. It asks us to hold all of that discomfort and to choose to neither shrink nor explode, knowing you cannot erase what you do not like. Sometimes it requires sitting in, and staying in, the suck. So naturally, we’ll talk a lot about that, too.

But to go back to David’s point: Over millennia, we’ve honed the emotional and cognitive skills to live and work effectively together. We believe we humans have superpowers that bots do not.

Most of the time, we can choose to muddle through the frictions and forces that have us stuck, coming out on the other side bumped and scratched, but tested, and more connected.

Here’s to muddling through, together.

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If you want to understand more about what we do, why we do it, and how we arrived here, click here. If you’re interested in potentially working with us – perhaps you’ve got a source of conflict or rupture that’s got you stuck, or a shared pain-point you wish to tend, or a gathering where you’re hoping to spark the kind of conversation and connections that people will remember long after they leave the room – click here.

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Author: Lennon Flowers (bio)