Sensemaking, community, and purpose: Two frameworks, and many more
I have thought and written often about how education should and must change to respond to these times we’re living in (and, even more importantly, meta-change so that educational systems can during any times change according to the times).
Variously called a “time between worlds” (Stein), a “time of perils” (Ord), or even “the end of our world” (Sherrell), this Anthropocene era is full of all manner of strife and change, and our educational systems are implicated as both causes and as potential sources of hope. We too often put too much on the shoulders of our young by focusing on education as a solution, though, outsourcing the burden of change to those with the least amount of immediate agency to enact it.
When we adults see a world of poly- and meta-crises and do not have frameworks to help us make sense of our roles or obligations in this context, where do we turn? I sense among my own generation (Millennials) — and in others, in related ways — a swelling need and demand for tools, frameworks, and communities to make sense of the present moment and our roles within it.
Unlike with children in a public education system, we adults do not have an obvious context in which this sensemaking and place-finding can occur. Running clubs, bar scenes, sports fandom, farmer markets, or the like are not sufficient replacements for the religious and cultural institutions that once, in admittedly flawed and incomplete ways, provided three key services for affiliates:
- A shared understanding of the source of truth or the nature of reality
- A sense of community
- A source of individual, morally coherent purpose
New Communities
Many new candidate movements are emerging to address some or all of these needs. Proponents of particular suites of ideas or followers of certain thought-leaders have coalesced into communities that have some shared view about the world as it is and/or about the world as it could and should be. Ideas like Meaning 3.0, GameB, Deep Ecology, or regenerative communities all to varying degrees problematize our times in a way that is relatable and then propose a set of both personal and political solutions towards which one can strive and be a part.
I have been involved in the last couple years with two communities/frameworks in particular: The first — effective altruism — I have already described in detail, so here I will reference it primarily in summary and in service of contrast. The second, which I’ll call “Resilience & Acceptance”, is a specific climate-focused community with roots in upstate New York, but I believe a reasonable proxy for other collapse-awareness/eco-spiritual movements elsewhere.
Below I describe these worldviews and consider how we might (and, until a major cultural update occurs, must) stitch together communities like these to meet our sensemaking, community, and purpose needs, but I first must acknowledge the default alternative to bothering with any of this in the first place.
The Default
Despite the rise of these subcultures, it is seemingly much more common for us adults to elect paths of avoidance or distraction instead. This might look like cynical inaction, mental gymnastics to ignore problems or absolve ourselves from responsibility for their solutions, or accepting business-as-usual (socially, politically, economically, emotionally…) and just enjoying what we can as we let the dissonance and spiritual degradation — not to mention the suffering of others and risks to us all — pile up.
I see these responses not as failure modes only some of us will succumb to or that we need to constantly guard against at all costs, but as inevitable situations we will each regularly wake up to find ourselves in. Like the classic mediation cue to notice when you realize you’ve been thinking (because all but the most enlightened of us will) and then non-judgmentally come back to the breath, noticing our failures to seek truth, community, and purpose are moments of clarity and contrast that can reinvigorate our better efforts.
New ideas and new communities are therefore not only defenses against these moments of im- or a-morality, but structures we can create to more quickly snap us back to our senses as the ethical people we hope to be.
Frameworks in Action
I now sketch out in more detail two specific alternatives I have found to the default neglect of sensemaking, community, and purpose that are, I hope, at least somewhat illustrative as a reference class for other such communities.
My first extended experiences with both Effective Altruism and Resilience & Acceptance conveniently were quite similar in format: weekly online discussion groups where participants would read, watch, or listen to content on their own and then come together on Zoom to discuss and reflect. The weekly topic titles for each of these courses paint a useful picture of what the communities aim to offer to potential “members”, though in neither case does that term confer any official distinction:
To add a bit more color to the picture and to linger for a moment on the differences between these frameworks, here is my own stereotype-strewn caricature of each community:
Despite their obvious differences in substance and style, the similarities in structure are a clear response to what it is we are all seeking:
- Frameworks and stories that help make sense of the world?
Check.
2. A community to discuss and debate with, and feel seen and heard by?
Check again.
3. Guidelines for what constitutes good living?
Sure does!
I don’t believe either of these communities, nor the others like them, has done all of this “right” or can alone satisfy these three human needs for dealing with troubling (or any!) times. This then leaves us with two options:
- Convince ourselves that some specific worldview is in fact thorough enough to be all we need, or close enough to fully buy in anyways.
- Accept that we need a patchwork quilt solution of sensemaking lenses, nourishing communities, and sources of passion.
From SBF to XR self-immolators, the extremes of acting (however imperfectly) on worldviews like these in totality are clearly fraught, so we might be stuck with #2.
But perhaps this is not so bad! Maintaining a diverse portfolio of worldviews, communities, and meaning systems is compatible with genuine discretion and conviction, and the tensions that emerge among our various intellectual, communal, and moral endeavors might be exactly what we need for societal and personal progress.
This buffet of options for finding what we need in these times of uncertainty and change is essential even while we must be wary of a social media/AI-fueled proliferation of worldviews and communities that slowly strip away any common ground. We can nonetheless seek to piece together a durable fabric to support us until more universal understandings of our predicaments, promise, and purpose emerge.
