Deep conversation with open-minded people

The antidote to doom-scrolling and hunting for dopamine

Over the years, it’s become clear to me that people are life’s most valuable asset. Not big bank accounts, plush surroundings, or even experiences like travel, though those are all worthy goals. 

As we become more absorbed by our devices, more individualized and alienated from one another, focused on individual achievement and our personal wishlists, we risk losing our most precious resource—our network.

Hopefully you don’t need reminding, but our connection to people is ultimately what gives us life. They make living fun and interesting. People lift us up when nothing else can. People make us laugh, give us space to share and be vulnerable, and to show love and affection. Surely attachments also come with loss and heartbreak. But the positives outweigh the negatives tenfold.

This past Thanksgiving, I invited two close friends (Kathryn and Jeremiah) over for a potluck. I made lasagna and we talked. No TV, just a light playlist and a house full of love. We commiserated over the challenges of dating in LA—both for gay men and straight women. We played We’re Not Really Strangers, which provides conversational prompts like “who looks up to you?,” “what compliment do you love to receive,” and “what do you have good taste in?”

Los Feliz theater

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No one is a stranger, really. All humans share similar source DNA, and from the broader perspective of alien life, we probably all look and behave more or less the same too.

The next day, Kathryn forwarded a meme that read: “deep conversation with open minded people is such an underrated luxury.” I agree, though I believe it shouldn’t be a luxury, but a human right.

Everyone should have someone, ideally several people, whom they can trust to share intimate details, openly ask questions, and engage in respectful debate. Today, the word “debate” carries with it a sort of adversarial, win or lose connotation. But debates don’t need to be won or lost. Rather, they provide a forum for sharing, listening, and considering varying facets of an issue. 

For too long we’ve let the competitive nature of our economics and our politics turn us against each other—me vs. my neighbor, Americans vs. immigrants, religions against other religions. They’ve made us suspicious of one another rather than trusting that we are all fundamentally good and after the same basic thing: more happiness, less suffering. 

It’s my firm conviction that what the world needs is new ideas and new ventures that help people connect. In the words of Utopia for Realists’ Rutger Bregman, the world needs new ways of creating wealth rather than new ways to shift it around. 

I never travel without a visit to the local fire station—notice the green lights Austin’s Fire Department is now using on its apparatus

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Now that human civilization has reached peak “good life” in many industrialized nations, the biggest thing left to do is learn how to work all together, how to see the world without boundaries, and to connect with each other again. 

I realize that our world is still full of basic problems like poverty and xenophobia, but in my mind, these issues are perpetuated by the border walls we keep, literally or figuratively, between and among ourselves.

I don’t have the answer. Sometimes I wonder if attempting to enact any substantive egalitarian change on the world, outside of deeper, uglier capitalism, is a game for losers.

On the other hand, it all starts with evenings like the one I had with my friends, sharing and listening, thinking to myself: This is way better than online shopping and doom scrolling.