Go Count Your People
This past Father's Day I took my wife to see Jack Johnson, who is, against all odds and all algorithms, still touring.
We navigated our way past full lot upon full lot until we found our spot.
We followed the herd through the gates.
By the time he ambled on stage - no pyrotechnics, no dancers, just a man and a guitar - the whole arena had become one animal, breathing in time.
...
I looked around and noticed something: half that crowd hadn't been born when Jack Johnson got famous.
They'd shown up anyway. Not because some app told them to, but for the same reason their parents did twenty years back: a fellow being completely, unhurried himself, singing about surf, love, family and simplicity in a way no machine ever could and no machine ever will.
We've been starving ourselves of it, I think, and only just now noticing the hunger.
Funny enough, it feels like the kids who grew up inside the screen are starting to turn their backs on it ... maybe, maybe they're even leading the charge against "the machine".
I don't expect the screens to go anywhere, and I don't think they should. But whatever the new machines turn out to be capable of, and they will surprise us yet, they cannot sit across a table and break bread with you. They cannot show up at your door at midnight. They cannot catch a sunrise on the beach with you.
Belonging was never meant to be outsourced. It still isn't.
...
I learned the flip side of this lesson somewhere far less glamorous than an arena: a CrossFit gym.
We joined a couple months back, loved it at first, and slowly started to wonder ...
The owner was kind, the space spotless, the man knew his sport cold. But he was more devoted to capital-C CrossFit than to the people walking through his door.
He's closing next month. Never hit the membership numbers he'd hoped for.
That's hard to watch. Call it win or learn. He went for it, which is more than most of us ever do, and taught the rest of us something about business and belonging on the way out.
Community isn't a monologue. It's not "come look at what I love." It's "let's find out, together, what we love."
You can hold all the passion in the world for veganism, and a steakhouse still won't be your audience.
A man who won't ask his room what it needs or meet it where it is will not have a room much longer.
Here's what I keep landing on: you do not find yourself by staring harder into a mirror. You find yourself in the people across the table. The ones whose names you know, whose troubles you'd drop everything for, who'd do the same for you.
Your passions, your causes, your carefully built name, are just decoration until somebody else is standing in the room with you.
So go count your people. Not your followers. Your people.
The ones you'd break bread with on a Tuesday for no reason at all, and defend without being asked twice.
If you can't count them on one hand, that's not a tragedy. That's just homework.
Shut the laptop. Lock the phone.
Make room. Walk out the door.
Your people aren't going to come find you. Go find them.