What if it's not a small business?
Decommodifying our path to other people
✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG! I am so glad you are here. Sharing this space with you has been one of the best parts of my year. Truly. ✨
Our loneliness is becoming a pain point to solve for! New products and entire weird startups are being created right now to give us a chance to pay our way out of our isolation!
As I wrote about last time, the saddest consequence of all this is that we fall out of practice with the skills, bravery, and occasional inconvenience it takes to build community for free.
This reminded me of an older essay I wrote that I’m re-running here today; it touches on our own personal impulses to productize and paywall everything. Unfortunately there is a tiny entrepreneur inside each of us (mine smokes a cigar and it smells disgusting), fed on stories of virality and scale and making passions into incomes.
While every small business idea won’t necessarily build community, I do like fantasizing about the alternate timeline where making it free does.
So yes! Let’s make this face when the next great friendship product is pushed on us; but let’s also occasionally make that same face at ourselves. Building a world where friendship and community is a little easier to come by can start at the smallest, most personal scale of our own silly little projects.
This essay was originally shared in my old friends newsletter; if you’ve already read it, you may excuse yourself now and remember that I love you
What if every time you heard a good idea you battled the primal urge to say “you should make a business out of that”? What if instead, we let them just exist, or float away never to be realized, orrrrrr…
Try the thought experiment I’ve been trying recently: morph the good idea into something small, something that generates no revenue but maybe saves people money, something only 30 people will see and love and that’s it, something that exists for 6 months and stops, something that does not scale, something that has no website, that takes many people giving small amounts of time to maintain, that isn’t aesthetically cute but is beautifully functional, something you don’t attach your name to at all?
“That we live as individuals makes us extremely weak. Extremely weak in terms of being able to create a good life. Sure, if we have enough privilege, we can compensate for that weakness by buying and buying and buying things and relationships and services, but it doesn’t actually give us rootedness, care, community, wholeness, reverence for life — all the things that make for a real experience of aliveness and flow.”
- miki kashtan in a podcast episode that changed my life
Some examples of what I mean:
A dear pal of mine made a chili dog for themselves and pointed out the absurdity of buying hot dog buns in a pack: what if you just want one? What if you don’t want to commit to eating 8 hot dogs by yourself in a week?
We riffed on this challenge until we came up with an idea that could be a business but is way funnier as not one: hacking the Little Free Library model to share chili dog ingredients with anyone who needs them on your block, throughout the week, all of the time!
When I talk about my Power Prance dance class that I co-founded with Jamie, I used to feel guilt that it wasn’t bigger, hadn’t gone beyond Santa Cruz, ever had a website, etc. But now I feel deep gratitude for what it was: a small, hilarious movement for a few dozen people over the course of half a year. (It’s also worth noting that it never felt overwhelming to make, or like it burnt me out – it’s worth a ponder about the connection between pushing everything to be HUGE and the personal toll it takes on us!)
Another friend struggled with finding the right saddle for their bike and we talked about how expensive and time consuming finding the right one can be. My first thought: make it a business! Rent saddles to people!
A wiser thought: what if we crowdfunded enough in our co-op to buy a range of saddles to make available for trial and error and eventual purchase?!
In many ways this might just be about making everything a library.
This is about dreaming bigger, it’s about mutual aid supporting basic needs and then some, it’s about taking solutions into your own hands and releasing the secret wish of infinite scale.
Little ~provocations~ like this give me hope – or as adrienne maree brown writes when talking about science fiction (which this thinking always feels like in a way), it’s “where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behavior”
What is your next thing if not a small business?
🇵🇸 Ceasefire Now. Ceasefire Now. Ceasefire Now. Call your reps, every day. Posters and stickers for printing. More resources for action here and here.
As an American living in Scotland, it’s been such a relief to see that there are English-speaking places where social good is put ahead of profit over and over again: all Scottish colleges are free, free universal healthcare, and the legal right to walk and even camp overnight anywhere, including all over privately owned land.
All just because it’s good for people.
It’s far from perfect, but it’s helped deprogram me from ruthlessly consumerist ways of being. Being ill for a long time and becoming fairly poor also helped that process because when you can’t buy solutions, you focus on the root causes.
In fact, I once asked a Scot why they’re so progressive (vs our next door neighbours in England) and he said, “Because we haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be poor.”
I really appreciate your writing this because sometimes I feel alone in thinking about this stuff...
I snorted a little snort at the little free chili dog library! 😹 Thank you- I love this.