# Who Would Come Looking ![[resources/images/20160222-who-would-come-looking.jpg]] <iframe width="100%" height="20" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/soundcloud%253Atracks%253A2430158187&color=%23ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true"></iframe><div style="font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc;line-break: anywhere;word-break: normal;overflow: hidden;white-space: nowrap;text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif;font-weight: 100;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/bryantmcgill" title="Bryant McGill" target="_blank" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;">Bryant McGill</a> · <a href="https://soundcloud.com/bryantmcgill/who-would-come-looking" title="Who Would Come Looking" target="_blank" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;">Who Would Come Looking</a></div> [[livestreams/Community as a Safety Net and the Freedom to Stop Rushing - Livestream|Livestream]] | [[collections/Livestreams Collection|Collection]] | [[collections/Livestream Lessons|Lessons]] | [[collections/Simple Reminders|Reminders]] | [[livestreams/comments/Community as a Safety Net and the Freedom to Stop Rushing - Comments|6,830 Comments]] *From the livestream broadcast recorded February 22, 2016, in Austin, Texas.* Here is the question, and I want you to answer it before you read anything else. If you went quiet for three days — no posts, no replies, nothing — who would come looking? Not who would notice eventually. Not who would see it a week later and send something. Who would get in a car. Most people, asked that honestly, arrive at a number that frightens them, and the number is not a measure of how likable they are. It is a measure of infrastructure, and almost nobody has been told that the infrastructure was something they were supposed to be building this whole time. I have spent a great deal of effort telling people how to think more clearly, hold a line, endure a bad stretch, and leave a situation that is eating them. Every one of those instructions has a silent precondition sitting underneath it, which is that there is somewhere to land. Hold a boundary and the other party escalates — then what. Leave the job, leave the house, leave the person — go where. Endure the worst year of your life — on whose couch. Strip the landing place out and the advice becomes decoration, which is why so much of it fails for the people who need it most, and why they conclude the failure was theirs. ## It Is the Safety Net of Humanity +Community and family are the backbone and the safety net of humanity, which is precisely why both are under sustained attack. A person embedded in a real group can absorb a shock that would otherwise end them — the lost job becomes a hard season instead of a collapse, the breakup becomes grief instead of homelessness, the diagnosis becomes a logistics problem with eleven people solving it. Remove the net and nothing about the shock changes, while everything about the outcome does. {{Community and family are the safety net of humanity, which is the reason they are the most attacked structures in the world.}} +What makes a real group unassailable is arithmetic rather than virtue. No critic can undermine it, no cynic or gossiper or doubt-whisperer has any power over it whatsoever, because **you cannot invalidate the feelings of thousands of people and you cannot invalidate hundreds of friendships**. One hostile voice can discredit an argument, a reputation, or a single relationship. It cannot discredit a hundred people who love each other, who are going into each other's homes, bringing their children, making things together, and forming attachments that exist independently of anybody's opinion about them. {{A single hostile voice can discredit an argument and cannot discredit a hundred friendships, which is why a real community is the one structure that cannot be argued away.}} > [!info] What the science says > The claim that social connection is a survival variable rather than a lifestyle preference is one of the better-evidenced findings in population health. > > **Relationship quantity and quality predict mortality.** Holt-Lunstad and colleagues' 2010 meta-analysis across 148 studies and more than 300,000 participants found people with stronger social relationships had substantially greater odds of survival over follow-up, with effect sizes comparable to established risk factors. Their later work placed social isolation and loneliness alongside those risks in magnitude. > > **Support buffers the stress response itself.** The social-support buffering literature finds that perceived availability of support moderates the physiological consequences of stressors — the same event produces a smaller cardiovascular and neuroendocrine response in someone who believes help is available. The net works partly by changing what the body does when something goes wrong. > > **Loneliness and isolation are separable, and both matter.** Loneliness is the felt discrepancy between desired and actual connection; isolation is the objective absence of contact. A person can be isolated without feeling lonely and lonely in a crowded house, and the health literature finds independent contributions from each, which is why the fix has to be structural rather than only emotional. > > **Repeated low-stakes contact builds attachment.** Proximity and repeated exposure reliably increase liking, and self-disclosure that escalates gradually and reciprocally accelerates closeness, as Aron's work on sustained reciprocal questioning demonstrated. Showing up repeatedly is not a poor substitute for chemistry; it is the documented mechanism. > > **Weak ties carry opportunity.** Granovetter's work established that the contacts delivering job information are frequently acquaintances rather than close friends, because distant ties reach networks a person's intimates do not. A thin, wide layer of acquaintance has material economic value distinct from the thick layer that carries you emotionally. > > **The honest limit.** None of this licenses blaming an isolated person for their isolation. Capacity to build and maintain relationships is shaped by circumstance, health, geography, money, schedule and history, and a great deal of modern isolation was engineered into the environment rather than chosen by the people living in it. ## Let It Fall Apart in a State of Calm For someone who is already at the limit, the instruction to go build a community is useless, because building anything requires surplus and they have none. So before any of that, there is a triage sequence I have taught for years, and the order matters because people reach for the last step first. +The first move under overload is scheduling and strategy — the ordinary unglamorous work of sequencing what has to happen and when. When scheduling cannot absorb the load, the second move is rearrangement: changing major factors, dropping the class, cutting the activity, removing the standing commitment that no longer earns its place. And when rearrangement is also insufficient, the third move is detachment, which is close to a form of deliberate recklessness — the decision to stop caring whether certain things hold together. {{Overload has an order of operations: schedule it, then rearrange it, and when neither is enough, stop holding what you were never obliged to hold.}} The step that reframes everything for a person coming apart is the last one, and it needs saying plainly. If something is going to fall apart, let it fall apart in a state of calm instead of a state of distress. The outcome is frequently identical either way; what differs is the condition of the person standing in the wreckage afterward, and that difference compounds. The more hurried and panicked anyone is, the more mistakes they make, the higher their cortisol runs, the less they sleep — and the whole thing turns into a cycle of self-destruction driven not by the original problem but by the manner of responding to it. +Some things need to fall apart, and a person may be holding together exactly what ought to be allowed to come down. That sentence is the one I would most want handed to anybody currently describing themselves as falling apart at the seams, because it reframes the entire experience: the disintegration may be accurate rather than catastrophic, a structure that stopped working being disassembled by a reality that has noticed. The seam was always going to give. {{The feeling of falling apart is sometimes the accurate disassembly of something that should never have been held together this long.}} ## You Have to Show Up So the net gets built, and here is where almost every version of this advice goes wrong. People are told to find their tribe, which describes belonging as something discovered — a matter of locating the right room full of the right people who will recognize them on sight. That instruction fails reliably, and it fails worst for the people who need it most, because it presumes a charm and an energy that somebody in trouble does not have. +Belonging is constructed by attendance rather than discovered by compatibility, which is why the whole of the instruction is: you have to show up. Show up, and show up again, and show up sweet — not charming, not interesting, not healed, not with anything to offer beyond presence. The mechanism is repetition rather than chemistry: proximity and repeated low-stakes contact are what actually produce attachment, which means the person who keeps turning up to the unremarkable weekly thing is building something the person waiting to feel ready never gets. {{Belonging is built by attendance rather than found by compatibility, which is why the only real instruction is to show up, and then show up again.}} It is best if it takes place in person, and I want to be unfashionable about that. Something is transmitted across a table that is not transmitted through a screen — the face-to-face time with people who are going somewhere, the unplanned part of the conversation, the fact that a body in a room can be handed a casserole or a ride or a place to sleep. Online is where you find them. In person is where the net is actually woven, and a net that has never been in the same room has never been stress-tested. +Raw is the new slick, and that is permission rather than aesthetics. The barrier stopping most isolated people from walking into anything is the belief that they have to arrive polished — the slick version, the photo-shoot version, the one with the good answer to how they have been. Nobody owes a room that performance. A person can turn up tired, unimpressive, with a bad month behind them and nothing to contribute, and be exactly as welcome, because the unpolished version is the one that gives everybody else permission to stop performing too. {{Arriving unpolished is a gift to the room rather than a failure of it, because the first person who stops performing is the one who lets everyone else stop.}} ## What Was Actually Built, and How I want to be specific about this rather than inspirational, because I did not theorize about community — I built one, and the construction was deliberate in a way worth knowing. The Royal Society was designed using the same social-psychology concepts and the same techniques of influence that are ordinarily pointed at people to sell them things, and it was pointed the other way on purpose. A bar for conduct, a name that created an expectation people then grew into, local chapters in cities around the world, chapter presidents, meetups where the whole agenda was that people showed up and talked to each other. A blank slate, filled by attendance. And the design had a target, because the loneliness it was built against was itself designed. Every February the machinery runs an annual demonstration of the method — the campaign that puts enormous pressure on lonely people and underscores a person's loneliness precisely in order to sell into it, calling all broken and lonely hearts and then charging them for the remedy. That is engineered isolation with a price tag attached, and the counter-operation is not a better feeling. It is a structure: a group that exists whether or not anybody is buying, in which people belong to one another as a plain matter of fact. ## Who Is Expensive and Who Is Cheap There is a harder argument underneath all of this that I want to put at the end rather than the beginning, because it is the one that will still be true when the warmth wears off. Isolation is not merely painful. It is the precondition of almost every form of harm that happens to people. Predation is an accounting behavior that appears wherever its price falls, and the single most reliable way to lower the cost of harming someone is to leave them with nobody — no witnesses, no coalition, no retaliation, nowhere to go, no second account of what happened. Read any situation in which a person was systematically exploited and you will find isolation either as a precondition or as the first thing the exploiter produced. The chimpanzee patrol attacks at eight to one because eight to one is cheap, and the only reason the arithmetic ever runs the other way is that somebody raised the cost. +A person with people is expensive and a person alone is affordable, which makes a coalition defensive infrastructure rather than a comfort. Every friendship is a witness, a potential retaliation, an alternative place to live, a second opinion about what is happening, and a reduction in the monopoly any single party holds over somebody's needs. That is why the structure is attacked, why atomization is profitable, and why the advice to simply be strong on your own is the most expensive advice anyone ever follows. {{A person with people is expensive and a person alone is affordable, which is why building a coalition is the cheapest defense available and the one almost nobody schedules.}} So the question at the top is not sentimental. It is an audit. If nobody would come looking, that is not a verdict on your worth and it is not permanent — it is an unbuilt structure, and it gets built the same dull way everything gets built, by showing up repeatedly to something ordinary, in person, unpolished, before you need it. Keep it simple, because it is simple. Can we love one another. Can we just be friends. --- [[about/About Bryant McGill|Bryant McGill]] is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, systems architect, technologist, and strategic advisor, as well as a Congressionally Recognized Ambassador of Goodwill and United Nations–appointed Global Champion. His work spans naval intelligence systems, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and civilizational governance architecture. His forward analysis on U.S.–Israel Pax Silica frameworks has appeared in Jewish/Jerusalem News Syndicate (JNS). --- ## Related blogs - [[blog/20190112 - Cut the Rope|Cut the Rope]]: what leaving requires, and why it is impossible without somewhere to land. - [[blog/20240817 - Becoming Too Expensive to Harm|Becoming Too Expensive to Harm]]: the pricing argument this piece applies to coalition rather than to posture. - [[blog/20181027 - Don't Give Up All the Way|Don't Give Up All the Way]]: the reduced setting, and who holds the work while it runs there. ## Related Livestream Lessons **Directly related.** These broadcasts supplied the material cited in this piece and are documented with timestamps in the source notes below. - [[livestreams/Community as a Safety Net and the Freedom to Stop Rushing - Livestream#The Safety Net of Humanity|The Safety Net of Humanity]] *(Feb 22, 2016)*: the backbone that converts a catastrophe into a hard season, and why it is the most attacked structure there is. - [[livestreams/Community as a Safety Net and the Freedom to Stop Rushing - Livestream#You Cannot Invalidate a Hundred Friendships|You Cannot Invalidate a Hundred Friendships]] *(Feb 22, 2016)*: the arithmetic that makes a real group unassailable by any critic, cynic or gossiper. - [[livestreams/Community as a Safety Net and the Freedom to Stop Rushing - Livestream#The Order of Operations Under Overload|The Order of Operations Under Overload]] *(Feb 22, 2016)*: schedule it, rearrange it, and only then detach — in that order, because people reach for the last step first. - [[livestreams/Community as a Safety Net and the Freedom to Stop Rushing - Livestream#Let It Fall Apart in a State of Calm|Let It Fall Apart in a State of Calm]] *(Feb 22, 2016)*: identical outcomes with different survivors, and the self-destruction cycle driven by the manner of responding. - [[livestreams/Community as a Safety Net and the Freedom to Stop Rushing - Livestream#Some Things Need to Fall Apart|Some Things Need to Fall Apart]] *(Feb 22, 2016)*: holding together exactly what ought to be allowed to come down. - [[livestreams/Community, Agency, and the End of Passive Self-Help - Livestream#You Have to Show Up|You Have to Show Up]] *(Mar 3, 2016)*: attendance rather than compatibility as the mechanism, and showing up sweet with nothing to offer. - [[livestreams/Community, Agency, and the End of Passive Self-Help - Livestream#It Is Best If It Takes Place in Person|It Is Best If It Takes Place in Person]] *(Mar 3, 2016)*: what crosses a table that does not cross a screen, and why a net needs stress-testing. - [[livestreams/Community, Agency, and the End of Passive Self-Help - Livestream#Extending a Hand Is the Whole Entry Requirement|Extending a Hand Is the Whole Entry Requirement]] *(Mar 3, 2016)*: the low bar nobody believes is the actual bar. - [[livestreams/Bringing Social Media to Life Through Local Community - Livestream#A Blank Slate Where People Show Up and Talk|A Blank Slate Where People Show Up and Talk]] *(Jan 7, 2019)*: the minimum viable structure, and why an empty agenda is a feature. - [[livestreams/Bringing Social Media to Life Through Local Community - Livestream#Somebody Has to Start the Chapter|Somebody Has to Start the Chapter]] *(Jan 7, 2019)*: the asymmetry between waiting to be invited and convening the room yourself. - [[livestreams/Bringing Social Media to Life Through Local Community - Livestream#Face-to-Face Time With People Who Are Going Somewhere|Face-to-Face Time With People Who Are Going Somewhere]] *(Jan 7, 2019)*: proximity to trajectory as a resource distinct from friendship. - [[livestreams/Love, Social Design, and the Purpose of Community - Livestream#Engineered Loneliness Has a Price Tag Attached|Engineered Loneliness Has a Price Tag Attached]] *(Feb 14, 2016)*: the annual campaign that manufactures the ache in order to sell into it. - [[livestreams/Love, Social Design, and the Purpose of Community - Livestream#A Community Can Be Deliberately Engineered|A Community Can Be Deliberately Engineered]] *(Feb 14, 2016)*: the same influence techniques pointed the other way, on purpose. - [[livestreams/Raw Is the New Slick When Building Real Community With Integrity - Livestream#Raw Is the New Slick|Raw Is the New Slick]] *(Mar 15, 2016)*: arriving unpolished as permission for the room rather than a failure before it. - [[livestreams/Raw Is the New Slick When Building Real Community With Integrity - Livestream#The Polish Requirement Is the Barrier|The Polish Requirement Is the Barrier]] *(Mar 15, 2016)*: the performance people believe is the entry fee, and what it keeps out. ## Related topics - [[wiki/Social Capital|Social Capital]]: the asset this piece argues is a survival variable rather than a nicety. - [[wiki/Behavioral Pricing|Behavioral Pricing]]: behavior appearing where its price falls, applied to isolation. - [[wiki/Deterrence Pricing|Deterrence Pricing]]: what raises the cost of harming a person, and what lowers it. - [[wiki/Adversarial Resilience|Adversarial Resilience]]: holding a position against a party who is probing it. - [[wiki/Emotional Regulation|Emotional Regulation]]: the operations that make a calm disassembly possible. - [[wiki/Habituation|Habituation]]: diminishing response to a repeated input, and how an absent net stops being noticed. - [[wiki/Psychosomatic Feedback Loop|Psychosomatic Feedback Loop]]: the route by which isolation reaches the body. - [[wiki/Human Dignity|Human Dignity]]: the standing that makes asking for help something other than a humiliation. - [[wiki/Respect|Respect]]: the conduct that makes a group worth belonging to. - [[wiki/Cognitive Agency|Cognitive Agency]]: ownership of the account a person gives of their own isolation. - [[wiki/Introspection|Introspection]]: the audit the opening question actually requires. - [[wiki/Path Dependency|Path Dependency]]: why an unbuilt structure keeps being unbuilt. - [[wiki/Discipline|Discipline]]: the ordinary repetition that attendance turns out to be. > [!quote]- Broadcast source notes > **Primary broadcast: [[livestreams/Community as a Safety Net and the Freedom to Stop Rushing - Livestream|Community as a Safety Net and the Freedom to Stop Rushing]] (February 22, 2016).** Recorded in Austin and running an hour and twenty minutes, the broadcast moves from the community that had formed around the broadcasts into the practical question of what to do when a person is overloaded. > > 1. **11:00–11:47:** The unassailability argument. "No one can undermine it and no critic can harm it and no… cynical person or doubter or doubt whisperer or a gossiper or negative entity has any power over whatsoever. None, because you cannot invalidate the feelings of thousands of people. It's just impossible. It's impossible to invalidate the friendships. How do you invalidate hundreds of friendships?" Then the concrete picture — "if you have a hundred people that love each other and dozens of them are getting together and coming into each other's homes and they're bringing their children online and they're making videos with their children and they're forming friendships. You can't invalidate friendships. It's impossible." > 2. **11:47–12:12:** The thesis and the claim about attack. "That's the strength and the beauty of community, which by the way is one of the most under attack things in the world is community and family. So under attack because community and family is the strength. It's the backbone. **It is the safety net of humanity.** And that's why that is under attack more than anything." > 3. **12:12–12:43:** The response and the simplicity. "That's why the royals are coming in and coming together and saying no more, man. We are coming together and we are loving one another… It is so simple. Let me just tell you, we keep it simple… It's not complicated. It's like the simplicity of it is, it's just can we love one another? Can we just be friends?" > 4. **28:30–29:30:** Hurry as the enemy. The audience is asked how many are "running around in a hurry a lot," followed by the standard — "grace and ease is a part of the royal way and never hurry" — and the mechanism: "you have to resist getting into a situation where you are rushing and hurrying, because when we start rushing, we start slipping back into that fight or flight type of reactive" state. > 5. **30:00–30:35:** Detachment, named as defiance. "I think meditation can come into play. And also just defiance. This is a good area where defiant Brian can help you. It's almost a form of recklessness to say, I just don't care. I'm not going to let this situation cause me upset. I would just rather let it, if it's going to fall apart… **Let it fall apart in a state of calm instead of a state of distress**, do you understand? It's just not worth it." > 6. **30:40–31:06:** The reactivity arithmetic. "We have to learn how to approach things in a less reactive way. The less reactive we can be, the more effective we can be. The more panic and hurried we are, the more mistakes we're going to make. The more we're going to increase our cortisol levels, the less sleep we're going to get," until it "falls into a cycle and a pattern of self-destruction." > 7. **31:06–31:48:** The order of operations, given explicitly. "When you're losing control, when you're feeling hurried and rushed, it's a good time in that moment to try to A, use scheduling and strategy. If scheduling and strategy won't work, doing some rearrangements in your life, changing some major factors in your life, dropping classes, cutting out certain activities. If that doesn't work then you need to step into the kind of detachment phase of just not really caring if certain things fall apart. It's just not worth it. **Sometimes actually things need to fall apart and you may be actually holding things together that need to fall apart.**" Jenni adds the practical form: "sometimes you have to learn to say no, where maybe you would have always said yes to a certain person, or said yes to certain activities, or going out with friends." > > **Supporting broadcast: [[livestreams/Community, Agency, and the End of Passive Self-Help - Livestream|Community, Agency, and the End of Passive Self-Help]] (March 3, 2016).** Attendance as the mechanism. > > 8. **40:25:** The preference stated flatly — "it's best if it takes place in person." > 9. **1:11:38:** The entry requirement — "if we will just show up and extend our hand." > 10. **1:16:24–1:16:26:** The instruction, three times in a row. "You gotta show up. You've got to show up. You've got to show up and be sweet." > 11. **1:18:19 and 8:35:** The scale it had reached — "they're meeting up all over the world," and "we have a community that meets up." > > **Supporting broadcast: [[livestreams/Bringing Social Media to Life Through Local Community - Livestream|Bringing Social Media to Life Through Local Community]] (January 7, 2019).** The structure, concretely. > > 12. **9:20 and 10:35:** The build — "we have chapters in every major city around the world," and people "could stop in these royal meetups all around the world and we can have real" contact. > 13. **11:16–11:30:** The ask, put directly to the audience. "Who's willing to start a chapter in your town? Because we're going to be interviewing and looking for chapter presidents all over the world." > 14. **14:34–15:13:** What the room is for. "Imagine if you could go and you could meet with a group of people where you just get" together, with the value named as "the networking, the face-to-face time of meeting really with other positive-minded people who are wanting to do things in life." > 15. **15:53–16:03:** The joke and the design principle inside it. After someone raises the word cult — "if we had a meeting, you wouldn't make it a cult, would you?" — the actual description follows: "right now, it's a blank slate where people show up and they get to talk to each other." > > **Supporting broadcast: [[livestreams/Love, Social Design, and the Purpose of Community - Livestream|Love, Social Design, and the Purpose of Community]] (February 14, 2016).** Engineered loneliness and engineered community, on Valentine's Day. > > 16. **1:42–2:39:** The annual demonstration. The broadcast opens "calling all broken and lonely hearts," then names the mechanism: the day "puts a lot of pressure on lonely people," and "it underscores a person's loneliness," with the marketing campaigns "really designed" to do exactly that. > 17. **12:33:** The counter-design, stated without apology. "We designed this using the same propaganda techniques, if you will, the same social psychology concepts." > 18. **18:45 and 26:31:** The bar and the result. The foundation was "designed to be a place that sets a bar, it sets a goal for what type of comportment" is expected, and what it produced is stated plainly: "belong to one another. We all love each other. We all care about each other." > > **Supporting broadcast: [[livestreams/Raw Is the New Slick When Building Real Community With Integrity - Livestream|Raw Is the New Slick When Building Real Community With Integrity]] (March 15, 2016).** The permission. > > 19. **5:51–6:16:** The formulation, repeated. Against "slick photos, slick photo shoots, everything's perfect," the claim arrives twice — "the new slick, I believe, is raw. The new slick is raw" — with the prediction attached: "it'll probably go so far to raw that the new raw will be slick one day."