The year of "Only connect!"
On various attempts to re-center humanity in my life
Welcome to Speculative Cartography, a publication about technology, society, stories, and what’s possible.
Last autumn, my girlfriend and I did something a bit nutty. We moved to Michigan without any pressing reason — no job offer, no graduate program, no family to be close to. Prior to that, we had spent about 72 hours in Michigan, and probably less than two weeks in the Midwest over the course of our lives.
There were things I hoped to get from moving. I had lived in Philadelphia for the last 15 years and I wanted more quiet, more fresh air, easier access to nature, and to generally get away from the radiating effects of the northeast metropolitan corridor. I also hoped to find community.
There’s an irony in moving away from my longtime home to find community, because of course it meant leaving behind my entire social network. But the truth was that despite having many lovely friends there — people I care deeply about and want to keep in my life no matter where I go — I also felt rather isolated.
In March of 2020, I left the office with my laptop and never went back. The pandemic killed off a lot of my connections and many of my hard-won social skills atrophied. And as an autistic person, I felt increasingly boxed in by the chaos outside my home. It felt harder and harder to have the windows open on a nice day or to step out my front door.
Moving away from Philly was a bit like ending a serious relationship: even if there are good things about what you have, there are too many problems to keep going. You have to sacrifice what comfort and security you have for the possibility of finding something better.
On top of my own personal struggles and recent context shift, we’re living in a disconnected world. We’re all constantly busy and moving, out of sync in time and space. It’s all highways and social media and zoom calls.
So for any number of reasons, I’ve decided to make this a Year of Connection. I will be reading, thinking, and writing about this a lot in the months to come, but today I want to tell you how I came to this idea in particular and what I am planning to do with it.
Why "connection"
There are a bunch of ways I could have come at this problem, but I’m rather fond of years themes. I got the idea from CGP Grey and it has worked pretty well for me over the past several years.
Year themes have an advantage over New Year’s resolutions in that they take a broad focus. Rather than pursue a rigid target, which is easy to fail and will likely only change one dimension of your life even if its successful, a year theme helps you notice opportunities to choose differently at life's many branching paths. They also can’t fail since even small shifts toward your theme count as success.
Most importantly, themes create resonance. “Words are tuning forks for the brain,” says CGP Grey. Our minds are full of metaphors that steer the choices we make in every day life, and finding resonant ideas to guide us can be a powerful way to make change.
I was in Literati Books the other day and there was a themed display in their non-fiction section. The titles contained words like "community", "belonging", "friendship", "networks", and "togetherness". Many smart people are working on this problem and they've created and invested in dozens of metaphors, but as a writer, I feel that choosing the right one is crucial.
“Community” is probably the most obvious one, but for me it feels like more of an outcome than a process or an action. “Belonging” is simply what community makes you feel, another outcome. I miss my friends, but “friendship” is only one part of what I’m after, and “networks” are really just the broader category that the social network of community belongs to.
My partner was the first person to use the word “connection” in a way that stuck with me. She had lived in Philly for a much shorter time than I had, and her best friends were scattered around the world — Bhutan, Italy, NYC, rural Maine — and she felt that she was losing touch with them. I encouraged her to find ways to make visits happen or talk on the phone more often, and she resolved that she wanted to make re-connecting with these people a personal objective.
In July 2024, I read Humanly Possible: 700 Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell. Before that, I had vaguely understood myself to be a humanist, at least in the sense of "atheist but not an asshole", or a secular do-gooder, or someone who likes old books, but revisiting the great humanists of the past and studying their commonalities made the idea robust and alive for me: humanity is the yardstick by which we can measure what is good.
After that, I spent a lot of time thinking about the ideas of humanity and reality.
When we look at the common causes of our social isolation, we find that they are all things that de-center human experience and distance human beings from each other. We work from home, we attend events virtually, we get meals and packages delivered.
And many real things are replaced with imitations and illusions — things that seem like humans or seem like they are putting us in contact with humans, but are not. The instructive voice of the self-checkout machine, the customer service chatbot, the algorithm of content that we shape and shapes us, the lives and experiences of our real, actual friends as mediated through our phones. Reality is the shared space in which other humans operate, it is the substrate of our connection. (I was amazed to learn that "common sense" is the phenomenon that emerges from people sensing the same common reality.)
Bakewell sets up freethinking, inquiry, and hope as the three pillars of humanism, but she also gives special treatment to the idea of connection. It it through our connections to other human beings that we find meaning, self-definition, and the foundations for our morality. To emphasize her point, she quotes Howard's End by E.M. Forester: "Only connect!"
This, ultimately, was the idea that stuck with me. Connection is the building block of community, the atomic level of the social network. It’s the mechanism underlying all of the other ideas — community, friendship, belonging, humanity, reality. "Connect" is the relevant verb, the correct action. Only connect.
Connection in practice
Though neither became my theme proper, humanity and reality are the twin strands of my yearlong project. I’m developing strategies and tactics to connect to people in my life — staying in touch with old friends, making new friends, being an active part of my community, spending quality time with my partner — but I also recognize that I can’t hope to be successful without addressing the role that illusory and manipulative systems play in my life.
Connecting to people
Connecting to people is mostly simple-but-hard. Some of my initial tactics include:
Making a list of friends to text and call on a regular basis. I love my friends and want to know what they're up to, but I really struggle to send messages without a specific motive.
Focusing on the quality of the time I spend with my partner. My partner and I already spend a lot of time together, but there is something special about when we have each other’s undivided attention.
Joining hobby groups. Do other people find this instinctive? I have some deep anti-joining impulse that I know I have to override.
Sitting on my front lawn with a coffee. One of the things I miss most about West Philly is the abundance of spontaneous porch gatherings.
Returning to the same public spaces at the same times consistently. I know from my time as a barista that you can become a “regular” faster than you think.
Smiling, making eye contact, saying hello. I know this works but it feels like an attack on me as an autistic person that it does.
Though our approaches differ, my fellow hope-peddler Garrett Bucks frames his own "Year of Connection" around a simple daily practice: "I'm going to start the day asking 'how am I going to either deepen an existing connection or build a new one?' I'll then end the day by asking myself how I did."
Even this blog is part of it. I have always struggled to find people who want to participate in the kinds of conversations I want to have and in the way I want to have them. It's part of why I'm a writer: putting down thoughts in documents and notebooks feels like a conversation I can have on my terms and on-demand. But now I am putting things out into the world and hoping that what was once a private form of self-conversation can become a way of reaching out to others. As Henrik Karlsson put it, “a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox”. I hope to find that's true.
Connecting to reality
Connecting with reality also seems deceptively straightforward: go outside, touch grass.
And I fully intend to do that! For instance, I’ve made a list of outdoor spaces to visit, and instead of listening to podcasts and music when I’m out walking or running, I’m making an effort to pay attention to the plants, animals, and houses in my neighborhood. I know you could call it mindfulness, but I think it’s even simpler than that; I’m just experiencing the world without technological mediation. And I gotta say, it’s strangely revelatory to do something so simple and so human.
But the other part of the problem is that there are so many systems at work to ensure that I continue to engage with things that are fake, illusory, and manipulative. We think we’re interacting with the world and with other people, but we’re interacting with a simulacra. In order to connect with the real world and real people, I actually need to dis-connect from un-reality.
To that end, I’ve started auditing all of the tech dependencies in my life — devices, apps, subscriptions, ecosystems — and developing and implementing strategies to remove them from my life.
Where I’m going from here
It's only the beginning of April, but I think even my small initial efforts are having an impact. My mind already has a slightly different texture from lessened engagement with media. I'm enjoying more small moments of direct connection with my partner. I've extricated myself completely from some digital platforms and greatly reduced my reliance on certain ecosystems — swapping my Apple Watch for a running watch, switching my browser to FireFox and my search to Kagi, (legally) removing the DRM from my ebooks. It truly, actually, feels liberating.
In the coming months, I hope to find that my life is much more full of people than it has been in previous years. I’ve got many more experiments planned, books on my reading list, and ideas to write about. But for now I'll just say: "Only connect!"
Thanks for reading! Speculative Cartography is still in its early days, and my primary goal is to share ideas and connect with like-minded people. If you enjoyed this essay, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with someone.