Me, Elsewhere

Remember last month, when I mentioned that I’d gotten the opportunity to write somewhere else?

Well. I finally got around to writing my first piece for Humane Pursuits, and you guys? I think it’s pretty darn good. I had a great time writing it, anyway, and I’m excited to build this kind of work into my routine.

The stuff I publish there is still my property, and I’ll probably double-post a lot of it here, but just this once I’m going to post a teaser. I’d love for you to click through and read the whole thing (this is not contractually obligated or anything; it’s just a great blog and I think at least some of you will find it interesting).

Lo! An excerpt, mercilessly chopped right from the middle:

The whole reason for using platforms like Facebook is to buttress the communal and familial bonds that have been weakened, not by neglect, but by the novel but now universally accepted fact of geographical separation.

How completely right is that? Sure, people have always traveled (cf. Marco Polo and that Odysseus guy), and at times entire populations have moved from one place to another. All the same, the practice of spending one’s entire adult life at a significant distance from one’s birthplace has certainly not been the norm for most of human history. I’m not sure whether to blame the train, the automobile, or the airplane, but somewhere along the line, modernity brought Facebook upon itself.

So the unavoidable maxim of philosophy—the one about going back to first principles—strikes again. The problem isn’t that social media corrodes human relationships; the problem is that humans live so far away from one another.

The rest is here. I hope you like it.