When I lived in a beach village in India running an artists’ hostel, I would visit my friends and family in Mumbai during the off-season. I would feel this stretch in my brain.
I would find myself telling my hippie friends to work harder and challenge their brains while recommending my city friends to chill out, stand and stare for a bit.
Both would yield minimal results.
Just like if you talk about Bitcoin to Solana folks and vice versa. It gets very aggressive and very dumb very fast.
The gap is just too wide.
In a world without truth, there are only tribal truths.
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I can put this into words for the first time: I travel across bubbles.
These are just two wide spectrums.
But I do hang out with:
- GenZ as well as my friends who are 60+.
- Right-wing religious folks as well as left-wing purple hair folks
- Men’s rights activists as well as women’s rights activists
- Bikers as well as drum circle organisers
- Yacht partiers and those eating McDonalds at a crypto conference
- tpot as well as e/acc
I think my insatiable curiosity drives me to learn from each one of these groups + my undying desire to teach people (or maybe just reconcile my own beliefs) gets me exposed to numerous people who can handle well-intentioned critique of their bubbles.
The only problem I am left with is: I have to design my tribe with a specific value system from the ground up.
After seeing an aisle full of values and beliefs, I cannot buy anything out of the box anymore.
But that is little price to pay for the knowledge and the learning that I got.
I keep saying this: the magic is somewhere in the middle.
And I am here to find that middle. Samatvam, as it is called in trad Indian literature.