Self Actualization through Aligned Community
This is essay 3 of 6 for 1729 Writers Cohort #1. Apply to 1729 today.
While the concept of “self-improvement” has a less than stellar reputation, it is clear that people will always want to better their lives in an intentional way. And it is clear that it is not easy to do this. So there need to be ways for people to improve their lives, but the ways that exist are not clearly effective. How could all of this work better? People are best able to make intentional changes when working with others, and the more aligned they are with the other people, the better. The Internet enables finding super-aligned people and working with them and ultimately achieving not just self-improvement but self-actualization and real contribution to the world more broadly.
The Solo Route
The simplest way to try to improve on something is to just come up with an idea yourself and try it on your own. The easy part is to come up with a few goals, a few areas you want to do better in. Everybody has a few ideas about how they could do better: fitness, relationships, career, learning a language, writing, and so on. The hard part is turning hopes into reality.
You have to alternate between being aggressively active and then reflective and humble. You want to do something like regularly try time-limited experiments with clear goals, reflect on the results and adjust. So something like trying a new experiment each week then reviewing it at the end of the week is probably a good idea. But that’s actually hard. Just doing that consistently is hard. There are a hundred ways to talk yourself out of doing what everyone knows works.
Doing Better Together
The simple, reliable way to do better in my experience is simply to work towards goals with aligned people. Well-established examples of groups working toward personal goals together are exercise classes and Alcoholics Anonymous groups. Participating in a group can vault you from thinking about it and making excuses to just doing it and soon doing more than you had imagined. Every part of the behavior change process is made easier by going through it with like-minded peers.
First, you need ideas for specific changes to try. There are endless ideas out there for any common goal. The Internet can offer you millions of ideas on how to lose weight or how to be a better friend or husband or wife. Choosing the right one is hard. It’s hard to be honest with yourself about what you would actually do. It’s much better to bat around ideas with a person who knows something about what you’re trying to do. It’s even better if it’s someone who knows you and can easily spot wishful thinking, or perhaps insufficiently challenging courses of action.
Then you need to actually stick to an experiment for a long enough period of time to evaluate it. This is /really/ hard. It’s very easy to decide you’ll really try something for even just a week, then convince yourself within a couple of days that it’s a stupid idea and you should really do something else. It will be easy for a peer to spot that kind of detour and nudge you back on track. It’s harder to make your half-baked excuse make sense to someone else than to yourself.
Then you need to honestly evaluate your performance. Again, just verbalizing what you’re thinking will probably cause you to be more honest than you might be with yourself. It makes the lie too obvious to actually tell it to another person.
Then you need to start the next experiment, either an iteration on the last experiment or a different one altogether. Make a new commitment to the group and yourself, and track progress within the community with check-ins throughout the week. This is a junction at which it’s easy to falter and choose not to go forward in light of falling short, but it’s easier when you can rely on peers for support and encouragement.
Better Alignment, Better Results
Working with a group is great, but there is often only a limited alignment level. Often these groups are based on a general goal and type of approach to that goal. But groups formed around goals can actually contain a wide variety of people with different ways of thinking. Let’s say you want to get better at writing. You want support and accountability so you join a local writing group, maybe something on [meetup.com](http://meetup.com/). But you find that writing is really very broad. You want to write about technology, some want to write short fiction, some want to write poetry. There’s only so much you have in common. You can share some general tips, but ultimately work in very different ways and can only learn so much from each other. It’s hard to get excited about what your peers are working on because it’s usually not something you’re interested in. There are, of course, different groups with different focuses. If you were into writing about tech, you could probably do better with something like Write of Passage, which by its nature as an Internet-native early adopters’ product has a tech-focused vibe.
What if you could find a group that is /extremely/ aligned with your goals? Or, even better, what if you could find an entire community aligned around your values, and find groups within that community to pursue each of your specific goals with? You might be able to not only attain some measure of self-improvement but something beyond that. You might be able to clarify your idea of how you can be of most value in the world and attain self-actualization.
This is what I’m seeing in the 1729 community. The community is made up of people interested in Balaji Srinivasan’s ideas. Srinivasan, also known simply as Balaji, is a prolific, bold thinker on technology in general, and more specifically on transhumanism and the future of innovation, governance, and community. Typically people hear about Srinivasan’s ideas in one of his podcast appearances, essays, or tweets. They apply to join the community and can gain access to a Discord and a weekly lecture series.
It doesn’t necessarily sound like much, but it’s really something special. It is unusual to find oneself among people who share an optimistic vision of the future and are committed to building it. The community convenes weekly in lectures by Srinivasan and post-lecture chats.
Eager to act on the ideas shared in the lectures, people form subgroups around more specific goals like fitness, learning, and writing. They set up challenges, encourage each other, hold each other accountable, and give each other helpful feedback. They brainstorm and develop ideas for tools to enhance the process as they do all this. People sketch concepts for community dashboards, tag in people who are already working on new apps to help run group fitness challenges, and the ideas just fly at a fast pace. And it’s not just ideas, you see real results too. You see how a person who is a lot like you can reach the level you’re aiming at, and you can ask them how they do it.
This is a rich environment for prototyping and iterating on tools, especially so since there is a good deal of technical and design talent in the group. These tools can then be useful to people in the broader community and outside of the community. This is where you can see small groups of individuals helping not just themselves and others in their group do better, but the broader world.
Overall, it’s a remarkably productive, generative community. What seems unique and may be the key is the intellectual leadership of Srinivasan. The community is really about something, something inspiring: “Immutable money, infinite frontier, eternal life,” as Srinivasan’s Twitter bio declares. People are really invested in the values of the community. And the goals and values of the community are reviewed and developed in-depth in the weekly lectures. The ultimate goal is immense technological advancement through a network state, “a social network with an agreed-upon leader, an integrated cryptocurrency, a definite purpose, a sense of national consciousness, and a plan to crowdfund territory.” As wildly ambitious as the idea sounds, it is actually possible to see the community in the Discord growing into an aligned, real-life community. It’s a bright, starkly distinct alternative to the helpless, cynical doomerism that is the default in social media. It’s a promising way to channel disparate efforts at self-improvement and technological progress into an effective, aligned, purposeful community that could really change the world.