The Big Question

The line no one is coming to save you recurs across this site, and it is one of the most reliable mottoes I have for getting an individual to take action. Hearing it correctly produces urgency. Living inside it produces agency. Most of what I have written in these essays is, in some form, a long expansion of that line — the call to recognize that the cavalry is not on the way and the cavalry is, in fact, you.

I stand by the line as personal advice. It is the right thing to tell yourself, every morning, in the bathroom mirror, as you reach for the protocol you have built for yourself. It is the only thing that reliably moves an adult out of the slave-default and into the master-default. As a piece of personal psychology, it is correct.

In this essay I want to ask whether it’s also correct at the civilizational level. Whether no one is coming to save you is the way we want it to be, or whether the line is true only because we’ve collectively built an arrangement in which it has been made true, and whether — if we’ve built such an arrangement — we should consider that the arrangement might be the actual problem.

We sit, each of us, inside hyper-optimized bubbles of individuality. The bubble is real. The bubble is, in the modern arrangement, what most of us have instead of a community. Inside the bubble you have your apartment or your house, your phone, your feed, your job, your delivery services, your streaming subscriptions, your specific dietary preferences, your specific therapist, your specific identity, your specific tailored everything. The bubble is tuned, with great precision, to you.

Inside the bubble, when you are in trouble, who can save you? Not the people on the other end of the apps; the apps are transactional. Not your employer; the employer will replace you. Not your neighbors; the bubble has insulated you from them. Not the state; the state operates at scales that cannot see you. Not the church; the church is gone, in the institutional sense, for most of us. Not the village; the village is also gone. The honest accounting of who is positioned to save you inside the modern arrangement returns, almost without exception, a list of one name. You.

This is the situation that makes the line correct. The line is not an eternal philosophical truth. The line is an accurate description of a specific civilizational moment in which the structures that used to do the saving have been quietly dismantled, and the only entity left in the room is the individual, alone, looking at the mirror.

I’ve been telling people, essay after essay, handle it yourself, the cavalry is you. I’ll keep telling people that, because at the personal level, in the world we currently occupy, it’s the only honest advice. But I’m not celebrating the arrangement. I’m operating inside it. The arrangement is the problem. The advice is the work-around.

The honest version of the question: do we need a new kind of church?

I don’t mean a denomination, and I don’t necessarily mean a religion. I mean the social institution, the weekly gathering, the shared base layer I described in the hyper-individualism essay. I mean an entity whose explicit function is to know the emotional weather of a defined group of humans, to notice when a member is in trouble, to organize the resources of the group to do something about it, and to deliver, on a regular schedule, a piece of guidance that pulls the members back toward the version of themselves they were trying to be.

This is not a new function. Every durable human culture has had some version of it. The synagogue, the mosque, the parish, the meeting house, the temple, the longhouse — every settled human community has, by whatever name, run an institution whose job is to tend the flock. The modern arrangement is the first in human history to operate at scale without one, and the loneliness data, the deaths-of-despair data, the addiction data, the suicide data, the friendlessness data all suggest that operating without one is not working.

I would like there to be a new version of this institution that does the function without the historical baggage. I do not know what it looks like. I am suspicious of every existing candidate — the existing churches, in most cases, have drifted into morality and politics in a way that has detached them from their core ancestral purpose of leadership; the secular replacements like therapy and self-help and online communities are too thin and too transactional to do the work; the new-age substitutes are usually selling something. I do not know who is supposed to build the new thing, or what it looks like once built, or whether the modern population is even capable of sustaining one. I want to register the question. I do not yet have the answer.

When I bring this conversation up with people, the most common response, after work is too busy, is kids take everything I have.

The parents in my generation are, by every metric I can measure, more involved in the moment-to-moment management of their children than any generation in modern history. The kids are scheduled, supervised, driven, attended, fed, monitored, and homework-helped in ways my parents would have considered absurd. We were sent outside in the morning and told to come home when the streetlights came on. Gen X ran feral. Most of the kids in my neighborhood now do not. I am an elder millennial raised the gen X way, and I notice the difference.

I get it. I do not have kids myself, and I am not going to pretend I understand the daily reality from the inside. It is hard. It has, to be honest, never been easy — the cohort of parents in any era has always complained about the bandwidth their kids consume, and the complaint has always been legitimate. But I observe that the modern parent is, by structural necessity, attending to the kids in a way that consumes most of the bandwidth a community-tending function would have required. The parent cannot see the wider flock because the parent is, every waking hour, attending to the small flock of their own household.

This is, I think, one of the historical reasons priests were celibate. I am not making a doctrinal argument; I am making a sociological one. To know the emotional weather of an entire congregation — to see the lines clearly, to notice who is falling behind them, to deliver the weekly sermon that pulls the most people back inside the lines — requires a person whose attention is not consumed by their own household. The childless tender exists structurally because the childed tender cannot do the second job. The Catholic priest, the Buddhist monk, the Hindu sannyasin — every tradition that has had a tending class has, in some form, recognized that you cannot tend the village and tend your own children at the same time, and has provided a path for the adults who wanted to tend the village to opt out of running their own household.

The cynical reading is that this is control. The more honest reading is that it is structure. Someone has to be available to look at the whole flock and pull the members back inside the lines that make a flock a flock rather than a herd of disconnected animals. The whole-flock view is a different job than the small-flock view, and the same person cannot do both well.

So who is doing this job, in the modern arrangement?

Almost no one.

The existing churches, in most communities, are not doing it — the priests and pastors I know are administratively overwhelmed, theologically embattled, politically constrained, and demographically declining. The good ones still try; the good ones are running uphill against an environment that is not supporting them. The secular professional class is not doing it — the therapists and life coaches and counselors are running paid one-to-one engagements that produce small individual improvements but do not deliver the whole-flock view the function requires. The teachers are not doing it — the modern teacher is buried in paperwork and curriculum politics. The community center, the union hall, the lodge, the Rotary club, the bowling league, the PTA — every secular institution that used to host this function is empty, dwindling, or has narrowed into something else.

The result is that no one is taking it upon themselves to know whether the people in a given community are okay. There is no whole-flock view anywhere in most American towns. Each individual is operating inside their bubble, with their family, their feed, and their handful of friends, and if they fall through the cracks, the cracks are wider than they have ever been because there is nothing underneath the cracks at all.

This is the actual content of no one is coming to save you. The line is not a tough-love mantra. The line is a description of a civilization that has stopped staffing the role.

Comfort as domestication

The strange wrinkle is that we are, despite all of this, too well-behaved.

The modern environment, for all its loneliness and dysfunction, has been so successful at delivering surface-level comfort that the population it has produced is unusually placid. The food is abundant. The temperature is controlled. The entertainment is endless. The conflicts that used to demand collective action — famine, plague, raiding parties, hostile climate — have been so thoroughly handled by infrastructure that most modern adults do not feel the kind of pressure that produces collective response. The comfort domesticates. We are well-fed, well-housed animals who have lost some of the chaotic energy previous generations brought to their problems, because the problems are no longer arriving in a form the animal nervous system recognizes as urgent.

What we need, I think, is some version of chaotic energy that calls us out of the comfort and moves us into the work the comfort has hidden. The closest modern analogue is the coach — the figure who, in domains from sports to business to fitness, takes a group of humans and pushes them, deliberately, beyond what their comfort would allow. The coach is real, the coach works, and the coach is a partial answer. The coach is not a whole answer, because the coach engages a small slice of the person’s life — the gym, the sport, the career — and not the whole-life view the church-shaped tender used to provide. The coach gets you fitter. The coach does not notice when your marriage is sliding. The coach does not check on you when your mother dies. The coach is paid, and the payment defines the scope.

There is, I think, a gap between the coach and the priest that no modern institution currently occupies. The gap is in the shape of an adult who has time for you, knows your whole life, has earned the right to call you out, and is not transactionally engaged. I do not know what the modern version of that adult looks like. I do not know how we produce them. I do not know how we coordinate them. I am genuinely asking.

I don’t have the answer. The rest of this site is full of answers; this essay isn’t.

What I have is a small set of tentative moves that, taken together, might begin to substitute for the missing function.

Build the inner ring deliberately. Pick the two-to-six humans you would actually fight for and tend them as if the tending were your job. It is. Make them tend you back.

Find a weekly gathering of some kind, of any kind, that is not transactional. A men’s group. A reading group. A fitness group. A church if you find one that has not drifted. A neighborhood council. A volunteer slot. Whatever weekly, real-time, embodied gathering you can sustain. Show up. Notice the people. Let them notice you.

Be the adult who notices, in your own ring, when somebody is not okay. Be willing to say the thing. Be willing to ask. Be willing to organize the small response — a meal, a visit, a phone call, a presence — that the modern apparatus has stopped supplying by default. You will not save the village this way. You may save one person you know.

Accept that the bigger fix is not going to come from your individual action. The bigger fix is a civilizational rebuild that is going to take a generation or more, and you are not personally responsible for delivering it. You are responsible for not making it worse and for tending the small piece of it that is in front of you.

And keep, in the back of your mind, the question I am asking in this essay. Is this the way we want it to be? Because if the answer is no — and I suspect, for most readers, the answer is no — then the way it is now is not a permanent fact about the universe. It is a configuration we have inherited, and a configuration we could, with enough collective will, reconfigure. I do not know how. I suspect it is one of the largest open civilizational questions of our time.

Ending on the personal note, because the abstract version of this essay risks sounding bleaker than the felt reality.

The line no one is coming to save you isn’t true for everyone. It isn’t true for Effie. I am saving Effie, in the small daily mechanical sense, by holding the protocol, by being present, by tending the marriage as the smallest tribe inside which she always has at least one person who is watching. She has someone to count on. The household has the structure I keep writing about, and the structure is the saving, and the saving is real.

Most people do not have this. That is the part that makes me sad. I cannot scale my marriage to the population. I cannot make every person have an Effie or a Jeff, depending on which seat they need to be in. The arrangement is, for a long list of reasons, much harder to build now than it used to be, and a lot of people who would have been inside one a hundred years ago are now alone, watching the same feeds, scrolling through the same nights, and waiting for a cavalry the modern arrangement has quietly stopped sending.

I wish I had an answer. I suspect the absence of an answer — who tends the rest of us, the ones outside any small saving arrangement — is one of the largest open questions our civilization has to face, and the question is going to define what comes after the post-modern blip more than any of the other things we currently spend our political attention on. We have engineered an enormous, unprecedented amount of personal freedom. We have, in the same motion, dismantled the safety net of human attention previous arrangements maintained as a side effect of how they were structured.

The freedom is real. The cost is real. The question — can we have both — is open. The site is, in its small way, an attempt to answer it for one household and to publish what is found in case the answer is useful to anyone else. Anyone reading this who has a piece of the larger answer — how to staff the tending role at scale, in a population of hyper-individualized adults — I would very much like to hear from you. I do not have it.