Advertisers and marketers have segmented us into neat categories—Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Baby Boomers—to make it easier to sell to us (#mo’money), and as fun as it might be to be part of an “age club,” it’s crazy that we have created a world with invisible walls for ourselves.
And what about schools? I often wonder why we segment our kids into different grades where third graders only hang out with other third graders. Of course they’re going to bully each other! They don’t have the tools or perspective to get into each other’s backpacks! What if there was an intergenerational school where we brought in our elders and mixed all the kids together? It would take some educational coordination, but kids might be less likely to bully each other, and each age-group would inspire the next.
All this to say, let’s recognize the power of intergenerational relationships and how they impact the perspective and balance of a community. The varying points of view I get from friends who have more life experience than me or who are younger and have a new perspective to share is invaluable. I wish I had known this earlier in my life and had been encouraged to spend more time with older and younger community members. Go through the Four Stages of Community again, this time with the view of making friends of all ages. It may just be the key to finding your people! We forget that “our people” are genderless, raceless, and ageless. It’s all about energy!
Think about dating apps—they all require that you post your age to your profile page. Why does it matter? The love of our lives could be under our noses, but they may not fit the age range we put in the app! My life partner, Eli, is thirteen years younger than me, and I imagine our paths never crossing if we were both on a dating app.
The thing is, before Eli, I never would have looked twice at someone that young because of societal “norms.” What a lesson it has been for me on so many levels—including recognizing that energy is ageless.
When Miki and I were twenty-three years old, we traveled to Australia for a college friend’s wedding. We met twin brothers—who were ten years old—and they became our favorite new friends from that weekend. Yes, they were ten years old. And we were twenty-three. Their energy matched our energy, and we ended up playing soccer with them and laughing all weekend at the wedding! They were hilarious, and Miki and I couldn’t believe how cool and funny they were. Our knee-jerk reactions could have been, “Hmm, is this creepy?” or “Go away, children,” but we thought to ourselves, “They’re just people, and they’re SO MUCH FUN.” We still talk about the ten-year-olds to this day.
Energy will always be your best compass. Whenever I follow or lead with energy, it never fails me.
Try it for your next gathering! Invite folks of all ages and see what happens!
In the next three months, have a really good conversation with someone who’s at least ten years older than you and someone who’s at least ten years younger (relatives don’t count!). What do you notice about their life views? Their energy?
Master Citizens
Here’s an idea. Let’s stop calling our elders “Senior Citizens” and “the Elderly.” Almost 76 million Baby Boomers are 65 and over and they don’t want to be called either of these derogatory terms! I looked up synonyms for elderly and this is some of what came up:
NO ONE IS CALLING ME ELDERLY when I turn sixty-five! Over my dead body (pun intended)!
My dad, now in his late sixties and an aerospace engineer for forty years, loves being a Boomer but was none too pleased when a grocery store clerk innocently asked him if he wanted to go through the Senior Citizens line, because it was faster. “I’m fine right where I am, thank you. I’m fitter than most forty-year-olds!” He came home grumbling and feeling bad about himself. “Do I look that old?” he asked my mom. He didn’t go back to the grocery store the following week. And this is how our self-imposed isolation begins.
What change can you inspire in your community to honor your Master Citizens more meaningfully?
So what if instead of calling our more experienced citizens “Senior Citizens” we honored them by calling them “Master Citizens”? They say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything. At sixty-five years old, you’ve clocked in 569,400 human hours. If that’s not a master’s degree in “humaning,” then I don’t know what is!
Since we all live and age differently, we can’t all be described in the same way. And rather than labeling, let’s reimagine how we interact with, hang out with, and honor those who have given us wings to succeed. I picture my dad getting high fives as he walks down a red-carpeted Master Citizens line at the grocery store and imagine him looking forward to going there each week with my mom. Wouldn’t you want the same for the people who have helped you? And won’t you want the same when you get to their age?
Let us belong to a world that continues to value soulful connections over artificial intelligence.
Chapter 10
The Future of Belonging
What Happens Next?
My family and I spent a week in the vibrant city of San Miguel, Mexico, for the annual festival Día de los Muertos, or “Day of the Dead.” For several hours we volunteered at a local community festival called La Calaca, where our friend Veronique, one of the energetic co-founders and a leader in shaping the community of San Miguel, invited us to help decorate the town square for the evening festivities. We gathered with dozens of locals in the cobblestone square, sat in a circle of wooden benches, and picked bright yellow marigolds off their green stems as we chatted in broken Spanish.One of the volunteers played Spanish classical music on his guitar as we arranged the freshly picked flowers around a fountain in the center of the square. There was a comfort and matter-of-factness about serving the community here—a feeling of “Yeah, we’re all participating, isn’t that how it is everywhere?” that felt really good. This volunteer attitude and service orientation made me feel an instant sense of belonging. As I sat on the plane heading back to New York City from Mexico (with Eli, mouth open, sleeping next to me), it hit me:
Belonging is a dance between polarities.When we dance between the “we” and the “me,” magic happens.
As Americans, we have been pushed and prodded to focus on “me.” We have celebrated rugged individualism, competition, independence, and “going against the grain” for so long that we’ve forgotten about the importance of the collective “we”—and how good it feels. As noted in my Hierarchy of Needs, to find joy and reach our highest human potential, we have to first find and nurture our sense of purpose and service orientation.
If our focus is only on “me,” depression and anxiety will result. And this is what is happening. Technology has pushed us too far in the direction of isolation and individual gains (followers! likes!) that we have forgotten the dance between “me” and “we” and how important that flow is in our lives for our happiness—and survival.
Our separation will lead to our extinction, and technological isolation is the first symptom.
This is your time now, and you have all the tools you need to create the best community for your life and organization.
DO IT.
The world needs more belonging, more love, more community, and you are needed to wholeheartedly participate in receiving and sharing your energy with others. Let’s reconnect to our purpose as humans—which is to simply share and receive energy. Even money is just energy! So share that generously too!
I’m concerned about the future of belonging and how humans will connect with one another in thirty to fifty years, with technology evolving at breakneck speeds and with little thought about how to properly use this technology. It has been well documented that there’s a direct correlation between smartphone overuse with perceived dependence and the increase in reports of anxiety and depression.
So why do we keep racing in the direction of more technology, especially toward virtual reality and artificial intelligence?
While I know it is
our human destiny to keep evolving and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, it doesn’t appear that our goals are aligned with achieving a deeper sense of belonging. If we are less happy now than we were before smartphones, why are they still our obsession? I often speak at media conferences and hear speakers bragging about how they are “increasing people’s screen time with X software and Y technology.” Is more screen time something to be proud of? Are we happy with how much time we’re spending online, or do we later regret it? How did our sense of belonging become at the mercy of technology and capitalism? Silicon Valley is in the midst of convincing us that technology can replace the real world, that it’s just a matter of triggering the right sensory experience and once we do, boom!
We’ve re-created reality. But this way of thinking misses one very important thing:
Energy
It misses the intangible energy exchanges that happen between people and the ecosystems around us. For this reason (among others), “connecting” online is not really connecting. Even when we’re simulating all five senses with virtual reality headsets and haptic gaming vests, it’s a surface-level and poor excuse for real human connection. VR and artificial intelligence will never be able to touch with the warmth and energy of a human hand or hug you in a way that melts away your worries.
Energy is the invisible universal language for all life. It’s genderless, ageless, shapeless, and colorless. It’s all of us. No machine could ever replicate or manufacture it.
While technology and social media have been vital sharing tools for viral movements like #MeToo and the Women’s March—even our Daybreaker community would not be where it is without it—until we fully understand the puppeteers behind the scenes playing with our attention in the name of profits (Isn’t money so 2008? We’ve got bigger fish to fry, people!), we will continue moving farther away from true belonging.
Imagine what the world would look like if every single human felt belonging. We would show up for real for each other. Show up to vote. Show up for the bullied kid. Show up for the bully. We would embody inclusion. Focusing on the importance of belonging is essential to our existence and survival as a species. It’s more apparent now than ever. Belonging might seem like an afterthought to so many of the problems we face today, but it’s actually critical to solving each and every one of them.
Belonging gives us the confidence to take care of ourselves, others, our planet, and all the members of our ecosystem. Knowing this, it becomes clear that building a community is one of the most important, generous, and creative acts a human can aspire to. So have the courage to follow the steps in this book at any and every turning point in your life. Keep Going IN and Going OUT. Share this with friends and support one another as you build and join new communities of your own. If you commit to participating with generous and courageous energy, you will enjoy deep belonging, abundant community, and success. Your time is now.
LETʽS GO!
If you need help architecting or creating your dream community, large or small, I’m here for you. We’re launching the Belong Center, a 2.0 Community Center and Consultancy to support anyone wanting to create community anywhere in the world. If you have the courage and curiosity to nurture a community and participate in leading the revitalization of your neighborhood, local business, or global community, or create something totally new, you’re the kind of person I want to support. Go to belongcenter.com for more information.
If you can commit to this every day for the next twenty-one days, you will reprogram your brain and will feel a deeper sense of belonging to yourself than you’ve felt in a long time, which will radiate into your relationships. Here it is:
Dance in front of the mirror to at least one song a day.
While you do, pay yourself compliments, love yourself, and be generous. You can be wearing clothes or be naked, alone or with a friend or partner. Remind yourself that you are just energy in human form. Remind yourself that it’s incredible that you’re here experiencing this wild human existence. Remind yourself that no one is judging you and that you get to choose your actions. Then just dance and let go. We spend most of our time either in our heads or being told what to do. Dance is creativity and self-expression personified. Dance is freedom. Dance is universal. It doesn’t matter if you’re sixteen or ninety, a man or a woman. You don’t need drugs or alcohol to dance. Science has proven time and time again that dancing is the best form of exercise and the best way to release your natural D.O.S.E. No judgment. Just move. You will find after these twenty-one days that your life perspective will shift in magical ways, and you will feel a deeper sense of belonging to yourself than you’ve ever felt. And you will be ready to share your energy generously with others. Go to belongcenter.com for a list of songs to try!
Acknowledgments
I dedicate this book to the following humans and communities that have deeply impacted my journey:
The love of my life, my best friend and partner in mischief, Eli Clark-Davis. Your double-decker smile and giving spirit get me every time. Thank you for staying up with me every single night so I wouldn’t write alone. You give me wings every day.
My OG community member—my twin sister, Miki Agrawal, who I’ve been in community with since we were hanging out in our mother’s womb. It’s unreal to have someone who knows me and who inspires me as much as you do. Thank you for being my first and oldest friend through thick and thin. From the womb to the tomb.
My parents, Mire and Rajendra Agrawal, who came to America as immigrants and created community from scratch with English as their second language. I watched the way you gathered our family and friends together with deep thought, intention, and play. Thank you for establishing the importance of community early in my life.
My family: my older sister, Yuri (Didi), who inspired me from the start with her adventurous spirit; to my brothers-in-law, Andrew Horn, Ben Zaitchik, and Ethan Clark-Davis, and to my parents-in-law, Rosie Clark, Jeff Davis, and Sam Horn—thank you for being such wonderful supports and sounding boards in my life; and to my nieces, Emi and Alice Zagra, and nephew, Hiro Horn-Agrawal, for reigniting my childlike wonder and for teaching me the importance of family and celebration.
My dear friends and Inner Core who brainstormed and ideated with me on so many weekends and in the middle of the night. Thank you to Max Stossel and David Yarus for your friendship, guidance, and unconditional support. And thank you to my dear friends Alfredo Rabines, Philip Donaldson, Mark Fisher, and Zach Iscol—excited to become Master Citizens together. You’re home to me.
Boom Spiral Community for being tried and true FYFs and for showing up for me when I needed it most. Y’all are the crazy and wild ones and sharing this life with you has been a deep privilege.
Our Daybreaker Community and Catalysts around the world who inspired me to write this book in the first place. Thank you for saying yes and for dancing at sunrise with reckless abandon time and time again. You have been my biggest teacher and healer in every way. Our Daybreaker HQ team for being with me every step of the process as I wrote every day at our office after hours. Thank you Tim Patch, Malka Sender, Tiffany Ip, Katelyn Collins, Elliott Larue, and Aly Bloom—your gentle spirits and daily encouragement made me feel connected to the process, not just the result. You’re family to me. It truly takes a village.
My soccer teams and schools: Montreal, Canada: Brossard FC Select, Harold Napper Elementary School, Centennial Regional High School, Marianopolis College; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Varsity Soccer Team—thank you for teaching me about friendship, teamwork, and fighting together for the same goals.
My language schools: French School, Japanese School, and Hindi School—thank you for teaching me how to communicate with others across the world and for showing me the importance of diversity.
Burning Man for reminding me what radical self-expression, adventure, and inclusivity feel like. You were one of the important catalysts in my cr
eative and community journey.
Summit Series for helping me find an Equal Energy Exchange of adventurous and curious minds.
My agents at Sterling Lord Literistic, Celeste Fine and John Maas—without your support, this book wouldn’t exist. Thank you for finding the right publishing partner for this project and for making it all so easy and fun for me.
My publisher, Workman, and Susan Bolotin for believing in this book and me—it’s amazing that publishers like you still exist, and it’s an honor to work with you.
John Mackey for your friendship and for writing the foreword to my book. Food is the backbone and an essential building block for community, and I honor you for dedicating your life to it. Your wisdom and understanding of the human condition have been such an inspiration for me. Thank you.
To Tony Hsieh, for putting your money where your mouth is and building a community from the ground up in Vegas. You’re the real deal. And to Esther Perel, Leland Melvin, Dr. Deepak Chopra, Ben Rattray, Alex Ljung, Dan Buettner, and Dr. Mark Hyman: Thank you for your endless support and for reading my book with genuine interest.
My co-illustrator, Ryan LeMere, for burning the midnight oil with me and for helping bring the pages to life. Your pictures are worth ten thousand words!
To Tomas Garcia for your cover illustration and for yourincredible creative spirit.
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