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- #112: Count on community.
#112: Count on community.
Shem Opolot
March 14, 2025
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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 Over time, the pants in my wardrobe have changed from slim-fit tapered to straighter, flowier pants. We probably have subliminal Instagram influencing and K-Dramas to thank for that, but this has caused me to reflect on cultivating individual taste. If you seek out things you [might] like and reflect on why you like them afterward, over time, you can cultivate an individual taste that’s impervious to external influence.
But you can also end up looking like a clown, and such is the ambiguity of life. But, more often than not, it’s better to be a clown. Do something you like this weekend.
LIFE.
Count on community.
An individual. | Source: Unknown
Have you ever tried to balance a pencil on your finger by its length? You either have to constantly rock back and forth to keep the pencil still on your fingertip or keep rolling the pencil on your fingertip within inches of its center. Balance can be achieved, but it has to be maintained constantly. Forever.
So how do we balance “I want to be left alone” (individualism) with “I want to be in a community” (collectivism)?
The definition of community I remember from primary school was a group of people living and working together. That definition may have worked for your parents, but I’m sure it doesn’t work for you. When you grew up, your family was your world. Your community. Then one day, your world expanded exponentially when you went to school, played sports, made friends, joined clubs, and opened your first Facebook account, where you thought it was a good idea to “poke” someone and post on people’s “walls” in dreadful shorthand lke ths.
Community is complex. It’s malleable and yet abstract. For instance, America’s decision to leave the World Health Organization breaks rank with the global community, but, in theory, demonstrates America’s commitment to its own community—America. That decision can be community-centric or individualistic.
And the perfect place for you to be is in the middle of individualism and community.
You see, the greatest folly of humanity is our failure to learn from our history, doomed to be trapped in cycles of liberty and fascism, liberalism and conservatism, and individualism and collectivism.
Women fought for years for the right to work. Now we force women to work so much that they’re terrified of having children and derailing their careers.
We can’t moderate. We don’t learn.
The problem with extremes is that the harder you pull on the pendulum, the more violently it swings back in the opposite direction when you release it.
Thousands of years ago, we lived alone and hunted alone until we learned we were less likely to get eaten by lions if we lived together. So we formed communities. And through communities, we made giant leaps in innovation, motivated by necessity and, more importantly, showing our work. Individual ideas rubbed against other ideas like two rough stones and started large fires.
But then, as you know, when you put two or more people together, eventually, one of them will pack a bag and walk off to the point where the land meets the sky. This manifests in families, villages, and countries “suddenly’ obsessed with the fallacy that immigrants are taking their jobs and killing their children.
But no matter how much people annoy you, and no matter how much self-mastery is essential—compulsory, even—you must never cleave yourself from your community because we were made for kinship. We were made to take group selfies where not everyone looks their best. To walk each other home. To attend weddings and criticize the decor and horrible timekeeping, but attend the next wedding anyway.
And the attack on community is one of the reasons why unchecked capitalism is harmful.
You see, capitalism promotes consumerism by building an altar of convenience and sacrificing community. Instead of getting a ride from your friend, you take an Uber. Instead of staying with a friend, you get a hotel or an Airbnb. Instead of breaking bread with your friends, you order in and eat a whole pizza by yourself.
But it’s not just capitalism.
Even abusers recognize the power of community and try to isolate their victims. If you’re not communing with your friends, who will tell you you’re being a complete idiot? Who will tell you you deserve better?
Yes, you must know thyself, but radical individualism is dangerous, if anything, because it makes individuals unaware of what normal looks like. Of what treatment they should expect, or demand even.
Community is an evolutionary necessity, and you must become a whole individual living within a community. That’s the balance between individualism and collectivism.
THINGS.
A quote.
If you make a habit of writing things down, over time you develop a body of work that will give you insights into yourself and the world that you cannot get any other way. You can’t use your mind for this, because the mind is tricky and will modify your memories.
A picture.
Had the biggest and best bowl of ramen and chicken in this quaint restaurant in D.C.
Jinya Ramen Bar, Washington, D.C.
WORK.
Make better presentations.
We’re about due for another career skills workshop, but here’s the simple golden rule of making effective presentations, outside all the other guidelines you can find here:
One slide has one message, articulated in the action title and fully supported by the slide body.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ Maybe we could all be DJs?
✅ The best coffee shops in the world.
✅ The Google interview question everyone gets wrong.
✅ Why’s the Vatican considered a country?
✅ Is marriage dying?
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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