I've been thinking about us

A lot, actually

Kia ora e hoa,

Last year, I spent a lot of time thinking about us.

While I try to spend my thinking time on the stuff I can do something about, I’ve found it really hard to ignore how far we’re drifting apart.

This sounds like a break-up email to my college girlfriend, but I’m talking about us as in the collective of humans that share our world. Whether that’s a town, city or Aotearoa, the trend right now is division, not connectedness.

I won’t reach too far into that rabbit hole and hold up all the reasons, but think for a minute about these three things:

Where does ‘normal’ push you?

Does the combined marketing efforts of our capitalistic society* push you to work together with your neighbours and buy three lawn mowers for your street to share - saving hundreds or thousands of dollars and reducing the size of the pile at the landfill, or do the companies like Stihl, Toyota, Samsung, push for every individual or household to buy their own thing to leave mostly unused in the garage/kitchen/house until they need it?

Which of those approaches makes more profit for those trillion-dollar companies?

This isn’t some railing against Big Hardware or Big Tech - they’re just acting in the way our capitalist economy rewards.

Is it easier or harder to live in ways that have always made sense?

Do you know how hard it is to buy land (read borrow money and pay interest to a bank) as a collective or wider whanau* so you can share resources and finance?

Do you think New Zealanders spent more time last year…

A) responding to divisive ideas like a fringe party rewriting Te Tiriti o Waitangi, or

B) ensuring our Government rethinks and fixes a housing system that means if my son were to try and buy a home now, he’d need to have saved a deposit that would have paid off half his entire mortgage in real-adjusted-dollar terms when I was his age? (In unadjusted dollar terms, his deposit today would have paid for an entire home when I was 10).

The point is, us thinking and acting as a collective, in kotahitanga and community, takes conscious effort to go against the grain of a money-backed system, and with a constant flow of divisive kōrero, we’re spending more time arguing than holding those in power to account for improving the big things we need fixed.

*I’m talking about papa kainga, not Gloriavale…

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Sorry, it’s gonna get worse

Election year means all political parties (and their mouthpieces) scrambling and shouting for your ear to convince you they’re here for you because you’re right, which must mean the others are wrong.

You can probably already hear the divisive posts on their way to your feed. Remember this year’s strain will come with a (un) healthy dose of AI-enhanced misinformation and disinformation too.

But it can get better

Togetherness and kotahitanga are the antidote to that pending pandemic of rhetoric and divisiveness.

I get to see the beautiful act of doors opening to their community through Shoebox Christmas, and that connection to the bigger collective that happens. But as that door swings open and then shut, it becomes clear that we’re a bit out of practice at kotahitanga and community. That shouldn’t be surprising when you look around at that culture and business influences we consider normal, but having had the privilege of growing up many generations deep in Otaki, where community is still how we roll, and being connected to the collective groups of iwi I’m a part of - I hadn’t noticed it as much before.

Because of that and now that I’ve got Kaha Create up and running, I’m going to spend some time collecting kōrero on what it means for us to be a community and to work together. Because I don’t think we can wait for the rest of the world to remember that regardless of your GDP or how many languages your car talks, we’re all just smart monkeys evolved to thrive in tribes and communities.

I’ll share it with you here when it’s ready.

In the meantime, in the face of the upcoming shitstorm of political rhetoric and paid campaigns by lobbyists, please remember:

You won't change a person's beliefs in the comment section.
Choose where you put that energy - we're all going to need it this year.

Ngā manaakitanga,
Pera