Day 25: Be Long

Cape Town is as confused about the weather as it always is. Walking on the beach with scarfs and jackets in November. Yesterday it was 40 degrees Celsius. After leaving South Africa 16 years ago the city greets me with questions of heritage, history and kinship. On this trip I have been consistently struck by the deep of happiness one senses when talking to people who are settled in their communities. Having lived their whole live in a village, the world makes sense and everything knows where it belongs.
This sense of certainty releases a deeper sense of calm. Things are predictable, they fit. When you goto the local nursery you have long conversations with the owner about the pros and conns of opening a coffee shop.

Action for Happiness place a lot of emphasis on the importance of community in providing happiness. Being part of a community though means spending time together. The rituals and sharing weave shared commitments and understandings. Your investment can’t be short if you want to belong.

In the 70’s anthropologists made the ‘shocking’ discovery that a lot of what they learnt from communities was distorted. When researchers went into communities the people most keen on speaking to them were the outcasts, the outliers. Not being aligned with the rest of the group they were keenest on the newcomers and provided their fringe perspectives freely. The core of the communities would observe the interaction with the ‘newcomers’ to get a sense of where they would end up inside the social structure. A kind of social early warning system.

Very few companies make the investment to go long and be long in communities. The snapshot trajectory of ‘insight’ built through focus groups serve as truth for their multi-million dollar investments. Social listening experiments are often run by interns or younger staff who “get twitter.” But taking dipstick measures and sounding out the market can’t serve to provide the real sense of where the deeper concerns lie. Like the outsider anthropologists of the 70’s companies need to understand that their perspective is eccentric. Being ‘in sync’ is a longitudinal sympathy that understands the beats and underlying rhythms driving the community’s sense of self. As the african proverb has it: “to go fast, go alone, to go far, go together.” Be long.