The Share Issue

Yes, it’s true. Our second issue, The Share Issue, greets the world today. To get a little peek into why we’re investigating sharing this time around, here’s the letter from the editor for this issue. To download it for free, head on over here. To buy a print copy, you can grab that here. Thanks for coming along on the journey!

As I was in the process of writing this letter I came across a TED talk that Helen Fisher gave in which she talked about emerging trends in women in the workforce, “Everywhere in the world woman are moving into the job market and closing the gap in economic power… Yet for millions of years on the grasslands of Africa women commuted to work to gather their vegetables. They came home with 60% to 80% of the evening meal. The double income family was the standard, and women were regarded as just as economically, socially, and sexually powerful as men. In short, we’re really moving forward to the past.”

When I kicked off The 11 Project I knew I wanted to look at the wide variety of things that are shifting for us right now. In particular, I’m interested in how that is affecting our definition of “the good life”. What’s fascinating is that in many ways our “evolution forward” looks very much like, as in Helen Fisher’s example, a reaching back.

Connection, community, and sharing seem to be in our DNA. All of these things are an enormous part of what it means to be human. We used to live in very tightly knit communities where everyone’s connection to, and responsibility for, the other was assumed. We can skip the history lesson, but suffice it to say, somewhere along the way we decided that the single family home with the two car garage was the way to go, and our communities changed drastically.

And yet today we seem to be on a lightening fast track toward re-connecting. We are currently witnessing an explosion of new tools that are allowing community and sharing to happen in a way that they just didn’t 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago. There are plenty of trends to notice in the conversation about what makes us happy these days, but none is as all encompassing and as rapidly evolving as how sharing now touches all of our lives on a daily basis. Think about the last time you used a communal tool like, say, Google, Wikipedia, Craigslist or Facebook, and you get what I mean by “daily”.

There is more opportunity for connection, community, and sharing (of experience, information, and physical goods) than ever before in history. This point is made abundantly clear in Lisa Gansky’s brilliant book, The Mesh. Her inspiring and laser sharp look at how sharing, or “the mesh”, is now affecting literally every sector was the inspiration for this issue, so it seemed appropriate that she grace our cover!

The means are clearly different. I don’t see us literally moving into the past by attempting to recreate a hunter gatherer society anytime soon (though Jeanne Goodman of the Jamaica Plain Cohousing community, interviewed in this issue, certainly shows a compelling and very contemporary option for living within a more closely knit community). As you’ll see in the interviews in the following pages, in many cases it is rapid advances in technology and all the delicious gifts of Web 2.0 that allow us to reconnect to a sense of community and sharing.

Whatever the means, and whatever the sphere of influence- be it local food, car sharing, housing, or empowering citizens- the effect is that we are reconnecting to a fundamental piece of our humanness. We are coming home to ourselves and that makes for a very good life indeed.