Commusings: True Wellth

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Dear Commune Community,

The rooster crows (or rather, the cat jumps on my face). I stumble to the closet, fetch my phone, and open my Oura ring app. My sleep score is a 92! I must be well rested. Thank heavens for this wearable, for how else would I know if I had gotten enough sleep?

The need to check one’s sleep score is a modern reflection of a broader human endeavor. Across the ages, humans have created metrics and measurements to get our arms around the world, to gauge success, and to better prophesize.

These symbols pervade every corner of life. We can ascertain the ambient temperature by measuring the expansion of mercury in a glass tube. This metric is socialized through a number on the Fahrenheit or Celsius scale.

I won’t argue that symbols aren’t helpful – but they are not what they say they are. They are symbolic – representative of some underlying reality.

As Alan Watts often quipped, humans too often confuse the map with the territory and the menu with the food. You don’t visit a cartological coordinate, you visit a town with denizens and cafes. You don’t eat the carte du jour, you savor the actual croque monsieur.

Nowhere do symbols distort our reality more than in our assessment of wealth. Companies are judged by their year-over-year revenue growth. Countries are evaluated by the increase in their annual GDP.

But like a human body requires both growth and restoration in equal measure, does not a company or a country also necessitate a similar balance?

Do symbols like growth percentage belie true health?

In a speech at the University of Kansas in March 1968, my political hero, Senator Robert Kennedy, addressed this very issue:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Similar to how we mistakenly assess the success of nations by their GDP, we humans often conflate our personal wealth with our bank ledger. Our individual worth is regularly defined by the abstract symbol of money. So, logically, we both crave it and cling to it. And, in this incessant craving and clinging, we become dissatisfied while life’s true target – real wealth and happiness – dangles relentlessly somewhere “out there.”

Yes, of course, some degree of money is related to our ability to be safe, sheltered, well-fed, and educated. But beyond this point, there is very little correlation between money and human flourishing.

True wealth – or what I dub “wellth” – is accrued through the direct experience of feeling vibrant, building strong social connections, learning, and applying one’s imagination.

And it is these aspects of life that Commune deeply yearns to provide. Our courses – on health, spirituality, mindfulness, leadership, and regeneration – are conduits to feeling strong, connected, curious, and in a state of personal growth and efflorescence.

I hope you will consider gifting yourself a Commune Membership as a means to grow your true “wellth.”

In love, include me,
Jeff