Dunbar's Number

A Call To Downsize. But, How?

I woke up this morning to an email inbox that has never been cleaned out and sits at over 85K emails (this isn’t because I’m wildly popular, it’s because I’m lazy when it comes to technology.) Additionally, I have several voicemails I’ve meant to listen to, a string of unanswered texts, some WhatsApp messages that I need to respond to, and about a dozen other correspondences that have been neglected. Believe it or not, I’m actually the type of person who is on top of responding to things, so I can’t imagine what it might be like for a person who struggles in that respect.

What does this tell me? It tells me I’m one person who is physically and mentally incapable of keeping up with hundreds of different people with hundreds of different needs. Turns out 99.9% of humans are incapable of what most of us are trying to do.

So, why do we set ourselves up for failure, and worse than that, why do we set ourselves up to feel like failures when we predictably can’t keep up with the multitudes of humans we feel compelled and responsible to know and interact with? Why do we try to reject how God made us?

Because we have all been told this is normal.

I can’t tell you how many times I have felt overwhelmed simply by the sheer amount of circumstances, comments, and situations revolving around the people who only exist in my social media world. At any given time, I can hop online (which I do daily because it’s my job) and see videos about people’s homebirths, a new curriculum that an acquaintance wrote, a birthday party for a friend from high school’s child, and a message from an old friend asking me to promote their new business. It’s a lot, but it’s normal. For many people, before their feet hit the ground, they have thousands of swirling thoughts, and if we are honest, very few are about meaningful things like scripture, life purpose, and service to others. More often than not, our mind is taken hostage by new recipes to try, a fun workout at the gym, something else we need to add to our Amazon cart, and the possibility that 2025 might just be the year we start the hobby of crocheting.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to March 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic—the first few weeks after the world shut down. We had quite a bit of outdoor freedom on our small farm, and we spent a great deal of time planting our "Victory Garden" (which became all the rage in those early days, along with chicken procurement) and tending to our homestead. With the government’s push for isolation, we did feel slightly alone. We were part of a very large church in the area where we hadn't yet formed close relationships, and being relatively new to Virginia, we also didn't have a large group of very close friends. Our church shut down for 7 months (which is absolutely insane to think about). We have no family in the state. But we did have our little family of five, and that sustained us greatly. Still, we needed to bond with others. We needed a scripture and a deeper connection to a faith community. We needed far more than what social media or an online church could provide. Obviously.