Weekly drop
In this week’s Ideas in Progress piece, author, journalist and strategist, Masuma Ahuja, explores the potential of the dinner table for making space for us to eat, laugh, talk and dream together.
I have spent the last few years in research and conversations trying to understand how we build models for community in an increasingly lonely and insular world, and what connecting with each other might unlock on a personal and a societal level. I can’t shake the conviction that a more connected world is a more prosperous and possible one. That maybe in losing the habit of being together, we lost access to all the possibilities we can unlock only with the unique combinations of all of our perspectives and skills.
The hard part is that community isn’t something any of us can engineer on our own, it requires buy-in, for other people to show up.
I turn to new social media apps, to supper clubs and members clubs, to publicly funded social infrastructure. All answering questions about how we scale the intimacy of a group chat. How we make that feeling of belonging something that’s baked into the world around us.
Somehow, though, the answer I find is often at the dinner table.
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