We are social animals who need social habitat

Every big, immediate crisis of our time - like this latest crisis, the coronavirus pandemic - makes plain that it's not enough to be, think and act as an individual. So much of our personal wellbeing is determined at a level beyond our personal control.

If we want to solve our problems or achieve our best life - for ourselves, and for society - we need to explore what it means to be, think and act at a social level. And we need to get much better at it.

Social habitat is endangered

Unfortunately, the spaces in which we come together to explore what it means to be, think and act social are disappearing, and sometimes being destroyed. For example:

• Repeated shock events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, are dividing "winners" and "losers" in society farther and farther apart
• Growing differences of wealth, age, and education are creating distances between us so wide that the simplest encounters with people across "different walks of life" are becoming rare in daily life
• The collective experience of the public "broadcasts" is being replaced by the personalized experience of our "newsfeeds"
• Even the free time and space we would need to meet people outside our scheduled plans is disappearing, as we turn more and more of our life over to the tasks of production and consumption.

Social habitat is disappearing from our lives and from society. As that space where connections happen disappears, we become disconnected from one another. We become more individualized in our being, thinking and acting.

Everyone, from stay-at-home parents to globe-trotting CEOs, is being, thinking and doing within an increasingly simplified, disconnected awareness of reality as a whole. That, fundamentally, is why our world is full of crises we cannot solve. And that's why we can't respond to crises any other way than how we do right now.

Basecamp is an effort to rescue and restore vital social habitat, for ourselves and for one another.