Episode 26 - Cohabitation During Covid

Transcript

David: 0:07

Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán,

Ellie: 0:09

and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

The podcast where two friends, who are

Ellie: 0:13

also professors

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

David: 0:30

Ellie, you just moved, so I want to hear what your experience of that was like.

Ellie: 0:34

Yeah. So before the pandemic, I lived with a longtime friend of mine. She was my roommate. And I thought that I never wanted to live alone.

My thinking was: 0:43

I've tried living alone, I found it really depressing, like I'm sort of not my best self when I live alone. I'm likely to skimp on doing the dishes, watch more TV than I ordinarily might. And so I actually really like living with people to help regulate me. And then, you know, a shift really happened during COVID. Suddenly, when I was spending all of my time at home, not only working from home, but also spending every evening at home, et cetera, I started to crave more space and more alone time. And the same thing happened to my roommate. And now we both live alone. So I actually discovered that I really like living alone. It's just a matter of how I live alone. I live alone best when I'm in close community with other people so, yeah, I think COVID really changed my perspective on my living situation. How about you?

David: 1:33

So I've lived alone in the past. Uh, back in 2014, I was doing a fellowship in New Orleans and I lived by myself for the first time as an adult and I hated it. It was basically a major psychological regression where like, at some point, I was just not even wearing pants in the house, eating cereal day and night. Hated it. And now I am on the verge of going back to California, I am currently in France, and I will have to decide what I want my living situation to be. And I'm really having a difficult time deciding, because as I said, living alone in the past was not great, but I think that during COVID, it actually might be ideal for me.

Ellie: 2:18

Well, and I think we're at a very important moment right now when a lot of us are vaccinated and so we can go back to interacting with other people, because I think what made living alone attractive to me is the fact that I am now vaccinated and I can hang out with other people, have people over, because for a couple of months, over summer 2020, my roommate was gone. And that was at a moment in the pandemic where I really wasn't able to interact with other people in close quarters. I found living alone during that period of the pandemic absolutely intolerable. My anxiety really spiked because I couldn't be in physical proximity with other people. I felt super lonely. And so I think, you know, the conditions of COVID have really revealed to some people that they need to change their living situations because living alone during COVID, and also living with people during COVID, have presented these super extreme situations that only now, as we're sort of coming out of periods of confinement, are we starting to realize really were as extreme as they were.

David: 3:25

Yes. And a lot of this has intensified, in particular, during periods of lockdown, where if you live alone, you face this extreme loneliness where you don't know how to interact with other people, you don't know if you can interact with other people, which was really bad for a lot of people's mental health. On the other hand, people who co-habitated found themselves having to negotiate things that previously were not negotiated or even negotiable. And that introduced a lot of interpersonal tension into the household. I think that with COVID, we've seen a change, not just in how people live, but in how people relate to the home as a space.

Ellie: 4:06

Yeah, and it depends on which home you're talking about as a space. So, for instance, between March and July of 2020, 20% of Americans moved. And a lot of people around our age and especially those a little bit younger than us, say in their twenties, moved home, right? College students moved home. And I think, you know, there was a interesting New York times article about people who moved back to their childhood bedrooms during COVID and the author talks about the return of teen angst, you know, you're moving back in.

David: 4:35

Like 30 something year olds.

Ellie: 4:37

Yeah, exactly. You know, finding yourself face to face with your old yearbooks, with your old posters and that sort of thing. So the physical space of the home, for many, wasn't just changing, but was actually like returning or regressing to this previous moment of life.

David: 4:54

Yeah. And especially the household of your parents, right, has such psychological weight attached to it. I, of course, love my parents, but I can say in all honesty that whenever I go back to the place where they live, it suffocates me, not because of anything they do, but it's because the space has some memories built into it that then get sort of shoved in my face when I'm trying to look away. And if I had to live there, I could imagine becoming angsty about it in a bizarre way, right, in the way in which a 35 year old man can angst.

Ellie: 5:32

Well, definitely, because a lot of what teen angst is about is this feeling that you are prevented from your individual identity formation by having other people's expectations imposed upon you. And that's really something that happens a lot during periods of intense cohabitation, right, whether you're moving home with your parents during COVID or whether you're interacting with your roommate or your partner whom you live with in a new way.

David: 5:57

Yeah. And aside from the people who moved during COVID, I'm thinking about the people who got stuck, right, because a lot of people who maybe were planning to move were suddenly unable to do so during COVID because, um, apartments were not being shown, apartments were not being rented, people wanted to stay in their safety bubble. And I just wonder what that experience also was like, a feeling like you're trapped in a space, living with other people, especially people with whom maybe you don't see eye to eye when it comes to questions around safety.

Ellie: 6:30

Living with others has become a problem in a new way during this period, and as we start to come out of it through widespread vaccinations, it's a great time to reflect back and think about the new habits we formed.

David: 6:46

Today, we are talking about COVID and cohabitation.

Ellie: 6:50

How does living with others change our rhythms of life?

David: 6:53

And how do we manage, in the midst of living with those other people and with basically no where else to go, to find moments of peace, quietude, and maybe even solitude?

Ellie: 7:06

This pandemic be pushing us to think about cohabitation in communal terms? Prior to the pandemic, I was out most of the time. I was working on campus or at coffee shops, I was going out for drinks with friends, going to movies, taking walks in the neighborhood, going to picnics, and then suddenly during COVID, the home, the space of my apartment, became the site of basically all of my activities. Goodbye coffee shops, goodbye campus, goodbye exercise studios. Suddenly all of the things I used to do in different spaces were happening within the confines of my apartment.

David: 7:48

I don't know if you saw those videos of people recording themselves on TikTok and on Instagram, they were like welcome to my coffee shop and it was one corner of their couch and they're like, next we're going to the gym. And then they're just like took two steps and grabbed the weight they had purchased. And so the house topographically had different identities for different activities, but it was all happening in the span of 40 square meters, max. But yeah, I mean, I think that the sort of crowding of activities into a single space has become definitive of the COVID experience, the fact that everything that you used to do outside suddenly has to be done inside.

Ellie: 8:28

Yeah or like in the tiny amount of outdoor space that you have. So the apartment that I lived in, actually, one of the main reasons that I moved is because I had no outdoor space at my old place. And in the absence of that, during much of COVID, I would have friends over for socially distant dinners at these two outdoor bistro tables that I would set up in the carport of my building. So I'd would just be like, I'd bring out a couple of little candles and you'll have my cheap Ikea tables set six feet apart, but then we'd just be next to like my neighbor's cars, with like the helicopters of downtown Los Angeles noisily going over our heads.

David: 9:02

Yeah. And that's something that's been a major problem for me here in Paris, because one of the things that Americans will typically notice first is just how small the apartments are. They are tiny little eggs in comparison to American apartments or American houses. You know, they're like little eggs that you just are trapped inside. And you're-

Ellie: 9:21

Do you mean?

David: 9:23

No, because eggs are smaller than nests, Ellie. So like, I'm trying to really capture here the size and the need for hatching. I'm trying to break out of the window.

Ellie: 9:33

I love it.

David: 9:34

Um, and because of the large Osmanian buildings that are dominant in Parisian architecture, nobody really has outdoor space. Nobody has a yard, and most people don't even have a tiny balcony. At most, you might have a window. And the predicament that I'm facing and that I was facing while living with my partner is how do we share this tiny egg? Not just for living with one another, but in order to share our life together while doing all of our activities in the same place, right.

Ellie: 10:06

You know, those like you who have been living at least partially during COVID with a partner, suddenly that partner is also your coworker, is the only friend you can see on a regular basis. And then those who might've had a casual roommate situation, which you've also found yourself in during parts of COVID, when you lived in San Francisco now find themselves in a pod with those roommates. Those roommates become your entire support system. Even if you just like didn't know them that well beforehand. So, I mean, I'm thinking here about how the home space suddenly becomes multipurpose, but so too do the people we live with, they are suddenly multipurpose. They're our only support system. There are only friends, coworkers, sometimes lovers, et cetera.

David: 10:50

It's like, you're my roommate, but because I don't see any other people, you need to be also my friend and also my enemy and also my student. I'm just going to rant and mansplain things to you because I don't have anybody else to do it with. Um, but it really changes the social dynamic, right? Because when I think about the times that I spent in a small apartment with my partner, I got to see a side of him that I had never seen really before with as much clarity as I did during COVID, which is his side as a worker, the way in which he interacts with his coworkers, on his Zoom calls, the way in which he talks to his patients, because he works in medicine, and it's almost like peeling an additional layer of an onion that you thought was the last one, but then there are more layers underneath. Um, and also because it makes you cry, but- and it's kind of exciting to know that your partners or your friends or your roommates can surprise you still.

Ellie: 11:48

Yeah, no, I think that is cool to see new sides of somebody that you might not have had access to previously. At the same time, I think it can be very suffocating to go back to the word that you used for describing going home to your parents, right? Like this idea that I don't have any release from this home space. At most, maybe I have walks around the neighborhood or occasional socially distant hangs with other people outdoors. I think that was really a big challenge, um, that now that I'm vaccinated and can hang out with other people, freely, has just been totally lifted. I'm thinking about, for instance, the fact that for months, my roommate was the only person that I could touch and she was a good friend of mine, but it's not like we would often physically touch now. She was the only person that I could hug, right. And so then there was this sort of moment of like, we kind of need physical touch, but we maybe can't give each other the kind of physical touch that we really would want or the level, right. And so I remember like the first time I could hug my mom after months of the pandemic, I was just crying, hugging my mother because I had missed that so much. There was an extent to which my roommate, even though we were good friends, couldn't give me the range of physical touch that I wanted, including like the touch that I wanted from a hug from my mom.

David: 13:05

Yeah. you're like, "Mommy!" but it's actually your roommate. It's kind of you know, I guess if you don't have that dynamic leading up to it, which you shouldn't have that dynamic with your roommate leading up to it, um, but yeah, all those gaps and all those things that we're missing, can't be replenished. And I think that's exactly right that this suffocation comes from the absence of a release. And for a lot of people, living with roommates, in particular, created a pressure cooker, where you couldn't get away from them. So suddenly the people that you live with are too available, too visible, too present. And I don't think there is a right way to say that without it coming across almost like a personal attack against them, right. Like I don't want to see your face.

Ellie: 13:56

Totally. Yeah. And I think too this required so much negotiating of shared space. I remember for instance, I didn't have particularly strong wifi in my old apartment. And so a lot of times, the only way that my roommate and I could get consistent internet was by being in our living room or dining room. Neither of our bedrooms had particularly strong internet. And so we both had to work in the living room and/or dining room, which don't have a door between them. There was one night in particular where my roommate really wanted to watch a movie. And so she was watching it on the TV in the living room. And I had a FaceTime date with one of my very good friends. And my roommate got pretty annoyed cause she was like, I'm trying to relax and watch this movie and I keep overhearing your conversation with your friend. And then conversely, it's not really like I want to have a conversation with a close friend while in proximity to her, like knowing that there's no way she can't overhear it. And so there was like this moment of real tension, which was like, "Hey, how do we negotiate this shared space so this doesn't happen again?" because it was sort of annoying for both of us, but it's not really anybody's fault.

David: 14:56

Yeah. And, uh, you know, in this case, you're talking about a situation in which there were only two people, but my previous living situation in San Francisco, there were four of us in the same house. And so suddenly we had to start really thinking about, under conditions of confinement, what is the living room for, right? Who gets to use it and when, and for what purposes? Or are people sort of expected to just live in their private rooms, which in some cases is not really viable if your room doesn't get any sun or if it doesn't get good enough wifi. So we also had to work through some tensions that were created by the fact that we had to reinvent the rules concerning the usage of public space, because we were four people with only one living room.

Ellie: 15:44

Wow. And was it fun at all for you? Like did you enjoy being all together in the same space at moments?

David: 15:51

So there were moments of community building, probably like, Oh, let's do a family dinner or, Oh, let's watch a movie together. But then the real tensions began where, for example, somebody said, Hey, I can't work out of my room because my room is not big enough for a desk. So I need to be able to answer calls in the living room. And another person said, but then does that mean that I have to be in my room from eight to five every day because I can't go out there. Can I cook while you're on your phone calls? Uh, you know, can I watch a movie, to use the example that you just gave? And it was around that time that I also moved to France, but these were the sorts of conversations that began to happen as we moved into more serious of confinement.

Ellie: 16:39

I like how quickly you move from the fun stuff back to the crappy stuff again. But I think that resonates with a lot of people's experiences. I certainly found that there were silver linings to living with somebody. I really enjoyed a lot of moments of those early days of the pandemic, for instance, doing happy hour and puzzling with my roommate, right? Like that was really special. Or yeah, watching all of Tiger King, right. That was such a classic moment early in the pandemic

David: 17:06

I cannot.

Ellie: 17:07

With people they lived with.

David: 17:08

There's a movie coming out, of Tiger King.

Ellie: 17:10

Oh, well, I'd actually be curious to know how many people who got into Tiger King did so with people they were living with. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be that only people who lived with others got into Tiger King, because Tiger King would have been too weird to watch by yourself.

David: 17:27

It was already too weird to watch with other people, um.

Ellie: 17:32

Oh my God, back to cohabitation. Um, I'm just going to like, have fond memories of Tiger King and not look too closely at it. But I think one thing that the past year has really brought to mind for me is the nature of rhythm in the space, right? Like we've been thinking about the physical space of the home, the living room, negotiating that, but negotiating the space of the living room also means negotiating the rhythms of other people. We have affective, emotional, embodied, and habitual rhythms that mostly happen unconsciously, and living together during COVID required new levels of coordinating between them, including changing the boundaries around some people's rhythms. Um, I'm thinking about how, since I used to work from home three days a week before the pandemic anyway, but my roommate never worked at home, and suddenly both of us working at home during the day really shifted things for me because I was never used to having to deal with her lunch schedule, right, during the workday. And she was never used to seeing me work from home in like my trollish ways where I'm just like doing my research and not wanting to talk to anybody. And so suddenly, she was at home during the day and I wasn't used to that.

David: 18:46

Yeah, I really like the term rhythm for thinking through the ways in which COVID is changing our relationship to others in relation to a common shared space, in this case, the home. And rhythm of course, is a musical term that has to do with the temporal unfolding of a phenomenon or an event And the thing about living with other people during COVID is that we all bring, as you point out, Ellie, our own rhythms to the relationship, and those can be conscious rhythms or unconscious rhythms. And then we are faced with a problem, which is how do we make my rhythms link up with your rhythms in such a way that they don't collapse necessarily into the same rhythmicity, uh, and that term in music for this is entrainment. How do we entrain our rhythms so that they have a relationship without necessarily becoming a unity?

Ellie: 19:42

Okay. So the trick is to keep your identities, your individuality, separate, which strikes me as important, certainly, as somebody who thinks that the separation between Self and Other is a necessary condition for pretty much everything: morality, self-development, et cetera. But then also to kind of not step on each other's toes, right, creating this disharmonious frustrating, or I shouldn't say disharmonious, I would just say like arrhythmic, right, situation where people are getting on your nerves all the time. And I think one place where I think a lot of people experience this is when they're traveling with other people. That's when you really start to see that your rhythms might not be compatible. And it's sort of weird because lockdown during COVID is the antithesis of traveling. But I think it has a similar effect because you're with this person all the time, doing everything together, needing to construct your schedule around theirs. Differences in rhythm really appear and they appear more jarringly.

David: 20:44

Yeah, you really see other people's rhythms, right? Like, Oh, is this the kind of person that gets up early in the morning, gets to work right away? Or do they dilly dally in the morning and then work late at night? Um, you know, do they eat at regular intervals or are they more haphazard about that? And all those little details of our lives that together add up, not necessarily to a personality, but more like to a temporal scaffolding, in which our personality sort of manifest itself. And the point is that we don't think about those rhythms and yet we live them. We embody them. And when they are disrupted, we the impact of that disruption.

Ellie: 21:26

Yeah, because it's easy to be like this person is messing up my rhythm, right. I'm thinking here about how the French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote in his early 20th century book Matter in Memory that the duration lived by our consciousness has its own specific rhythm. That is to say that the main difference between myself and another person, for Bergson, is a difference in rhythm, how we live our style of inhabiting time through our embodied habits, our modes of perception, ways of interacting with the world around us, right? I think oftentimes when we think of identity or individuality, it's in terms of material, right? Or in terms of the actual body, in terms of our values, and Bergson says, no, individuality is actually more a matter of rhythm, your relation to time.

David: 22:18

Yeah. And Bergson is one of these philosophers that really foregrounds the temporal dimension of experience because he believes that that's really the only truth that we have access to. And that is that we are temporal beings first and foremost, who exist and subsist in time. And here we can contrast Bergson with somebody like Rene Descartes. In the 17th century, Rene Descartes famously is trying to find an absolute truth that cannot be doubted. So he starts asking himself, you know, what can I know with absolute certainty, which is how he lands through a process of doubt and introspection on that famous, clear, and distinct idea that we know: I think therefore I am. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, Bergson takes up the same question and he says, okay, let me go through this process of doubt and see what I really can know with absolute certainty. And he says, actually, I think Descartes is wrong. If I try to introspect and I focus on what I know, what I feel, and what I can not doubt, it's not that I think. It's actually that I am in time. So that is the foundation from which philosophy begins for Bergson. So he kind of turns the tables on Descartes by saying, I am not defined by cognition, by thinking. I'm actually defined by my embodied temporality, by the way in which my very being at every moment is constantly being and becoming at the same time.

Ellie: 23:54

I think that's such an interesting way of putting it, because you can think about the ways that like you can pick up on somebody's impatience who's sitting next to you, right. And it's different from yours. That's one way that we see the separation between Self and Other.

David: 24:06

Yeah. And in those cases where you sort of feel the tension of their impatience in the air, what is happening is that you're noticing the rhythmicity of their being, of their existence, of how they are projecting themselves onto the world. And you notice that there's of a discrepancy between their way of being in the world and your own way at that particular time. So one of the things that I like about Bergson's philosophy is that it's really helpful for thinking about different rhythms that happen not just because we're different people, but maybe even because we belong to different cultures, because we speak different languages, to think about really the plurality of rhythmicities that exist in nature and that explain, to some degree, why our experience of the world is not exactly identical to others even when we are, say, members of the same culture, members of the same sex, members of the same species.

Ellie: 25:04

Yeah, it reminds me too of Immanuel Kant's claim in the Critique of Pure Reason that time is our inner sense, and space is outer sense.

David: 25:15

Yeah. And the difference here between Kant and Bergson is that Kant is a universalist and so he argues that time and space, which he thinks are properties of consciousness, are something that our minds bring to the world rather than properties of the world itself. He argues that all humans, in fact, all rational agents, have the same forms of time and space. So all humans have the same experience of temporality and the same experience of spatiality, whereas in Bergson, there is a bit of an opening for thinking about different spatialities, different rhythmicities and you really see this in Bergson's writings about other animals, where he says they have their own temporality, they have their own spatiality, so why can't humans also differ in their experience of time and space?

Ellie: 26:07

But actually there is a place in the Critique of Pure Reason where Kant considers the same idea, namely that different individuals have different inner senses. So there might be a glimmer of Kant possibly getting into the insight that Bergson would get to, you know, a hundred odd years later. But we'll leave that digression for listeners to pursue if they want to really nerd out on Kant on time, his inner sense. Moving away from Kant and Bergson for a moment, one of the central insights of the field of ethnomusicology is that our sense of rhythm is not constant between different historical periods and different geographical locations. So whether or not our inner sense of time is universal we will leave aside, but its manifestations in rhythm certainly are not universal. Once you're acculturated into a specific sense of rhythm, right, through your upbringing as a child, and then moving into adulthood through ritual, through cultural festivals, through music, et cetera, it can actually be quite hard to break out of that sense of rhythm even though there are lots of different senses of rhythm that exist across cultures in the world.

David: 27:20

Yeah. And I think there's a whole story to be told here no offense, Ellie, about, you know, white people not having rhythm. Um, but the reason has to do with the fact that Western music has historically privileged harmonic over rhythmic complexity, uh, whereas many non-European musical traditions, privilege rhythm over harmony, which is why historically things like African music, Black music, indigenous music, have been dismissed by white European musicologists as simple and primitive and underdeveloped in spite of its incredible richness because those white European interpreters are only thinking in terms of harmony and not in terms of rhythm.

Ellie: 28:08

Hmm. So just kind of looking in the wrong places. And I think that also makes sense when we think about the way that rhythm is more closely, at least arguably so, related to the body, related to sensuality, than harmony is. Harmony is closely related to mathematics, right? If you think back to the ancient Greek work of Pythagoras, whereas rhythm is more closely related to our senses. And given white Europeans' dismissal and even fear of the body, of sensuality, I think we can easily understand why there would also be a dismissal of rhythm.

David: 28:44

Yeah. And I think it has to do with the fact that rhythm literally moves the body without the assent of the mind right? When you hear a rhythm, you start sort of tapping, you start moving to the rhythm. And it almost seems like from at least a European perspective, the eruption of the irrational, which here is contrasted again to that harmonic complexity in music, but bringing this back to COVID, it just makes me think that we are just not used to thinking about the rhythms of our lives until they are disrupted. And by then it's too late.

Ellie: 29:18

And we're also not used to thinking about needing to entrain our rhythms in relation to other people's. We're used to thinking that like, if we're cognizant of our rhythms at all, it's to be like, Here's my rhythm, here are my boundaries. Respect them, negotiate around them.

David: 29:34

Yeah. I think that's exactly right.

Ellie: 29:36

So like maybe the whole Anglo-European discourse around boundaries is actually just like a bad displaced narrative around rhythms.

David: 29:45

Yeah. It's like Western political philosophy just has no rhythm. During COVID, we've had to become way more tangled up in the lives of others than we normally even would be comfortable with. And not just our roommates, for example, but also their friends. So there is a second degree of separation that suddenly becomes immediate. And one clear example of this is just sex. During COVID, people started expecting information, not only about the people that their roommates had sex with, but also about who those other people had sex with, as a way of just tracking the risk factors. And one of the things that I know from my friends who were in that situation is just how uncomfortable having those discussions was, because it required really thinking in a communal way that is not indigenous to our Western mind.

Ellie: 30:51

And I really think this is the fall of political liberalism, which is what American society is based on. Liberalism makes us see individuals as primary. They are the basic social units and community is built up out of individuals. So community is secondary to individuality. This is, you know, a pretty impoverished way of viewing things in my view. And there are a lot of alternatives that we could provide where community is actually primary and individuality is second. One that a lot of people have focused on, especially in the past couple of decades, is the African concept of ubuntu. Ubuntu is a word that is shared by a lot of the Bantu speaking peoples of Africa, especially in Southern Africa, but not limited to that region. And it's a combination of the prefix ubu, which generates an abstract word or concept, with the root ntu, which stands for human. Ubuntu has a long tradition in African thought and precedes African colonialism, but it really became popular in the English speaking world after the 1990s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where Archbishop Desmond Tutu referred to it as a sort of African ethos that is an alternative to individualism. Basically, Ubuntu postulates that personhood, our individual identity, as well as our morality, are not something that is given; rather, they are achieved in relation to, and only through, our social interaction with others. I think the most famous formulation of this is in the phrase, "I am, because we are," which is an alternative to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am."

David: 32:29

Yeah. And because ubuntu begins from the ontological primacy of the communal, rather than the individual, it has become very difficult to translate into the lingo of Western philosophy, not that it needs to. But when Westerners think about ubuntu, sometimes they try to reduce it to a specific dimension or a specific category that has a cognate in Western philosophy. So for instance, some people will say, "Ubuntu is a theory of humanity. It is a humanism." Other people will say, "Well, it really is a theory of personhood. It's the claim that we are persons largely through our interactions with other people." And another definition that I really like is to think of as a theory or as a philosophy of justice that turns on the concept of communal healing and rehabilitation, which is why it was used, as you pointed out, by Desmond Tutu in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission project in South Africa, which focused on healing the social bond from the harms of apartheid. And so ubuntu is a theory of our humanity. It is a theory of personhood. It is a relational theory of identity, and it is a philosophy of justice and the best way to capture it, as you point out Ellie, is to think about it as an ethos, as something that animates, not just a lot of African languages, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, but also the mode of life in this part of the world.

Ellie: 33:58

One thing that interests me about the philosophy of Ubuntu is that on the one hand, there is an emphasis on all people as being equally worthy of moral regard. And on the other hand, an emphasis on the fact that ethical conduct requires negotiating social imbalances of power. That's something that African scholars, including Bhekizizwe Peterson, who's a professor of African literature, addresses in his work on ubuntu, this idea that ethical conduct with others requires an equality that is shaped in relation to society and not sort of presumed the way that a lot of European liberalism presumes it. And I think that's really important in thinking about our negotiations of space with others, right? Because all too often, the European liberalistic tradition that we've sort of imbibed presumes equality rather than taking equality as requiring a recognition of power imbalances as equality- of equality as something to be achieved in relation to others.

David: 35:03

Well in one of the most powerful things for me about ubuntu philosophy is that it places emphasis on restoring the whole rather than the part. When there is tension, when there is conflict, when there are problems, you don't focus on addressing the problem at the individual level, but you're rather try to provide some form of communal healing. And so if we try to use the language of rhythms that we were using before, we would say that the point of living together is not so that I, or you, have our rhythms restored, but rather that we create a set of rhythms that work well together. And I think that's an important point to keep in mind, that what is good for the whole is primary here. And that really is counter to our inclinations of thought for those of us who are raised in a different culture.

Ellie: 35:56

Yeah. There's an East African equivalent of ubuntu, which is utu. The scholar Kai Kresse talks about utu as requiring an awareness that not only do we have this kind of abstract quality of being human, but our humanity needs to be proven through concrete performance. And that concrete performance of humanity is happening, right, in relation to the whole, our performance of ourselves, of our own humanity, isn't a given, right? Like I'm not just like, here's my humanity and there's yours. And when we think about, for instance, like the negotiation of something as simple as who gets to watch TV on a given night, or are we going to watch something together, or who gets to choose, or when are we going to do the dishes, right. All of those very banal things that have caused a lot of anxiety for a lot of people during COVID. I think when we think about negotiating those in terms of the psychotherapeutic language of boundaries, we end up thinking about what are my rights, what is owed to me, and what do I owe another person? And that invariably leads to tension rather than this alternate notion, which is, Hey, what is the whole space of the home? And how do I exist sort of in relation to that, such that it's not about me getting my boundaries met or maintained, but rather about sort of entraining myself to the rhythm of others and creating an ecosystem of the home that is affirming for the individuals involved.

David: 37:30

In thinking about those ways in which ubuntu needs to be performed, the philosopher Julius Gathogo uses the concept of hospitality, which she thinks is a pretty decent translation of ubuntu, because it is through acts of hospitality that are Other-directed that we come to not just do something for them, but to do something for us. That's how we become human. That's how we become persons. That's how we develop our sense of identity that only makes sense the context of our community. And that notion of hospitality really is incompatible, or at least not very easily reconcilable, with the language of boundaries and rights that dominates Western political theory, and this is why some Africana philosophers have made the argument that even as Europe sort of prides itself and pats itself on the back for its so-called progress, in reality, it is light years behind other systems of philosophy, especially Africana philosophy, when it comes to thinking about morality and political theory, precisely because it has gotten the ontology wrong. It begins from the atomic individual and tries to build everything on top of that without realizing that, in fact, what it takes as primary is an effect of the community. It is the-

Ellie: 38:45

Hmm.

David: 38:46

first at an ontological level.

Ellie: 38:49

Yeah. And I think that is an interesting argument. I worry that the language of light years ahead, right, this idea that Africa, by virtue of the concept of ubuntu that does permeate a lot of different African cultures across the continent is somehow like ahead of the West. I worry that that is itself the logic of colonialism and the logic of sort of Western philosophy, right, the idea that some cultures are ahead of others. So I would take issue with that formulation of it, but I think the general point might be that this view is better because it is truer than Western liberal theory.

David: 39:24

Ha.

Ellie: 39:25

That I would be okay with.

David: 39:26

Well, but if you say better, that's still an advancement over something else. And so I get your point that this is a concern about the use of the language of progress that has been at the root of practices of colonialism, and so maybe we don't want to use progressivist language, but I don't really have a problem doing that when Europe ends up in the backseat. It's like, yeah, you guys are in the backwards ones. It's time to turn the tables. I'm totally okay with that use of-

Ellie: 39:51

David, the Master's Tools won't dismantle the Master's House, but I think, you know, this might actually take us full circle because here I'm concerned about the idea that the logic of progress or advancement presumes a concept of time that overlooks rhythm, right? Progress over time implies linear progression, right, rather than a sort of- well, actually not necessarily we'll leave dialectical views of progress out of it, but I'm much more interested in a richer concept of time that is sort of moving away from these narratives of progress and also noticing the kind of complexities and relational dynamics of time, which I think actually the concept of humanity that we get in ubuntu, this emphasis on the whole, gestures towards.

David: 40:38

And not just that, but also thinking about time not just as a sequence of moments on a line, but as something that has a sort of logic to its own unfolding that is rhythmic and that, as we said before, draws you out of yourself sometimes without your mind's assent. And so hopefully for those people who are living alone or living with others , you can find a rhythm that works not just for you individually, but for you in the plural. That's one of the benefits of the you in English, that it is actually ambiguous about whether it's or-

Ellie: 41:14

Okay.

David: 41:14

collective.

Ellie: 41:16

And as the US starts to quote open back up, with vaccinations and the reopening of businesses, I hope we can be taking lessons from the challenges of cohabitation that we've experienced during COVID and also just like to get out of what was so crappy about that too. Cause thank God. Thank God I can, I can leave my house now.

David: 41:36

Yeah. Maybe see each other on the other side. Enjoying Overthink? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 41:56

We've been thinking about cohabitation in terms of syncing up our rhythms with those that we live with. But I think here that an equally important issue is figuring out how to break away from the synchronization of rhythms in order to find times that are just for us, you know, when we don't have the opportunity to leave the home the way we did before, do we find a moment of peace and solitude?

David: 42:18

Yeah. And I think there are two ways of asking this question. One is in terms of solitude and one is in terms of privacy and they're not the same question. And for me, the difference is that when I think about privacy, it has to do with keeping information in, keeping it from leaking out, whereas solitude is about keeping information out, keeping it from leaking in.

Ellie: 42:41

I really liked that distinction. David. I've never thought about it in those terms, but I think that is so useful. So privacy as not letting stuff leak out, solitude as not letting stuff leak in.

David: 42:54

So in connection to cohabitation during COVID, I found myself struggling with issues of privacy. For example, when I had to call my doctor and have a medical appointment in an apartment filled with roommates where the walls are too thin. And so suddenly I was like, Hmm, I guess I'm going to be whispering under my bedsheets and talking about my medical history with my doctor. Solitude is very different because it has to do with creating a refuge that is conducive to something like rumination, to self observation, being able to curate a space for you where you won't be bothered by others. And so that's different from privacy, but it's still a problem for people who live with others during COVID.

Ellie: 43:39

I've always liked Hannah Arendt's comments about solitude, where she describes solitude as a way of being with yourself. You need to be away from other people in a genuine sense, right? So not like scrolling your phone, not constantly thinking about them in order to be with yourself. That private space I think is actually necessary for solitude. So I think, you know, maybe there's a relationship that they have, um, because what solitude provides for us is a chance to be with the different sides of ourselves, right? We're not just kind of like this single entity. We want to have a dialogue with ourselves, whether it's through writing in a journal, or through thinking, or through singing, whatever it might be.

David: 44:25

Yeah. And I really love Hannah Arendt's concept of the two in one, where she says that in order for us to cultivate the right kind of relationship to ourselves, we have to separate our consciousness into two, right. Consciousness has to become subject and object at the same time. And that creates an internal division that makes possible what is known as an inner dialogue, to use that term, Ellie, having a dialogue with ourselves and for Arendt, that's very literal. Different parts of yourself are talking to one another, but it doesn't mean that those parts are real on their own, it's just that consciousness establishes a reflexivity that enables a recursive kind of communication where you talk to yourself about yourself.

Ellie: 45:09

So ironically, too much communion with others can actually prevent this different kind of communion, which is the communion that we find with ourselves in solitude. And, you know, I think there are big differences here between the kinds of people you live with in finding this solitude. So for instance, if you live with somebody who's just a roommate, you can retreat into your room and hopefully, provided that you feel safe, provided that you feel like you do have some privacy, you can acquire that solitude by virtue of having this private space to yourself. However, if you live with a romantic partner, your bedroom is also their bedroom, right? And you often don't even have that time or space for privacy or solitude that you might need.

David: 45:54

And I think you're putting your finger on something important here, which is that those moments of solitude, of generative solitude, the kind of solitude that leads to self-discovery, for example, are becoming harder and harder to have during COVID, but especially for people who live with their romantic partners. But to this, I would add yet another distinction, which is the distinction in between solitude and loneliness. Because, for example, Nietzsche is very clear when he says loneliness is one thing, solitude is another. And we know that people who have lived alone during the pandemic, they experience loneliness rather than solitude. And that's a kind of ungenerative being with oneself, where you simply feel isolated and alienated from others. You feel cut off from the world.

Ellie: 46:43

Yes, that is exactly what I felt in summer 2020, when my roommate left for two months and I was suddenly living alone without anybody else in my pod. I felt this profound loneliness and Arendt also talks about the distinction between solitude and loneliness, where she says that loneliness is actually the inability to be by yourself with yourself. Loneliness is what you have when you are with a crowd. And I think, we have to understand that metaphorically in order for it to make sense here. But for instance, when I was really lonely last summer, what was I doing? I was scrolling my phone a lot, right. I was escaping through television. Those are ways of having a sort of inner crowd and not the inner crowd that's going to facilitate dialogue. I think for a lot of people during the pandemic, it's been too hard to face actual solitude. It's scary. People's mental health has been so challenged that it's like, well, what am I going to do? I'm not going to be my best self in like this inner dialogue. I need to escape and just kind of like hunker down and get through this.

David: 47:42

And the idea that you can be your loneliest self precisely in the middle of the crowd, which sounds counter-intuitive, but it has to do with a kind of self relation. So I want to go back to that point that loneliness is fundamentally an inability to withstand yourself in the absence of others. And so we flee from ourselves and throw ourselves into the crowd, into the they, um, because we don't like what we see and we're afraid of what we might find. And one of the things that Nietzsche's writings add to our understanding of solitude is the fact that when we manage to truly turn our solitude into a friend or into a life companion, that we look forward to, that we like spending time with, it makes our being with others all that much more meaningful, all that much more significant, because if you can be with yourself and learn to make of solitude a companion for life, then you know that when you are with others, that when you choose to spend time with others, it's because you love them and not because you need them.

Ellie: 48:51

Well, so if solitude is this important and valuable, the question is how do we find it when we're trapped with others in the house during COVID, or if we're alone, how do we find it when we're prone to loneliness than solitude?

David: 49:04

Well, my solution is to do what Nietzsche's character Zarathustra does, which is just to go and live in the mountains for 10 years, become friends with the animals and then come down to the city and tell everybody what you learned about yourself, although I don't know how practical that is. But I think there are other things that people have done, more practical things, as a way of rediscovering themselves, especially when they live with other people. And I'm here thinking about two friends of mine, they are a couple. And at the very beginning of the pandemic, they talked with one another and they said, look, we cannot just be with each other all the time. It's not healthy. We need time to ourselves. And so they came to this agreement that every day, they both would go for a one hour long walk through the city, by themselves, at different times. So that at least during that time they would give the other person sort of space to breathe, time to be alone, and also give themselves that time. And the interesting thing is that even though it began as this exercise for protecting solitude, it then also transformed to, uh, something else where, uh, my friend was telling me look, because I've been going on these, like, alone walks, I've gotten to know the city in a brand new way. And it has rekindled my love for the city. I've come to appreciate the architecture. I've come to really understand the relationship between different neighborhoods and it all came out of this concerted effort to figure out, in very, very practical well terms, how to protect alone time.

Ellie: 50:42

Yeah. I think the walk is a really important way of finding solitude. I'm also thinking about how we tend to associate in our culture solitude with adolescents, right, with teen angst. And so I'm thinking back to those people who moved to their childhood bedrooms, maybe they have been the best finders of solitude during this time, because they're stuck in the space where they like have this solitude of teen angst and they're, you know, rereading their old journals from high school.

David: 51:09

Oh my.

Ellie: 51:10

But, you know, a lot of times we think about solitude, we think about precisely that, right? Like the teenager alone in their bedroom, reflecting, or an adult reflecting alone in their bedroom. But one of the times that I often find solitude emerging most is in the interstitial moments between activities of everyday life. I feel solitude on my commute. I feel solitude when I am waiting for a friend at the bar. Those interstitial moments, I think, have been gone during COVID except for maybe like the shower, right, I think is another place for that. And so I'm excited, you know, maybe as we now start to open back up again, to rediscover solitude, ironically, you know, as we rediscover society.

David: 51:52

Open up. I want to be alone. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 52:05

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com as well as connecting with us on Facebook through our page or group.

David: 52:15

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

Ellie: 52:27

Thanks so much for joining us today.