Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty

I read this quite a while ago, so I should reread before writing this (I will rewrite after rereading)

In this essay, the author speaks about human groups, community, cooperation, creativity and the lives of the humans within those groups. Just as constraints enable creativity and too much freedom can be overwhelming for creative work, the lack of constraints on our social lives may have unexpected negative effects on our capacities as societies.

Traditionally, humans have been gathering in tree-like nested groups of groups of humans, where people had voice in their inner groups and those loosely coupled units could iterate on cultural innovations, imitating what works for them and discarding what don’t - but how to have a voice on a always global conversation? In which meaningful ways can we communicate globally if not by relatable memes?

As usual for Ribbonfarm and Sarah Perry, a great read.