Urban Tribes the Blog

How To Build a Grotto

Avoid isolation by setting up a shared office space

by Ethan Watters

Humans are social creatures. While freelancers seldom miss the constraints of office life -- the unnecessary meetings, the petty politics, the wretched busywork -- they often long for the companionship that traditional offices provide. When you're all alone in a home office day after day, you can spend whole afternoons staring into refrigerators or examining suspicious skin discolorations. Isolation breeds inertia, and some freelancers experience a sudden loss of creativity or productivity, as if their abilities were somehow tied to the social expectations of working with a team. By joining forces with several like-minded independent professionals to get a shared office space, you can create a sense of camaraderie without compromising the goals or vision of your own work. It's actually much simpler to do than you might think.

Thankgiving Essay

Years ago, when we were young and new to the city, we called them "orphan Thanksgiving dinners." We were beginning our careers, scraping by as artists or working as waiters and we often couldn't afford the expense or time to make it back to family for the holiday. At the beginning of November those who knew they would be stranded in town spread the word and one by one friends of friends would make themselves known. When Thanksgiving Day rolled around the card tables placed end to end could not hold us all and many would be forced to couches and the edges of beds to balance paper plates on our knees.

The dinner was always potluck and there was always too much food. One year a table actually collapsed under the weight of the offerings. Many of us tried to recreate the tastes of our childhoods in our efficiency kitchens. We called home for family recipes, the more ironic the better. Someone would bring an elaborate Jell-O dish with Cool Whip and canned pineapple or a sweet potato casserole with mini-marshmallows. These dishes were partly spoofs on our middle class suburban upbringings but they were often eaten first because they reminded us of home.

After dinner a few friends would bring out their guitars or we'd read a play someone had been working on with each of us taking a part. We took rambling walks through the strangely calm city. There were more calls home to mothers for advice on how to remove wine or gravy stains from the couch. The celebration would stretch into the night. No one wanted to go back to his or her apartment alone.

It was years ago that we called those gatherings "orphan Thanksgiving dinners." Something about them changed as my friends and I reached our late twenties and early thirties. The celebrations became more formal. The paper plates and coffee mugs were replaced with real, breakable dishes and matching wine glasses. Rituals formed over the years. Friends now wrote songs and rehearsed plays specifically to be performed at Thanksgiving. The after dinner walk had a specific route through the park.

Our tastes became sophisticated, as did our cooking skills and the once haphazard potlucks turned into multi-course feasts. There would be portabella mushrooms stuffed with Brie cheese and artichoke hearts and butternut squash risotto with shavings of black truffle. A few up-and-coming gourmands became serious about their sauces. The yearly pie contest became brutally competitive. (Although there were half a dozen blue ribbons from "Best Crust" to "Most Creative Use of Fruit.") There was still too much to eat but one of us had bought a house with a dining room and a sturdy oak table that could seat us all and handle the weight of the food.

But those weren't the changes that mattered. What mattered was this: We could now afford the time and travel expense to make it home to our kin but we chose not to. More precisely, the very idea of where home was had changed in our minds. What had begun as an affiliation of friends of friends - a stopgap measure to support us during our time living outside of family -- had become the central social structure in our big city lives.

Looking back at my twenties, I can now picture us as explorers in a new social landscape where it was suddenly the norm for both men and women to spend ten or more years living single, far away from our families and hometowns. No one told us that we were going to delay marriage longer than any generation in American History and no one gave us a map for how to navigate that time. Faced with the social wilderness of the city we slowly forged communities among our friends. Years ago we gathered haphazardly because we could not make it home to family. This Thanksgiving, my friends and I will come together reverently with a desire to honor our group with this particular holiday. We give thanks for this self-made community and for the certainty that we are orphans no longer.

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MY BEST EX-FRIENDS

October 19, 2003
New York Times
THE AGE OF DISSONANCE

By BOB MORRIS

finally got around to meeting a friend's kid the other day. She lives down the street, and yet it took me a year to get over there. Maybe I just didn't want to involve myself in one more new mom's tangled web. But this friend has been a great playmate for years — a chic, talented illustrator with a Chihuahua and a motorcycle. She was always up for fun. And she played the piano very well. Many afternoons, I'd hop on my bike and ride over to her studio with my trombone or mandolin. She had the time to play music then.

Let the "Sex and the City" friends have their brunches. We had our musicales.

When she married and moved in with a nice, stable real estate developer, we abandoned our routine. She was busy, and I, single New Yorker that I am, wasn't interested in getting to know someone with whom I couldn't network or play duets.

I had many other friends to fill the void. They didn't come with spouses attached, let alone children to distract from our fun.

"Friendships can be based on circumstance," said Erik Kolbell, a minister, author and psychotherapist, who wrote an essay in April for Town & Country magazine about dropping old friends graciously. "When things change, even if someone just moves out of the neighborhood, it can become too hard to maintain a relationship."

There was my pal, for instance, who married a woman who didn't appreciate my attitude. Or the supersocial gal who used to live near me, then moved uptown and became impenetrably busy planning her wedding, fixing up an apartment, then carrying a child. The other day, an announcement came with baby picture.

Cute, I thought. That's great. But what's in it for me?

It's not that I don't like having friends. It's just that like so many urban dwellers who have avoided settling down until the last possible moment, I have so many friends to choose from. And let's face it, it's much easier to plan spontaneous evenings with people who don't have baby sitter issues or dull spouses. When married couples get together, the talk of children and schools can make a single person feel sadly out of the loop.

"It's a life that's all about being in, not going out," said Kimberly Ryan, a former Vogue editor who gave up New York City to be a suburban mother in Darien, Conn. "My kid got a stomach virus the night I was coming to the city for a big dinner with my old girlfriends, and when I told them I couldn't come, they offered to send a car and driver. They just don't get it. Other single friends are angry because they feel I've abandoned them. It's hard for some people to see me as I am, I guess. And I don't blame them."

Is that what it is? Is it hard for us to see one another as we change, so we chose to disappear instead?

In "Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment," Ethan Watters, a San Francisco writer, suggests that the culture of the "Friends" generation, as narcissistic as it appears, has created a kind of solidarity that has made people less fixated on nesting and more attuned to one another as a community. But he also knows how easily friends can sabotage a new romance. His own group of single friends was not happy about his getting married not long ago, at age 38. "In the initial stages, people get hurt on both sides," he said. "But after a while, when things settle down, some friendships can come back. You just have to give them some time to regenerate."

Maybe so. The other day, when I arrived to see my old neighbor and playmate in her big new town house and big new life, I thought I'd just meet and greet the kids, deliver some presents and high-tail it out of there, never to return. She opened the door looking eclectically chic in a little pencil skirt and sherpa boots. She was thrilled to see me, even if one of her children was cranky, the other covered in baby food and her kitchen under renovation. Within minutes, we were making music together just as we used to.

The kids danced around us. They loved it. "Bob is a lot of fun," she told them.

I'll definitely be back soon for another play date. I love a captive audience.

WHO GETS THE CALL

Who gets the call if the unthinkable happens?

October 24, 2003

BY DEBRA PICKETT SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

In April, when Sonya Karatosic went into labor, her friend Sara Chapman drove her to the hospital. And she stayed -- through the whole thing -- spending two days in a hospital room, sleeping, when she could, in the room's single, uncomfortable chair.

She was the first person, besides Karatosic herself and the doctor and nurse, to hold baby Cynthia.

She even took a few days off from work later when Karatosic, a single mom, was feeling overwhelmed by her colicky first-born, just to help out.

Karatosic and Chapman were neighbors. They lived in the same Ravenswood Manor condominium building for a couple of years. More than that, they were friends.

Even the word friendship seems a less-than-adequate way to describe their bond, which is something more like being part of a family. But, of course, they're not really family. Not legally. Not officially.

And so, on Friday night, after Sara Chapman died in the Cook County Administration Building fire, detectives came to her building to look for her real family. They knocked on every door and on the window of Karatosic's basement studio.

Q&A with the Author

INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

So what is an urban tribe?

Ethan Watters: “Urban tribes” describes the social networks of friends we create in cities. While tribes can include married couples, they’re usually composed of those who have delayed marriage into their late twenties, thirties and forties. For a time, these tribes can replace our families as our primary social support system. We have inner-connected relationships with people in our tribes, we create rituals with them. Sometimes these rituals are as simple as eating dinner every week at the same restaurant or taking a Memorial Day hiking trip, but these repeated activities result in a sense of group history. Because of this shared history, urban tribes can lose members over time and gain new ones and still feel like the same group.

Why did you feel the need to write a book about this time of life?

Watters: My generation has delayed marriage longer than any generation in American history and everyone seems to be nervous about what this means. Parents worry that we’ll never have families of our own and we sometimes fear that our lives have fallen off track. The never-marrieds haven’t had a positive story to tell themselves, and that’s made them very anxious. When people understand that they are not alone in delaying marriage – when their lives get put in a context like urban tribes – they seem to feel much better.

Sounds like these people are kind of self-absorbed and whiny. Is that a fair rap?

SF Chronicle Article

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SINGLE-MINDED
A tradition of untraditional celebrations

Jane Ganahl Sunday, December 22, 2002
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Every family that celebrates Christmas has its rituals, such as when to get the tree, whether to go to church, what to cook (since pretty much everybody -- even me -- cooks), whether to open presents on Christmas morning or Christmas Eve.

Because my parents were from that weird dinosaur race called People Who Stay Together Forever, a lot of our family traditions were instituted in classic "Donna Reed Show" fashion.

My mom would do all the cooking and almost all the shopping for presents; it was so obvious that when we said our obligatory "Gee, thanks, Mom and Dad!" my father would laugh. "Well, I went to a great deal of trouble!"

My dad would get the tree and hammer the stand together in a manly way.

Those family traditions have morphed with my generation. Being a single parent has meant playing both dad and mom roles in our household traditions. I get the tree and wrestle it into the stand and take family photos, but also wrap a ton of presents , and do my once-a-year sugar cookie bake. (I am Christmas woman, hear me roar.)

Loving my own grounding traditions as I do, and because my daughter, Erin, is my immediate, built-in family, I used to worry about my numerous single friends.

But I've noticed how, over the years, they have taken traditional holiday observances and rewritten them into new ones that require neither a mate nor a family to make the practitioner feel part of the season.

San Francisco author Ethan Watters has been studying the changing traditions of single people for a book with the working title of "Urban Tribes of the Never Marrieds: Secrets of Community From an Unlikely Source." The book, due out this year, was spawned by a sensational New York Times essay a year ago that circulated on the Internet like a virus.

My Favorite Review So Far

http://www.culturedose.net/review.php?rid=10004992

Family and Friends Combined
A Review by Laurie Edwards
06/25/2003

Friends

It was at the offbeat, vital gathering called the Burning Man festival that Ethan Watters first got hit with the idea of an urban tribe. He manages both exactitude and a sense of wonder as he describes the epiphany that led to his book (and his spot in pop culture), Urban Tribes.

"Certainly each of these people had a relationship with me, but they all had distinct relationships with each other. There was a web of love affairs, friendships, rivalries, work partnerships, and shared homes. Connect any of those twenty-five people and you would find a history of activities and hundreds of hours of conversation that held shared secrets, gossip, and all manner of insight about the world. Those relationships created an intricate web of lives that added up to more than the sun of the friendships. What I saw there in the late Nevada twilight was not a loose group of friends but a single entity of which I was a critical part. There is was, gathered around a campfire in the desert: an Urban Tribe."

If any of the characters from Will and Grace, Friends, or Sienfeld were intelligent and articulate and wanted to tell the world about their lives, the result would be Urban Tribes. Ethan Watters is possessed of both these virtues, fortunately, along with a pleasantly self-deprecating humor; the story of how he lived his life from college until he got married (at around age forty) is the story of a what he calls his Tribe.

Watters admits he learned and wrote a lot of Urban Tribes on the fly. After writing a short magazine piece (which he later conceded was only somewhat accurate) creating "urban tribes" and skimming over the phenomenon, he got a ton of press, appeared on the morning shows—and had to back it up with a book. It's to his immense credit that he studied hard on his subject, flying here and there to check out various tribes all over America, and corrected what he came to see were the mistakes in the earlier article. The resulting book is the best and brightest of the Tribe lifestyle, a fascinating look at post-collegiate social life for singles in America today: the long-delayed marriages, the extended relationships (both personal and professional), and how the Tribe can exert peer pressure to simultaneously strengthen and inhibit its members.

Watters has a knack for getting past the image of a group and culling the essence of what that group stands for. Early in the book he explains a key point, referring back to Burning Man; reading this passage, you know you're getting not only a dedicated free spirit, you're getting a writer who can put words together to make you feel part of the story.

"Burning Man was the art-festival equivalent of moshing, a dance that, because people run into each other full force, appears to be the very expression of antisocial behavior. But those in the mosh pit (especially those who have fallen down and felt a half dozen hands instantly lift them back onto their feet) know the secret: there are elaborate rules to moshing and an etiquette to boot. Burning Man and moshing are not expressions of antisocial behavior but of a heartfelt desire for connection and community in the cool guise of rebellion. The best of both worlds."

This being America, if there's a new movement recognized, there'll be somebody to package it. While Watters is careful to never treat his subject as a product to be sold, he's well aware that others have and do. His observations on some of the more blatant commercial attempts to attract and exploit the Tribe phenomenon are interesting; his amusement and admiration come through clearly, and it's amazing how carefully he's noted how his people are being manipulated.

"...when Ikea played my favorite little-known alt-country band over its store stereo system, it felt less as if I were being manipulated and more as if some committee of sharp-eyed trend setters was spending a lot of time and energy trying hard to please me. That our desires were being sated almost before we felt the desire gave us the sense that we were somehow directing commerce, not the reverse.
Even when he finds out later he's been had by a large corporation—Starbucks disguised as a friendly little coffee shop—he (after some initial bitterness) chooses to see the deception as a positive: A huge corporation is so interested in his business that they're willing to create what he wants."

Watters has taken the time to delve into what created the Urban Tribe lifestyle, instead of merely reporting how it functions. His scholarship seems solid, and he's dug from some pretty eclectic sources. His answers to the question, How did this happen? are wide-ranging, and the dozen or so references all get some airtime, allowing the reader to figure out his/her own position. My favorite comes from Generation at Risk, which Watters quotes.

"The predictable sequence of education, stable employment, marriage and parenthood, that marked earlier cohorts of young adults gave way to an increasing diversity of life paths...For these young adults the options were broader—and the outcomes less certain—than those available to their parents."
Humans are social creatures; barring the need to marry young (thereby attaining companionship), they band together in groups to unsconciously fulfill one another's needs. That often these Tribes go on for years, with members coming and going here and there creates the security of a team without the formal rules of marriage. Activities run from the day-to-day of several members living together and regular poker nights or spaghetti dinners or round-robin emails, to group fun stuff like trips to exotic places, to functional things like getting somebody to vouch for a loan, to helping a member find a nice job. The Urban Tribe is more or less all-encompassing, running the gamut from emotional to financial to professional ties—a family in all but the formal rules...and the requirement that you always stick around. Watters wonders, with a perhaps understandable irritation, why these activities are considered natural and morally upstanding when they pertain to a blood-related family...but part of the "slacker" life when performed by members of a long-standing Tribe. After coming to understand the depth of feeling the core members of a Tribe often have for one another, I wonder the same thing.

Much like the members of a blood family, core members of a Tribe often have roles within the group which they naturally perform for the others. Over time, these roles may shift slightly, but mostly they remain static for the duration of the Tribe. There's the Hostess, the Needy One (always in trouble and requiring some kind of help), the Cynic, the Organizer, etc. As in any group, there are leaders and followers, but what's interesting is that members accept their roles and play them for years. Even "Bill, who shows up to everything with his dog and a six-pack," is an integral part of the Tribe fabric, and nobody can imagine him being anything but what he is.

Urban Tribes lasts only 260 pages, which is a damned shame; I could've read another couple hundred pages of it, no problem. Ethan Watters has managed to put a ton of surprising and often amusing social knowledge into a slim volume, skipping from subject to subject within the framework of the Tribe lifestyle. I've only mentioned a small number of the subjects he covers; he has the ability to explain each one fully without harping on it or dragging the book. Put simply, there's a lot of good stuff here, and you really have to read it.

Too many of the TV shows about tribes give the impression that the lives of the characters are about empty, without meaning (often because they're not married). (Seinfeld even celebrates its nothingness.) Ethan Watters proves there's more to these 'tweeners than pop culture thinks, and offers hope that this strange generation really is the hope of the future. Urban Tribes is an excellent treatise and a helluva fun read; I give it 4 1⁄2 stars and recommend it to everyone who worries about what's going to end up happening to all those Gen X'ers.

FROM URBAN TRIBES

HERE'S A SNIPPET FROM MY BOOK

Having delayed marriage into our late twenties and thirties we lived with a remarkable amount of personal autonomy to make up our lives as we went along. This did not feel like some sort of multiple choice freedom, but rather the type of freedom that could descend on us like a cyclone—erasing landmarks and spinning us around until we were dizzy with the complexity and sheer number of options that swirled around us. We didn’t talk about it much because freedom is a hard thing to identify in one’s own life. Given that freedom is, for the most part, an absence of restraints, we rarely stopped to count the things we were not bound by. I decided that was exactly what I needed to do.

To begin with, I knew we not tied down by family. I’ve already mentioned this but it deserves emphasis. No generation before had delayed the starting of a family with the tenacity we had. Not only did most of us not have kids, but in certain hipster areas of major cities you could literally go days with out seeing a child. Of course we had families in the form of parents and brothers and sisters. They were largely self-reliant, however, and required only our presence at high holidays and our voice over the phone every week or two. Our parents were living longer and more healthily. Even when they confronted illness, distance was often a wall to responsibility. Predictably, those of us who delayed marriage the longest were those who moved away to college and then to large metropolitan areas that promised interesting and consuming careers. We might have felt emotional accountability to our families back home (or wherever it was that our sisters and brothers landed), but it was seldom a drain on our time.

As for our parents’ attempts to constrain or guide us from afar, mostly they didn’t even try. By the time we hit twenty-five and had been living outside the house for six or seven years, parents had either abdicated their roll of advice giver or we had stopped picking up the phone on Sunday mornings. Avoiding their calls was seldom necessary. Even when we were in high school and college, very few parents of my generation seemed to be much interested in the role of stern advice giver. They worried for us and sometimes that worry influenced our behavior. While they encouraged us in our education, they did not, as a general rule, threaten disinheritance or any meaningful or lasting sanctions if we moved in with our girlfriends or boyfriends, bought a motorcycle, or quit our jobs to follow the lure of a deep certainty that we needed to become a Zen monk or a dot.com entrepreneur.