Can we buy back what we gave up?

This week Keith and Gerren close out a three-episode arc on the cost of independence with the hardest question of all. Not apps. Not initiatives. Not policy alone. Until the identity of the person shifts — until they see themselves as better with the group than alone — none of the programs work.

Keith gets personal about his own lifelong pattern of stepping back from community at the last moment. They get into Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart, Adam Smith vs. Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan as an Ayn Rand acolyte, the temporarily embarrassed millionaire, and Harvard's 85-year study on happiness. The number one predictor? Social connection. Not wealth. Not career. Not health habits. Other people.

And then Gerren connects both full arcs — trust collapse, identity, the stories we tell, and now this — into one throughput about how human connection breaks down in America. Institutionally. Personally. Cognitively. Narratively. Structurally.

Hard questions. No easy answers. Arc closed.

The Full Arc: Part 1 — The Deal We Didn't Know We Were Making Part 2 — What We Left Behind Part 3 — Can We Buy It Back?

Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod

Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT

Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection.

Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

We knocked down the load-bearing walls and called it progress.

This week Keith and Gerren dig into what we actually gave up — the third place, intergenerational family, shared child rearing, the male social ecosystem, and the spaces where doctor, lawyer, janitor, and teacher used to just exist together without any of that mattering.

Ray Oldenburg coined the term "third place" in 1989. In 1990, only 3% of Americans had no close friends outside family. Today that's 20%. The loneliness epidemic is not a phone addiction problem. It's seventy years of being told you don't need other people — and now we've stopped doing community so thoroughly we don't know how anymore.

Part two of three. Part three next week: what do we actually do about it.

Key Topics: The third place and its collapse, the data on loneliness and friendship, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, intergenerational community, shared child rearing, Día de los Muertos, the CIA veteran who never felt less free than back home.

Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod

Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT

Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection.

Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

The pitch was freedom. Nobody mentioned what we'd have to give up.

This week Keith and Gerren start a three-episode arc on where American hyper-individualism came from, who constructed it, and what it cost us. From Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged to Reagan's government-is-the-problem reframe, to the suburbs, the single-family home, and the structural dismantling of collective institutions every time they started serving people they weren't supposed to.

Part one of three. Hard questions. No easy answers.

Key Topics: The philosophy of radical individualism, the Cold War and collectivism as the enemy, Reagan and the moral reframe of government, the structural isolation of suburban life, welfare and unions dismantled by race, and why you can't individual-choice your way out of a structure built to isolate you.

Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod

Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT

Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection.

Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.