Editor’s Note: A Good Life in the Rubble | December 2025

I grew up on a steady diet of American individualism, not as a political theory but as pop-cultural scripture. Saturday afternoons were filled with lone gunslingers riding in from nowhere to save the helpless town (Shane, High Noon); one righteous man filibustering the rot out of Washington (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington); one incorruptible lawyer standing against a whole county’s worth of hatred (To Kill a Mockingbird). Even the darker stuff carried the same lesson: that the solitary figure—maverick cop, private eye, wronged veteran, the lone voice of reason—was the only dependable unit of moral force in a chaotic world. Entire genres conspired to teach us that community was unreliable, institutions suspect, and that salvation, when it came, arrived wearing boots, muttering “I’ll handle it,” and, preferably, carrying a sidearm.

The longer I live, the more convinced I am that the myth of the solitary human is, at best, a polite fiction and, at worst, the root of much of our present mess. It’s an attractive bit of make-believe: the lone thinker in the cabin, the rugged individual who needs nothing, the homeowner who imagines his property sealed-off and sovereign. (History, it should be noted, is not kind to this fantasy. Follow it to its logical end, and you don’t get a sage on a mountaintop, you get the Unabomber in his shack.)

The fact is that we are entangled. Nervous systems tuned to each other. Fates shared and futures braided. And if the past few years have felt like a great unraveling, it’s only sharpened the underlying reality: There is no life worth living that isn’t built together.

I keep returning to something Beacon-based filmmaker Seth Porges said in our recent conversation about SantaCon, his documentary about the anarchic, DIY celebration that began as an anti-commercial art prank and metastasized into exactly the thing it once mocked. Porges described the original San Francisco group, the same artists and oddballs who had started Burning Man, as trying to forge “a good life in the rubble.” He meant the ruins of late-stage capitalism, but the phrase feels more universal right now.

It’s a reminder that even dysfunctional systems contain pockets of communion. That we build meaning—create events, festivals, art—precisely because we need one another. SantaCon’s later descent into a debauched bar crawl is lamentable, sure, but never preordained. Seeded into its earliest incarnation was a small truth: People crave connection, even when they don’t yet know how to handle it.

This burning question—How do we handle each other?—threads through much of this month’s issue.

Take group singing. Maggie Baribault’s piece on Hudson Valley choruses (“Harmony Heals“), is nominally about the wellness benefits of singing, but it is really about interdependence. When you sing in a group, you surrender to a communal instrument. You match pitch, blend tone, share breath—literally share breath. The science is startling: Coordinated inhalations and exhalations synchronize heart rates and regulate the nervous system. Choral singing reduces stress, increases emotional regulation, and encourages that elusive state of coregulation, where bodies settle together into something like harmony. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” one vocal teacher explains. “When we practice singing with a chorus, we are honing our abilities to listen, sense ourselves better, express, and communicate.” It’s hard not to read that as an instruction manual for our societal moment.

Another version of this appears in my conversation with Brian Schaefer about his novel Town & Country, which sidesteps the easy binaries—old-timer versus newcomer, rural stalwart versus urban emigre—that dominate so much of our regional discourse. (Find my profile of Schaefer on Chronogram.com; Susan Yung’s review of the novel is on page 61.) Schaefer’s characters, in their stubborn, flawed attempts to understand one another, offer a corrective to our current appetite for clean divides. They are not symbols of factions but humans whose lives overlap in messy, necessary ways. In a landscape like the Hudson Valley, where population churn and cultural change is constant, Schaefer’s gentler point is worth underlining: There is no future here—or anywhere—that doesn’t depend on the uneasy alliances we form with the people we didn’t choose.

The most distilled example of this interdependence, though, comes from the piece on Playback Theatre that appears in this issue (“The Script Is You,” page 66.) Fifty years ago, Jo Salas and Jonathan Fox invented a form of improvisational theater that depends entirely on the stories offered by audience members. It is built on what Salas calls “deep listening”—not Pauline Oliveros’s sonic practice, but a kindred attentiveness to the lived experience of others. Playback is theater, but it’s also social intervention. Its premise: To witness a story well, you must listen without judgment, expectation, or premature interpretation. You have to let someone else’s narrative arrive unfiltered.

“We always give the teller the last word,” Salas told me. “We want them to feel that they have been heard.” What the performers create onstage is a mirror—sometimes crystalline, sometimes funhouse—of the teller’s experience. It’s not therapy, precisely, though many people experience it that way. It is, instead, a collective act of meaning making, where strangers co-author a temporary community simply by sharing what happened to them.

In an era increasingly defined by performative antagonism, the idea of listening as a radical act feels subversive in its empathy. But Playback, like group singing, reroutes us back to our evolutionary wiring. We are social primates. We learn by imitation. We settle our nervous systems by proximity.

It is not lost on me that all these practices—DIY art gatherings, community choirs, participatory theater, even the shared world imagined by a novelist—are not purely nostalgic refuges from polarization. They are forms of rehearsal. They train the muscles of cooperation in a moment that desperately needs them.

Because outside these spaces, the centrifuge of contemporary life continues to spin. The incentives for division have never been more lucrative. Social media takes our instinct for connection and feeds it synthetic sugar until the crash becomes the defining sensation. National politics has settled into ritualized combat, more intent on drawing blood than drawing consensus. Even here in the Hudson Valley, the story of who belongs and who doesn’t can be weaponized quicker than you can say “zoning meeting.”

The world may be cracked in a hundred places, but cracks aren’t only signs of damage—they’re invitations. In kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold, the break becomes the feature, the place where repair blossoms into beauty. Interdependence isn’t optional; it’s the binding agent that holds the shards together long enough for us to make something new—and maybe even luminous—out of what’s been fractured.  

This article appears in December 2025.