I want to start with two reasons why there may be less actual demand for spaces, in our modern society.
The first is hustle. Your customers may think something like this:
“If only I can get my goals finished, and gather enough money, I’ll escape these funnels and tubes, and find a space. But for now, I’ve got to focus on funnels and tubes—even though I don’t really care about them.”
Those people won’t seek spaces. They also won’t recommend them. Instead, they’ll recommend whatever helps them “get ahead” in the hustle.
- Notice: this happens even if it’s not true. Maybe spaces aren’t so expensive, maybe you don’t need to hustle first. But—if people believe you do—they’ll skip the spaces.
- Or maybe they really do need to hustle: they need to give their kids an edge, afford real-estate, or whatever. Maybe the only high-paying gigs are hustle-based, funnel and tube gigs. So, they really do need to defer the search for meaning.
Either way—whether the need to hustle first is true or a widespread myth—it creates a feedback loop. In a society with few spaces, meaning will feel remote. More people will believe they have to hustle for it. But that society will also have fewer meaningful jobs, so more people really will have to hustle first, if they want to make a living.
So there will actually be less demand for meaning.
Ok, here’s another thing that can bring down demand for meaning. It’s more deadly.
To make a society work, you need some kind of social glue. Spaces and meaning are a social glue—the one often called the “social fabric”, the “civil society”, the “third sector”, “social capital”. It’s got many names.
So spaces are one glue. The best glue. Spaces make the best friendships, the best loves, the best communities, the best citizens.
But there are other kinds of social glue.
- One type is force. Men with guns can force people to cooperate, even when they don’t share spaces, or sources of meaning.
- Closely related to force is incentives structures. You can force cooperation by making it the only way to survive economically, or the way to get ahead, to “get out of Dodge”.
- Finally, ideological cohesion is a social glue. A common ideology and a clear threat from an ideological opponents.
So, I think when a society has too few spaces, these other social glues ramp up to compensate. You’ll see more force, sharper incentive structures, and more ideological pressure—because that’s what’s needed to keep people in line when they don’t share meaning and togetherness.
Once this happens, it’s hard to bring the spaces back.
Economists have discovered that extrinsic motives—like trying to avoid being shot, going broke, or being ideologically denounced—motives like this “crowd out” the intrinsic ones. People go into an emergency state where they don’t pay attention to meaning at all. The intrinsic motives get lost.
That makes the problem accelerate: Trust declines, so spaces are less appealing. Ideological leaders build massive funnels to rile up their base against the other side, which suck up all the attention. Incentives systems harden people into the grind-set. Funnels take over completely.
So the hustle and alternate social glues—these two problems lower the demand for meaning and togetherness. They’re big ones and getting worse. Incentives these days have sharper teeth, ideological battles have been weaponized, and the hustle is bigger, both as a myth, and a reality.
So these problems partially explain the trend I described in the intro.
But they’re not the whole story! They can’t be! It it were—advertising about togetherness and meaning wouldn't work so well. If people were convinced they have to hustle first or that ideological concerns are more pressing, they wouldn't search so hard for togetherness and meaning.
So how can we explain this?