On the feedback form, some people mentioned being very upset by Solstice because it reminded them that they were lonely or felt like they could be accomplishing more. I do not think anything should change about Solstice itself in response to this feedback, because being reminded that the universe is vast and dark and cold is pretty much the entire point of Solstice.
I started writing a post around this aspect of Solstice, and I may come back to it, but since you bring it up here I think it’s worth addressing in a comment.
If I’m being frank, I think this is a woefully inadequate and irresponsible response. I don’t mean that as an attack on your or the organizers in any particular year, but rather as a statement against the general pattern of behavior being manifested. A rationalist culture with more Hufflepuff virtue would not think it okay to remind people of something distressing and then offer them nothing to deal with the distress.
Some more, somewhat disjointed and rambly thoughts on all this:
One of the effects of Solstice is that it makes salient thoughts and memories of loss and loneliness, generates negative-affect emotions, and otherwise affects people in powerful ways. These effects, especially for those who do not have a lot of psychological safety, range from producing mild negative affect to causing trauma or trauma-like experiences to causing psychological deintegration. Failure to address this and just say “ehh, intended effect” is, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, similar in my mind to encouraging someone to engage in a physical activity that is likely to cause them injury and then saying “oh well, I guess find your own way to the hospital” when they inevitably get hurt. Or, for a more mundane example that I think illustrates the same principle, it’s like telling a friend you want them to hang out with them at their house to lead them through doing a messy activity and then when the inevitable mess appears saying “okay, well, time to leave, I’m sure you’ll clean it up”.
I realize I’m making a claim here about what is morally/ethically right. I view it as important to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions, and if we put on an event that regularly and predictably causes negative psychological impact on a portion of the attendees, we have a responsibility to those attendees to help them deal with the fallout.
An alternative would be to more activity encourage such folks not to attend, but I think this is antithetical to how I understand the Solstice (it’s a highly inclusive event, and we’d cause people pain if we excluded them), so I think we need to work towards helping people reintegrate after they may have old or active psychic wounds torn open by the event. I think this can be done as part of the ceremony, although a more complete solution would be changing the culture such that the downswing of Solstice didn’t drop people out from a place where they already felt unsafe. Lacking that, I think careful ritual design during the dawn/new day part of the arc to help people connect and see the path forward would go a long way to addressing this issue.
For context, much of my thinking here comes from the way spiritual traditions help or fail to help people deal with the consequences of the insights they may gain from interacting with the tradition. This has been a problem in, for example, Western Buddhism, where people may teach meditation but not be equipped or prepared to help or at least help get help for people whose lives get worse (sometimes dramatically so) as a result of meditating. The rationalist project, even though it has a very different worldview and objectives, shares with some spiritual traditions an intention to help people better their lives through transformative practice, but I also see it doing not nearly as much as it could or, in my opinion, should to help those it unintentionally but predictably hurts by teaching its methods, and the situation with those hurt by Winter Solstice seems one more manifestation of this pattern. I would like us to do better at Winter Solstice as a way of shifting towards a better pattern.
I’ll probably have a longer response at some point, but for now wanted to quickly summarize my current position:
I think the correct solution is “Solstice continues to have a strong core of ‘look into the dark’, but gets better at aftercare, and the community as a whole gets better at helping people make sane life choices and build safety nets, etc, as they grapple with legitimately challenging subject matter.”
In the meanwhile, since aftercare and dealing-with-challenging-subject-matter is hard, I think the solution is to have better trigger warnings, and discourage people from going if they aren’t up for it. (Meanwhile, probably working harder at an afterparty so that there’s a clear place for people to go if what they want is more general holiday-togetherness)
A core issue is that many people (not sure if this is you or not), think of it in terms of “Solstice should be more inclusive, as the central community event.”
And I think that is fundamentally misguided – a toned-down, less dark solstice would not be more inclusive, just have a different audience. (Notably, I probably wouldn’t go, or if I did I’d treat it more like a party than like a sacred event). I do concretely predict (based on my experiences with Sunday Assembly), that a Solstice aiming to be less dark would have fewer attendees, not more, especially as years went by.
I think it’s actually important that this community was founded to grapple with hard problems, and that the central holiday reflects that. We should get better at grappling with hard problems (including at the central holiday). But I think it is quite important that no, the central holiday isn’t meant to be for everyone.
Multiple Solstices?
There’s an option (the 2020 solstice team is considering) of having multiple solstices with different focus areas. I don’t currently think that would solve the actual problem but did seem worth checking if people wanted that.
Also important to note: while I do support having better aftercare, I’m not actually sure about the scope of the problem. AFAICT there’s only one response on the feedback form saying “I had to help multiple people after the event who were alienated/triggered”, and I don’t know if that means 2 people, 5 or more. Obviously there may be more people who didn’t say anything, but given that any event is going to be net-negative for a least a few people, I do think it is (unfortunately) necessary to be able to say sometimes “sorry, it’s just literally impossible to make an event for everyone”.
I think it’s important to acknowledge the issue, but also important not to oversell it.
In the previously planned post I was going to explain something about what I saw like this as way of evidence:
After Solstice I talked with or otherwise helped multiple people suffering as a result of having attended Solstice. One person was seriously negative affected and I talked with them for over an hour about it. Another person was moderately negatively affected and I talked with them about it for about 10 minutes. I talked to 3 other people who in passing mentioned Solstice being net-negative for them but they didn’t invite further conversation on that topic. The main themes I got from these conversations is that Solstice strongly reminded these folks that they felt lonely, isolated, or ineffectual in ways I would categorize as distressing or dissonant with their sense of self.
Assuming I got what amounts to a random sample, this suggests to me there is at least a large minority—let’s call it O(10%)—of people attending Solstice who are negatively impacted by it.
I also wrote up the following caveats to my evidence:
It’s possible I suffer from selection bias and the situation is not as it seems to me. Perhaps by some mechanism or just chance I encountered more people suffering from having attended Solstice in 2019 than is proportional to the entire population. I have no reason to think that is especially the case but it’s worth keeping in mind when I give an impression of how many people are affected in negative ways by Solstice and how much that matters.
I also am relying largely on first-hand reports people gave me of their experiences and how much I perceived them to be suffering as inferred from those reports. I have not collected data in a systematic way, so I think there is a probably a lot wrong with my impression if you ask it to do to much. I am only personally confident of the general direction and order of the effect size, nothing more.
Also keep in mind I can’t say anything about the people who self-selected out of the main Solstice celebration because they knew from past experience with Solstice celebrations or expectations from similar events that they would have a bad time. I’ve talked to several people who do this over the years, so if anything they suggest the negative experiences of Solstice are more common than they appear or would be if people didn’t avoid it.
I think “aftercare” is a decent first-order approximation of what I view as the appropriate response. I think it needs to be a bit more than just “throw a party” or “here are some people you can talk to”. What I have in mind is something more systematic and ritualistic.
An ineffectual version of what I have in mind is the way, towards the end of a Catholic mass, there’s the rite of peace: everyone stands up, shakes hands, and says “peace be with you” to the people near them in the pews. Slightly better is the Protestant tradition of lunch fellowship or church picnic that immediately follows service, a sort of post-worship potluck meal, but much of what makes this work (or, as often as not, not) depends on the local culture and how inclusive it is.
I think a good version of this would be something I’ve not seen much before: a structured authentic relating activity as part of the upswing of the service. There was something like this a few years ago at a Bay Area Solstice where people wrote on notes they posted to the walls. As I recall the prompt was something like “what is something I’m privately afraid of and not telling others”, although maybe I’m mixing that up from another event. I think we could come up with something similar for future events that would help people connect and remind them that they are connected, even if they can’t see the face of those they are connected to.
I think none of this is to draw away from the darkness. Make the low point low and dark and full of woe. But match it with a high point of brightness and joy that actually pulls people together and connects them without backfiring and throwing in their face the way others are connected and they are not.
I think the Solstice should be “for everyone” in a certain sense, but that achieved not by watering it down, but by making it whole so that, as much as possible, it can hit the dark notes in a way where, even in the depths of despair, people retain a thread of connection to safety that pulls them back out into the light so they can dwell in the darkness for a time without being abandoned there.
I think a good version of this would be something I’ve not seen much before: a structured authentic relating activity as part of the upswing of the service. There was something like this a few years ago at a Bay Area Solstice where people wrote on notes they posted to the walls. As I recall the prompt was something like “what is something I’m privately afraid of and not telling others”, although maybe I’m mixing that up from another event. I think we could come up with something similar for future events that would help people connect and remind them that they are connected, even if they can’t see the face of those they are connected to.
I think none of this is to draw away from the darkness. Make the low point low and dark and full of woe. But match it with a high point of brightness and joy that actually pulls people together and connects them without backfiring and throwing in their face the way others are connected and they are not.
Yeah, something in this space sounds right.
There were also people who just wanted space process the ceremony after the event, in a more positive way (like, reflect on what they wanted to change about their life). I think those people would probably need something different from people who were harmed-in-some-way by the event, but similar infrastructure might benefit both.
I’m reminded of a funeral I ran once, where afterwards most people needed to escape from the funeral atmosphere and chat/party/etc to connect with each other in low key social ways, but a few people were like “I’m still real sad how are you all having fun as if he’s not DEAD!?” and that gave me a general update about competing access needs after ritual events.
Having had a couple days to sit with this thread, I think it’s worth adding that I’m willing to participate in addressing this issue in future Solstice celebrations (so for 2020 at least). I think I’m a poor choice for lots of things related to Solstice organizing because I’m not close enough to the core of rationalist culture to reliably drive things in ways most rationalists would like, but within the context of a team that is doing that I think I could probably have a positive impact on the Solstice experience by pushing it to better incorporate the kinds of things I have in mind and that would be effective at achieving their ends, though I am also happy to defer to others if they are motivated to do this and think they can succeed.
Put another way, if I just complain and point out the problem and offer some suggestions for who to fix it that’s not enough to make change happen, so since I think this is important I think it’s important enough that I should try to do something about it with my actions rather than just my words.
I started writing a post around this aspect of Solstice, and I may come back to it, but since you bring it up here I think it’s worth addressing in a comment.
If I’m being frank, I think this is a woefully inadequate and irresponsible response. I don’t mean that as an attack on your or the organizers in any particular year, but rather as a statement against the general pattern of behavior being manifested. A rationalist culture with more Hufflepuff virtue would not think it okay to remind people of something distressing and then offer them nothing to deal with the distress.
Some more, somewhat disjointed and rambly thoughts on all this:
One of the effects of Solstice is that it makes salient thoughts and memories of loss and loneliness, generates negative-affect emotions, and otherwise affects people in powerful ways. These effects, especially for those who do not have a lot of psychological safety, range from producing mild negative affect to causing trauma or trauma-like experiences to causing psychological deintegration. Failure to address this and just say “ehh, intended effect” is, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, similar in my mind to encouraging someone to engage in a physical activity that is likely to cause them injury and then saying “oh well, I guess find your own way to the hospital” when they inevitably get hurt. Or, for a more mundane example that I think illustrates the same principle, it’s like telling a friend you want them to hang out with them at their house to lead them through doing a messy activity and then when the inevitable mess appears saying “okay, well, time to leave, I’m sure you’ll clean it up”.
I realize I’m making a claim here about what is morally/ethically right. I view it as important to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions, and if we put on an event that regularly and predictably causes negative psychological impact on a portion of the attendees, we have a responsibility to those attendees to help them deal with the fallout.
An alternative would be to more activity encourage such folks not to attend, but I think this is antithetical to how I understand the Solstice (it’s a highly inclusive event, and we’d cause people pain if we excluded them), so I think we need to work towards helping people reintegrate after they may have old or active psychic wounds torn open by the event. I think this can be done as part of the ceremony, although a more complete solution would be changing the culture such that the downswing of Solstice didn’t drop people out from a place where they already felt unsafe. Lacking that, I think careful ritual design during the dawn/new day part of the arc to help people connect and see the path forward would go a long way to addressing this issue.
For context, much of my thinking here comes from the way spiritual traditions help or fail to help people deal with the consequences of the insights they may gain from interacting with the tradition. This has been a problem in, for example, Western Buddhism, where people may teach meditation but not be equipped or prepared to help or at least help get help for people whose lives get worse (sometimes dramatically so) as a result of meditating. The rationalist project, even though it has a very different worldview and objectives, shares with some spiritual traditions an intention to help people better their lives through transformative practice, but I also see it doing not nearly as much as it could or, in my opinion, should to help those it unintentionally but predictably hurts by teaching its methods, and the situation with those hurt by Winter Solstice seems one more manifestation of this pattern. I would like us to do better at Winter Solstice as a way of shifting towards a better pattern.
I’ll probably have a longer response at some point, but for now wanted to quickly summarize my current position:
I think the correct solution is “Solstice continues to have a strong core of ‘look into the dark’, but gets better at aftercare, and the community as a whole gets better at helping people make sane life choices and build safety nets, etc, as they grapple with legitimately challenging subject matter.”
In the meanwhile, since aftercare and dealing-with-challenging-subject-matter is hard, I think the solution is to have better trigger warnings, and discourage people from going if they aren’t up for it. (Meanwhile, probably working harder at an afterparty so that there’s a clear place for people to go if what they want is more general holiday-togetherness)
A core issue is that many people (not sure if this is you or not), think of it in terms of “Solstice should be more inclusive, as the central community event.”
And I think that is fundamentally misguided – a toned-down, less dark solstice would not be more inclusive, just have a different audience. (Notably, I probably wouldn’t go, or if I did I’d treat it more like a party than like a sacred event). I do concretely predict (based on my experiences with Sunday Assembly), that a Solstice aiming to be less dark would have fewer attendees, not more, especially as years went by.
I think it’s actually important that this community was founded to grapple with hard problems, and that the central holiday reflects that. We should get better at grappling with hard problems (including at the central holiday). But I think it is quite important that no, the central holiday isn’t meant to be for everyone.
Multiple Solstices?
There’s an option (the 2020 solstice team is considering) of having multiple solstices with different focus areas. I don’t currently think that would solve the actual problem but did seem worth checking if people wanted that.
I’m hoping the problem can be solved more with “giving everybody tons of what they want”.
Also important to note: while I do support having better aftercare, I’m not actually sure about the scope of the problem. AFAICT there’s only one response on the feedback form saying “I had to help multiple people after the event who were alienated/triggered”, and I don’t know if that means 2 people, 5 or more. Obviously there may be more people who didn’t say anything, but given that any event is going to be net-negative for a least a few people, I do think it is (unfortunately) necessary to be able to say sometimes “sorry, it’s just literally impossible to make an event for everyone”.
I think it’s important to acknowledge the issue, but also important not to oversell it.
That was probably me in the response form.
In the previously planned post I was going to explain something about what I saw like this as way of evidence:
Assuming I got what amounts to a random sample, this suggests to me there is at least a large minority—let’s call it O(10%)—of people attending Solstice who are negatively impacted by it.
I also wrote up the following caveats to my evidence:
I think “aftercare” is a decent first-order approximation of what I view as the appropriate response. I think it needs to be a bit more than just “throw a party” or “here are some people you can talk to”. What I have in mind is something more systematic and ritualistic.
An ineffectual version of what I have in mind is the way, towards the end of a Catholic mass, there’s the rite of peace: everyone stands up, shakes hands, and says “peace be with you” to the people near them in the pews. Slightly better is the Protestant tradition of lunch fellowship or church picnic that immediately follows service, a sort of post-worship potluck meal, but much of what makes this work (or, as often as not, not) depends on the local culture and how inclusive it is.
I think a good version of this would be something I’ve not seen much before: a structured authentic relating activity as part of the upswing of the service. There was something like this a few years ago at a Bay Area Solstice where people wrote on notes they posted to the walls. As I recall the prompt was something like “what is something I’m privately afraid of and not telling others”, although maybe I’m mixing that up from another event. I think we could come up with something similar for future events that would help people connect and remind them that they are connected, even if they can’t see the face of those they are connected to.
I think none of this is to draw away from the darkness. Make the low point low and dark and full of woe. But match it with a high point of brightness and joy that actually pulls people together and connects them without backfiring and throwing in their face the way others are connected and they are not.
I think the Solstice should be “for everyone” in a certain sense, but that achieved not by watering it down, but by making it whole so that, as much as possible, it can hit the dark notes in a way where, even in the depths of despair, people retain a thread of connection to safety that pulls them back out into the light so they can dwell in the darkness for a time without being abandoned there.
Yeah, something in this space sounds right.
There were also people who just wanted space process the ceremony after the event, in a more positive way (like, reflect on what they wanted to change about their life). I think those people would probably need something different from people who were harmed-in-some-way by the event, but similar infrastructure might benefit both.
I’m reminded of a funeral I ran once, where afterwards most people needed to escape from the funeral atmosphere and chat/party/etc to connect with each other in low key social ways, but a few people were like “I’m still real sad how are you all having fun as if he’s not DEAD!?” and that gave me a general update about competing access needs after ritual events.
Having had a couple days to sit with this thread, I think it’s worth adding that I’m willing to participate in addressing this issue in future Solstice celebrations (so for 2020 at least). I think I’m a poor choice for lots of things related to Solstice organizing because I’m not close enough to the core of rationalist culture to reliably drive things in ways most rationalists would like, but within the context of a team that is doing that I think I could probably have a positive impact on the Solstice experience by pushing it to better incorporate the kinds of things I have in mind and that would be effective at achieving their ends, though I am also happy to defer to others if they are motivated to do this and think they can succeed.
Put another way, if I just complain and point out the problem and offer some suggestions for who to fix it that’s not enough to make change happen, so since I think this is important I think it’s important enough that I should try to do something about it with my actions rather than just my words.