What I Learned From Spending 4 Days In the Woods With A Bunch of Internet Weirdos

It’s been almost a month after Vibecamp, and I’m still integrating everything I learned about myself there.

For the uninitiated, there’s an event called Vibecamp. This was the fourth year it has existed and it was the first year it was on my radar. It’s an event that sprang from TPOT, which is an acronym for “This Part Of Twitter”, a group of post-rationalists that have been building real relationships online and taking them offline every year.

And I’ve been obsessed with it this year since I found out about it. And, thanks to the generosity of Defender and the Open Research Institute awarding me a grant to attend, I was able to do so.

And it was exactly the transformational experience I had hoped.

For the first time in a long time, I was able to focus on myself, and what I wanted. I had to stop myself from living in the future, as I’m wont to do. I kept thinking about what the “best” sessions would be to go to. And then I realized that “best” wasn’t something I could define, and I had to focus on feeling what felt like it resonated with me.

What kind of sessions were offered? That’s a great question. And there’s one that I didn’t attend, but I think captures the spirit of Vibecamp in a way none of the others do.

That’s the session where people tried getting waterboarded to see what it was like.

That’s not a typo. People voluntarily tried torture out of curiosity.

There’s something so incredibly human about that, because it makes no sense. It’s not something I’d have believed, except that it happened at the camp I was at.

But that’s also an incredibly bad single session to show the actual spirit of Vibecamp because torture is exactly the opposite of the vibe. It was human, and done in the spirit of openness. This was captured beautifully in the opening session that the organizers ran.

There were three things they made us practice doing: saying and accepting “yes”, saying and accepting “no”, and responding graciously whether or not the answer was what you had hoped for. This was a place for pushing the boundaries of what you felt was comfortable, and that can take the form of all sorts of things, not all of which you personally are interested in pushing.

And the thing that was made abundantly clear from the beginning: that’s absolutely fine. You aren’t expected to. But you can if you want.

So I stopped thinking about what I wanted in the future, and I followed my curiosity, energy, and resonance. And there’s one session that has stuck with me more deeply than the others. It was a session on improv. But not improv for learning how to act.

Improv for learning how to show up authentically yourself.

This showed me that the human mind is incredible and when put into group settings, can accomplish amazing things.

I wasn’t sure what to expect; I haven’t been exposed to much improv. But I knew I wanted to get better at showing up as myself in public. It’s taken me a long time online to learn how to do that, and now Im interested in doing the same IRL.

We started off by doing an exercise as a group where we were around in a circle, and we passed an imaginary object around the circle, and the instructor kept bringing our attention to the fact that there’s an object that doesn’t exist except within the minds of the people around us, and by keying into the people, you can see all sorts of things happening that aren’t visible to those outside of the circle.

If that’s not a profound lesson about humanity, I’m not sure what is. It taught me that there’s a layer of communication happening in the world around me that I’m oblivious to. I’ve started paying attention to it now, and I keep catching people referencing social perceptions that I’d normally simply dismiss.

The energy was passed around, taking form and morphing as it was taken by the receiver and passed along to the next person. It was all based on the attention of the people in the moment and what they were able to pick up on from the person sending the energy. The key was to watch everyone’s eyes, because when eyes were locked, so much information was shared. We had to get acknowledgement that we had someone’s attention before sending them anything, because it was all about coordination in that moment.

And then we switched gears, and started walking around in the form of embodied animals, and letting various aspects of our bodies lead our movement. And at the end, we were then instructed to walk around embodying ourselves.

That’s when I became enlightened.

There was a shift in my posture and gait. I walked upright and tall, opening my body and being willing to take up space. This is completely the opposite of my normal tendency to shrink down, close off, and fight being perceived when out around people.

The only was I could learn who I truly was was by embracing who I wasn’t and then dropping the act.

And this tells us the future of the internet.

Over the past two months, I’ve been embracing all sorts of roles, characters that I’ve played in the hopes of understanding the final pieces that I needed to. And in doing so, I’ve been able to drop the act and simply be who I am. Everything is effortless now, because there’s no acting necessary. I simply exist in the moment and accept the world for what it is, and not what I want it to be, while also accepting me for who I am in the moment and who I want to be.

I’ve been working on this piece since Vibecamp. I wanted to know how I could express the things I’ve experienced, and I keep feeling that my writing hasn’t done it justice. And then I felt the same feeling Vibecamp gave me, but online. And that’s when I knew I’d finally succeeded. The energy I put out online was seen, captured, changed, and pushed on to the next person in the circle, in this case, back at me and several others.

First, the conversation. I had a call with Jessyka. She was the first one onboarded to Build In Public University, and she took the example I set and ran with it. She paid attention to what I was saying, and when she got it, it started to change everything for her. She caught the generosity bug.

Then, she sent me a site she came up with that solved the one problem that I couldn’t: how to describe my value to the market.

She did overnight what I couldn’t do in five years - put my knowledge and experience into a single package that anyone could grasp (including me).

Honestly, it’s what I had been praying for. I tried so many times to represent myself in specific ways, for specific audiences, and failed each time. I felt insane, because I knew I could help people in all sorts of ways, and it was eating at me that I wasn’t able to figure out how to translate my value into something repeatably sellable.

Then this appeared in my DMs.

And I finally felt seen.

It put me back in that improv circle, looking around at someone’s eyes, catching them, and making sure their attention was on the item being passed to them. And suddenly, the object was in someone else’s control, and they were changing it and sending it back to me in a completely new form. Except, this was something I’d been searching for.

Then she followed it up with a challenge:

And, I couldn’t let her send me that energy back without transforming it myself and pushing it along to the rest of the people in the circle.

The challenge has been issued. It’s a challenge to step up and state your goals. A video manifesto that shows the world what you believe.

And I recommend including some words about the need for generosity and to reach out to those behind you and offer a helping hand. The world has been way too hard for way too many people for way too long.

I’ve been trying to help as many people as I can while also managing to avoid all of the help I was offered and simply missed, because I was trying to own everything and do it all. I wanted to be everyone myself, a team of 1.

For the first time in years, I don’t feel like I have to save the world. Because now, I’ve seen enough to know that there are others who are also working on saving the world.

I’ve figured out exactly what my role is now.

My role is the coordinator. I simply need to make sure that the people working on saving the world can see each other and work together constructively, instead of destructively.

I just wasn’t able to fulfill that role until I could slow down and shed all the others that I’d picked up over the years. But thanks to the kindness and generosity of a grant, I was able to unlock things in myself and others that I didn’t believe possible.

That’s the power of engineering generosity.

It’s how we open the doors to the brighter futures we don’t dare hope for.

Let me know if you need a role. We’re picking up steam now and it’s getting fun.

And who knows?

Maybe we’ll get to hang out at Fivecamp.1