We have confused consumption with connection

On the radical acts of love and presence

I’ve been standing in the Starbucks line in Terminal 5 at JFK Airport for over 35 minutes. There’s a woman with a glazed over look ordering a drink she refers to as the Iced Dubai Chocolate Matcha™️ with salted caramel protein cold foam. I cringe because I assume she made this up on the spot, as is sounds so far fetched and ridiculous, but then I see the concoction on the menu. I am horrified, and for the life of me, I cannot tell if we’ve gone too far or if this is simply the natural endpoint of human civilization as we know it. Probably both, because witnessing this interaction has convinced me that society is absolutely fucked.

In the same line, a girl that’s maybe thirteen years old, dressed head to toe in Alo Yoga, turns to her much younger, nearly identically-dressed sister and declares unprompted that she will order the pesto mozzarella sandwich because it has fifteen grams of protein and is less than 400 calories. At thirteen, I blessedly wasn’t thinking about protein or macros or calories at all. I hadn’t yet been corrupted by a society telling me I wasn’t thin enough and that I was eating too much so they could sell me something else. I was still ordering happy meals, eating stale Halloween candy year-round, and pushing the steamed, unseasoned vegetables my mother cooked to the side of my plate. My dietary corruption would come years later in college.

Mark is standing next to me and is stunned to see Pink Drink™️ on the menu. He immediately asks me what Pink Drink™️ is. I make a mental note that it’s unbelievably endearing that he has never heard of it. I am so turned on by having a partner who is this chronically offline! I explain that Pink Drink™️ started as an off-menu secret, a Pepto Bismol-pink coconut milk sludge that a customer made up and posted on Instagram in their free time, and then of course the internet did what the internet does, and then nine years ago Starbucks had no choice but to put it on the official menu because their whole order system was grinding to a halt over this drink that no barista knew how to make without proper training. A customer went rogue with customization, the internet made the product go disgustingly viral, and now we are all standing in a line that’s twenty minutes longer than it needs to be because of a decision made collectively by strangers on social media a decade ago.

And that’s just Pink Drink™️. That was before the Dubai Chocolate Matcha™️ with salted caramel protein cold foam. We’ve been told so many times that we deserve exactly what we want, customized perfectly and precisely to our expectations, that we have collectively made the experience of getting a coffee or breakfast sandwich a minor major endurance event. Lines are so much longer because we are so used to getting exactly what we want. Customization has gotten completely out of hand! And yet we all just keep standing in this line, mildly annoyed, scrolling on our phones, waiting for the thing we invented the problem to get.

But the customization piece is only one half of it. The lines are longer and worse than ever because humans have stopped being present with each other entirely.

The woman in front of me vlogs herself bitching and moaning about the wait time. I watch her Google image search “mimosas at the airport,” save one of the better looking image results, and text it to her crush saying she’s turning up in the airport lounge and can’t wait to see him in the Dominican Republic later. She is in fact the least turnt of us all. Behind her, a woman is on a FaceTime call, broadcasting her entire conversation about hooking up with some guy to everyone within a twenty foot radius. Someone steps up to the counter still mid-scroll, has to be asked twice what they want, and looks vaguely annoyed to have been interrupted from whatever they’re looking at.

Everyone in this line has a vlogging camera or a speakerphone blasting or a FaceTime conversation going loudly and I keep wondering why everyone think their life is so worth documenting or sharing out loud? What are we all so afraid of facing if we just put down our phones for a second? Politeness is just presence with manners. The erosion of basic courtesy and human decency isn’t a mystery at all, it’s just what happens when everyone is mentally somewhere else instead of in the moment.

We are all absolute zombies, glazed over, shuffling and hunched forward, reaching for the next thing, already somewhere else in our heads before we’ve even arrived to the destination we’re traveling to.

Above us, trapped city pigeons are doing circular laps through the terminal. They’re completely unbothered by airport announcements, the aforementioned speakerphone calls, and travel delays. JFK is their new concrete jungle, and the arrivals and departures screens are the telephone poles where they roost. I watch them anxiously, worried that they’ll fly into a window trying to join their Boeing counterparts for takeoff. But they don’t join the metallic flock outside. The birds keep circling, moving, unbothered and uninfluenced. I hate that these birds, stuck here against their will, are the most present and glorious creatures in the entire building. I find this either beautiful or deeply disturbing depending on the given moment.

I go to Hudson News to buy the obligatory $15 airport water bottle, because of course all of the water fountains in the terminal are broken. At the checkout counter, there are travel neck pillows covered in swirling cartoon poop emojis. I stand in front of them slightly longer than I should, thinking that somewhere, someone pitched the shit emoji neck pillow in a design meeting and someone else emphatically said yes and now we are here, in the airport, surrounded by shit pillows, and no one thinks this is strange. Or if they do, they didn’t speak up in that ill fated design meeting. Consumerism is so disgustingly, fascinatingly gross. Humans will buy anything. We will brand anything!

Every invention these days is either a fidget toy or a placebo designed to distract us or placate us. And we keep buying both.

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As we are boarding the flight to Tulum, someone behind me in the jet bridge says that Tulum is totally cooked at this point. I file this away in my brain without responding—I’ve obviously heard this before. My work life is filled with people asking me which destinations are over, which places still have a pulse, and which ones are worth the trip before tourists ruin them completely. Every beautiful destination is cooked eventually, according to those on social media. Every single destination has a window of time before it becomes the punchline to a joke that isn’t that funny at all.

On the plane, my seat mate opens TikTok before we’ve finished boarding and doesn’t close it for the entire flight. She doesn’t even get up to pee, not even once. I watch her FYP scroll by in my peripheral vision and am triggered to see that she never reaches the end of a single clip, her attention span so unbelievably shot that she never even sees the end of a trivial fifteen second dance video. I’m not judging her, I’ve been in the same position before deleting TikTok for good. But I keep thinking about something I’ve been turning over in my head since Starbucks.

When you can have everything you want, whenever you want, it actually creates more friction, not less.

Somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, I keep coming back to that comment made in the jet bridge, and I think to myself that Tulum isn’t cooked, Americans are cooked. And the thing about being cooked is that you don’t know boiling hot the water is until you step out of it. We are all frogs boiling alive in the unseasoned cauldron of capitalism.

We’ve optimized and glamorized choice to the point of total paralysis and called it freedom. I think about how if I wanted the Rainbow Art kit or any of the infomercial toys advertised on Nickelodeon as a kid, I’d have to beg my parents to call a 1-800 number. There was only one option for everything, and if you ordered it, you’d wait, and wait, and wait, and wait. You almost wanted whatever it was more for the waiting. You’d run to the mailbox at the end of the driveway every single afternoon, hoping for signs of the precious cargo arriving in the mail. You didn’t document the unboxing for your Youtube channel. There was no overnight shipping or Amazon Prime. You just simply wanted the thing for a long time, and then you had it, and then having that thing was magically enough.

As I’ve grown older and become a mother, I’ve realized that people love being told what to do. Children thrive off of structure and set rules. We all crave some form of structure and routine. Not because humans are weak, but because curation is an ultimate form of love and care. Someone you implicitly trust saying “this is what you need” is infinitely better than standing in front of forty-seven options until you're too exhausted to want any of them.

Limitation creates presence, and abundance creates noise. To no one’s surprise, we are all drowning in a world of loud, crippling, deafening noise. There’s nothing I love more than arriving to a restaurant to find only 5-8 choices on the menu. It removes the mental gymnastics from a decision that should never have been hard in the first place.

We will spend money on literally everything except the thing that actually works. We have no problem customizing a coffee order seventeen different ways, but we won’t sit in a circle with the people closest to us and tell them the truth about how we are really doing. Americans have turned consumption into a personality and called it self-expression. And oh my—that is dangerous and terrifying and sad.

My friend Abena Anim-Somuah wrote this the other day, and I’ve been mulling over it ever since:

The stuff you own should be the least exciting thing about you. Obviously!

People will acquire cameras for vlogging, and some of us might even be living lives worth filming. But as soon as you press that cherry-red record button, the act of filming your own life makes it no longer yours. The moment you point a lens at your own life, you’ve stepped outside of it completely. You’re no longer the person enjoying the experience, you’re the person documenting the person having the experience.

Humans buy shit emoji neck pillows because irony is cheaper than full blown sincerity. We stand in line for our flights at airports for trips we will document and forget, because to most of us the documentation feels more real than the journey and the adventure itself.

The thing that actually works to bring us together is free and yet it costs everything. It doesn’t come in 47 customizable options. It cannot be ordered on an app or optimized with 16 modifications. It costs showing up, it costs vulnerability, and it costs being willing to sit in a circle at midnight and tell the truth about who you are to people who actually know you, or are choosing to know you for the first time.

I know this because I’ve dedicated my life to building a space where this happens every year.

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Love Summit is the intentional gathering I host for my closest friends and family every February in Tulum. It’s called Love Summit because that’s exactly what it is: a long-weekend summit dedicated entirely to love in all of its forms: self love, love of friends, love of music and dancing and moving our bodies, love between partners, love of and connection with the natural world around us. We don’t use the word love lightly.

It is not a retreat in the wellness-industrial-complex sense of the word. At this point, I’d argue it’s closer to adult sleepaway camp or a mini music festival than anything else, because art and dance is a big part of it, and moving your body really lends itself to presence and staying in the moment. There’s no agenda to sell anyone anything. The goal isn’t to fix people. It’s radically simpler than that, and somehow so much harder.

It happens at the same place over the same window in February every year. There is an agenda in the literal sense of the word, a loose structure, but most of the activities are optional and attendee-led. Everyone who comes has to contribute in some way, whether it’s teaching a watercolor class, leading a group workout, playing bartender for the night, DJing, or contributing financially. All contributions are created equal, and no contribution is seen as more valuable than another.

At its core, Love Summit is a highly curated group of 30-ish people who have agreed to show up fully. No work talk for 96 hours (Love Summit IS NOT a networking event), just honesty and openness to whatever opportunities and experiences come. I’ve built the space for this to happen within, but my friends deserve all the credit for what happens inside it. I love them dearly for leaning into this every single year without fail, for showing up ready to love and be loved. Which sounds simple until you realize how many people go their entire lives never quite managing either one cleanly.

signs I saw around tulum before the start of love summit

Every Love Summit, without fail, I lose my phone for a full 24 hours. I don’t notice until at least a day later, and that’s the part that gets me the most—not the losing, but the not noticing the losing. Somewhere between the arriving and reuniting and the hugs and the settling in, the instinct to document everything quietly slips away. No one is filming, no one is performing. Phones become irrelevant because the things happening in front of us are too real to need a record of it, and because all of the people we know and love are with us sharing that presence.

Last year, so few photos were taken that we handed out disposable cameras this year, because we knew that was the only way we’d be able to capture any visual memories at all. Film is so deliberate, finite, irreversible. Film begs you to look and commit before you press the shutter. There are no second takes, there’s only that precious moment.

On the last night of Love Summit during reflection time, my brother-in-law described the weekend as the recreation of the feeling of college, the specific texture of community where you’re surrounded by people who actually know you deeply and there’s nowhere else to be, because all of your people that you love deeply are in the same place. He’s totally right, but also wrong in a way that matters specifically to me. I never had that feeling in college. I had no idea who I was or what I needed. I hadn’t yet discovered my people.

It took me years to build this community. Or rather, we built each other, slowly, and then all at once.

My best friend Jenna said over the weekend that everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager. Most people are desperate for community but don’t want to do the unglamorous work of showing up. And it is decidedly unglamorous work! We want intimacy without discomfort, the circle of trust without the vulnerability.

But I think it goes even deeper than that. I’m shocked at how much humans want to be known without the risk of being truly seen. And being known and being seen aren’t the same thing. Being known is passive. It accumulates over a long period of time, through proximity and shared history and experiences. Being seen is an act of radical courage. It required you to stop managing how you’re perceived and let others around you see you for who you really are. Most of us are so incredibly afraid of what others will find that we spend our entire lives curating a version of ourselves that’s easier to love. A safer, more digestible version.

Love Summit works because everyone in attendance has agreed, implicitly, to drop the self-curation that stems from fear. The kind that manifests as armor, as a performance. For 96 hours, there’s no audience, no highlight reel, no version of yourself to maintain. Everyone shows up with what they’re actually good at—their real skills and genuine gifts—and offers them to the group freely, without ego and without hesitation. We’re just a group of people who have decided that being fully seen by the people they love is worth the risk.

And I’m shocked, every year, by how radical that still feels! How rare it is to find a room full of people willing to do it!

Community isn’t something that happens to you, and it won’t come unless you invite it and then double down on it. It’s something you build, incrementally, by showing up day after day even when you’re tired and don’t feel like it, even when it feels massively inconvenient, even when you’d rather stay home and placate yourself with the constant scroll of your FYP. And fostering genuine community is really hard—it requires a level of time, emotional labor, and vulnerability that most people underestimate unless they’re in the thick of it.

It means doing the unglamorous, unposted, unwitnessed, thankless work. Babysitting your friend’s sick kid, being the one who always initiates plans, dealing with conflict, organizing the things that will fall apart if you stop holding them together. You have to be the glue, and there’s no guarantee of return. I feel immensely lucky that my friends understand this, and that they too show up not just when it’s easy and exciting and in Tulum in dreary February, but also in the hectic in-between times.

Someone pointed out during reflection time that some of us have known each other for three years, and some only ever in the context of Love Summit, and yet we know each other with an intimacy that most other groups spend decades trying to cultivate. Research says it takes sixty hours of quality time together to move from acquaintances to close friends. We spend ninety-six hours of quality time together each year over the course of a long weekend. How lucky are we! And how intentional we all had to be with our time and efforts to get there!

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And yet! I spent most of the weekend living ever-so-slightly outside of my own body. I was so focused on building the community container for everyone else that at some points, I forgot I was allowed to thrive inside of it too, even though my goal for the weekend was to enjoy the vacation, to be off the clock.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s really hard for me to be a guest at my own party.

Last year, that tension of wanting to enjoy myself but also wanting everyone else to enjoy themselves unraveled me completely and led to me sleeping 5 hours the entire weekend. This year I had just one meltdown. One! And I want to take a moment to be genuinely proud of that, because growth isn't always super dramatic. Sometimes growth is slightly less time spent watching from the wings of your own life, and more time actually being present inside of it.

This one single meltdown was when I DJed with Mark on Thursday night. It was our first time performing ever, and I had taken some LSD. These two facts feel important to mention together. I’ve never been shy about my occasional psychedelic use—psychedelics have genuinely rewired my brain for the better, and they’ve cracked me and many Love Summit participants open in ways that years of conventional therapy couldn’t quite reach. I credit psychedelics in large part for my capacity to love and connect and make something like Love Summit possible in the first place. And yet, I still managed to spend my time behind the DJ deck completely crashing out inside my own head, dismantling a win in real time. Which tells you everything you need to know about how stubborn the ego can be and how difficult it is to be truly present.

Before we even got behind the decks, I preemptively circled the party downstairs telling people Mark had practiced more and was way better than I was. I told everyone I could find, saying it casually, like a disclaimer, like I was managing expectations. What I was actually doing was apologizing for my own existence in that moment, while also simultaneously setting myself up to absolutely dread and hate the next two hours because I had already written the narrative that I’d be a failure. My reasoning was that if I told everyone I might fail before I failed, then the failure wouldn't really be mine!

We both made a litany of mistakes, but of course we did. It was our first time DJing for anyone else besides each other. Performing for others is different than performing barefoot in your kitchen. I was high enough that the deck looked more like the dashboard of a Mini Cooper than it looked like a music controller, but not so high that I couldn’t perform. But people were dancing and vibing. And yet I stood behind the decks quietly dismantling my own win in real time, so worried about how I was being perceived that I couldn't feel any of it. It was a very strange out-of-body experience that I wouldn’t recommend.

After crying to Mark later on and sitting with my own thoughts and perceived failure for days, I now know no one was watching me the way I was watching me. Everyone in that room had flown to Tulum because they trusted me—they already decided to trust me when I invited them to this event. Most of them are also clients who had trusted me in the past to plan their birthday trips, honeymoons, anniversary celebrations. And yet, I spent the whole night in a courtroom I’d constructed and built alone, prosecuting myself for crimes no one else witnessed but myself. And even if they did witness my mistakes, my friends would have forgiven them! I’ve forgiven all of them for their flaws without question or judgment. I'm working on extending myself the same courtesy.

I do this self prosecution everywhere I go, and I have been doing it for years—the DJ booth just made it impossible to ignore.

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On the final night, we all sat at the same table after dinner, and everyone went around saying reflections, naming what the weekend had given them. We all held space and made sure everyone had room to arrive at their own conclusions. But somewhere in the holding I forgot to include myself again, so focused on the container that I forgot I was also allowed to be inside it. I contributed to reflections genuinely, and I named several things the weekend gave me. But I completely glossed over the fact that the weekend had given me a much bigger realization. I couldn't have named what I was feeling that night anyway—there was something sitting in my chest that the weekend had dislodged but hadn't fully surfaced yet. It would the next day.

On Sunday, we were supposed to fly back home, but a chunk of us faced flight cancellations due to the blizzard of the century barreling towards New York. We were stuck in Tulum, which is probably one of the best places to be stuck, since Mexico is heaven on Earth. I wasn’t really ready to return to “real life” anyway.

But then in the middle of our extended vacation, we received alerts that the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel was killed, and that we needed to shelter in place. Friends heading to the airport to sent us photos of burning cars on the highway, signs of retaliation. This definitely shifted the vibe, but we checked in to the hotel next door, we sheltered in place, we played games, we swam in the ocean, and we waited. More flights were cancelled, and more replacement flights were booked.

And yet in the face of all of this, I felt strangely, unexpectedly, suspiciously calm. In life I feel like I’m constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, and this time, it didn’t. Love Summit had been preparing me for exactly this. Four days of no phones, no social media, and radical presence, and then suddenly, a moment that actually required that presence. There was nowhere to be but there, in Tulum, and even in the chaos, the present moment was the best moment to be in. Genuine, unfiltered uncertainty is always massively clarifying, because it has a way of sorting what matters from what doesn’t. I found that almost everything I'd been anxiously managing in my head over the weekend suddenly fell away completely.

In this new and unexpected stillness, with no one needing anything from me, the weekend finally caught up with me. The concept I hadn't been able to find and name during reflection time the night before arrived quietly and then all at once.

Imposter syndrome. Raging imposter syndrome!

Not just a sprinkle of it, but a noticeably crippling amount that had been running in the background for so long that I had stopped noticing its distinct loud hum. It was a vicious and deadly strain, the type that made me wonder, even after 33 people flew to Tulum, whether they came because they genuinely wanted to be there and enjoy my company, or whether I'd just made it easy enough to say yes to a vacation. Whether they actually liked me for me or just liked the party I was throwing. Had I built something real multiple times in a row or just gotten incredibly lucky?

I had been extending grace to everyone in that room except myself, treating my friends with a love and acceptance I couldn't seem to turn that love inward for the life of me.

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When you live inside of a capitalist society long enough, every single interaction starts to feel transactional. Every relationship begins to feel like it has a ledger. Every act of love can start to feel like it has a motive hiding inside of it. You’re unable to receive anything cleanly because you’re always looking for the catch, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Consumerism doesn’t just shape what we buy, it also shapes how we relate to each other, communicate with each other, how we value ourselves, and how we decide what is real and meaningful. We've been so thoroughly marinated in the logic and concept of exchange that genuine presence starts to feel unbelievably suspicious. Presence feels too good!

Once most people had left Tulum and we were down to a group of six, reflecting on the weekend, it finally became undeniable to me. Thirty three people had flown into Tulum with the purest intentions. The entire weekend was in fact real. No one came for the destination itself—Tulum is so cooked, remember? They came for each other, they came for me, they came for the opportunity to be radically present and love each other. They came to exist inside of the container and to forget the outside world for four days.

Presence does not have a catch, and it is not for sale. You can’t perform your way into it and you can’t easily optimize for it. The only way to step into radical presence is by showing up with intention and accepting people for who they really are. I know my friend’s flaws, and I love them and accept them anyway. The weekend reminded me they constantly do the same for me.

I’m still learning how to let that be enough, and I know that logically it is absolutely more than enough. I'm still learning how to receive love as cleanly as I try to give it, how to stop prosecuting myself in empty courtrooms, how to stay inside the container I've built rather than hovering anxiously around and above it. I don’t have everything figured out, not even close. But I’m committed to the work, and more committed than I’ve ever been. And I think that the commitment is the entire point.

You cannot and you will not magically arrive at presence. You have to keep choosing it, imperfectly, over and over again, until it starts to feel less like an effort and more like home.

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We had to fly to Toronto in order to get home to New York. I’d be remiss to not tell you about the Starbucks in the Toronto Pearson Airport.

Of course it was the same chain, and the same cursed capitalistic menu. But the similarities stopped there. This was a completely different universe! The line was whisper quiet in a way that felt unbelievably disorienting after my JFK experience. No one in the airport was vlogging or documenting their next move. People ordered normal drinks, and people were reading normal novels in line and observing rather than watching Instagram stories. Everything moved efficiently, without drama. It felt like a minor miracle and then I realized it wasn't a miracle at all, it was just what happens when people aren't optimizing their lives for an audience.

At customs, I accidentally cut part of the line by hugging the side of the bottleneck we all occupied and a Canadian stranger called me out, calmly and directly, and that was that. I apologized, I moved and the line moved, and the world didn’t end. In America, calling someone out makes you the difficult one, and the aggressor is protected by everyone’s collective conflict avoidance. We’ve decided that keeping the peace means letting things go, which means the bar keeps lowering and we keep adjusting and then one day you’re standing in an airport surrounded by shit emoji neck pillows and protein cold foam and people clipping their toenails on a flight wondering how the world became so tragic.

The things that are broken in America aren’t broken because it’s inevitable. They’re broken because someone decided to break them, no one held them accountable, and we’ve been told so many times that this is just how it is that most of us have stopped asking why. Somewhere along the way, presence went out the window and accountability became completely optional, along with personal responsibility and loyalty. Selfishness has been normalized and rebranded as self-optimization.

The excess! The noise! The overstimulation! The self-generated bottlenecks and broken systems! This isn’t the natural endpoint of human civilization, it’s a specific set of choices that compound over time until they feel like heavy, Neptunian gravity. We’ve confused having more options with having more freedom. We’ve confused documenting life with living it. We’ve confused consumption with connection and then wondered why we feel so emptied out and hollow inside.

And all of those places that are supposedly cooked and ruined? The truth is that they’ve just become radically Americanized. We show up with our vlogging cameras and our protein cold foams and our spectacular inability to just exist somewhere without making it a full-blown production, and then we wonder why the magic is dead and gone. The magic was never gone, we just brought a bunch of unnecessary noise and choice with us to places that were beautiful and quiet and thriving on their own. You can find magic anywhere as long as you’re willing to be present.

The good news is that most of the rest of the world isn’t a bubbling cauldron of hot, loud, rude shit. It’s mostly just us Americans, drowning in a lack of presence. And we’ve normalized it.

You cannot buy presence—it isn’t a luxury for sale, and it’s not a personality type. It’s something you either have or you don’t. It’s a conscious choice you make, over and over again, in every Starbucks line and every airplane seat and every room full of people you love. And every time you make the decision to be present, even imperfectly, even for just a moment, the world gets a little quieter, a little realer, and a little more worth existing in.

We are all here on Earth. We might as well really be here, fully present, fully ourselves. The alternative is too painful and numbing for me to come to terms with.

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xx,

Bella