Love, Family, Community, The Counterculture: Interview With Me By Benjamin Wachs

I was drinking at the time

I’m still on hiatus from writing, but I’m writing a quick post today because my friend Benjamin Wachs just published an interview with me. This interview is part of Benjamin’s series “Distillations,” and it took place at a bar in San Francisco called The Alembic (this venue is separate from the spiritual center in Berkeley, which is also called The Alembic). So I was drinking during Benjamin’s interview! Make of that what you will.

Please note that neither of us recorded the conversation, so all these quotes are from Benjamin’s memory. Therefore, some of my quotes are not things I said in the precise way Benjamin recorded it, but I think he represented my side of the conversation reasonably well, nonetheless.

You can read Benjamin’s piece about me here. Or if you’d prefer to start by reading about our context, here are many paragraphs of context!

I met Benjamin around 2019-ish, when I was launching my magazine. We both have long, long experience in counterculture communities; we even lived together, for a while, in a local co-living space that I co-founded. I was once called “a pillar in the community” for the local counterculture, and meanwhile Benjamin used to be widely described as Burning Man’s “resident philosopher,” which means he both loves Burning Man and he has scathing critiques of Burning Man. In 2020, I was honored that Benjamin chose to contribute an item to Issue One of my magazine, in which he distilled our philosophy after many conversations with me.

I feel like the interview with Benjamin reflects so much intensity and heartbreak that both of us have experienced, on a counterculture community level and on a romantic level. In a way, I cringe to read it — because I feel like I was somewhat overdramatic in the conversation. If I could add one thing to Benjamin’s piece that I said during the conversation, it would be this: I’m overall glad, now, about the negative experiences he and I discuss, because it showed me a lot of terrible stuff about humanity and about communities that I’m grateful to know.

Benjamin often comments on his belief that, in countercultural communities, we are “bad at” community and family-type stuff. I get what he’s saying, but I would describe the phenomenon differently. It reminds me of themes that came up when I wrote about my history in the co-living scene, a couple years ago. Here’s a quote from what I said then:

Many people who end up here [in the Bay Area] were weird at home. In particular, many people who move to the Bay Area have a bad relationship with their family.

That is not the case for me. I’m close to my parents. I feel very grateful that I have a good relationship with my parents. But at some point, I had this insight: Wow, I’m on great terms with both my parents, and how many of my Bay Area friends are like that? That was a profound moment for me. It has come back to me many times over the years.

… Having crossed so many lines politically, I feel like I can see the outlines of the culture underneath the Discourse. I feel like the core issue underneath everything we’re talking about, all these different lifestyle experiments, is that the baseline culture is a mess. And the culture war isn’t helping.

Our “normal” culture is so hard on people right now. So many people have trouble forming basic long-standing bonds. This really matters to me. I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

One issue is that there is very little community enforcement. There is so little moral order in communities. And I hate what the culture war does to this conversation. I want to have a sincere, nuanced conversation about moral order. I just want to talk to a lot of different people about creating consistent community bonds over time. But the Discourse around this is utterly bonkers. As one example, I follow a lot of conservatives who make a big deal about how they’re anti-polyamory — but then, they don’t socially punish infidelity among their members. Why? Why would lying to your partner about sleeping with another person be okay, especially if consensual polyamory isn’t okay? I don’t understand that.

This seems common across all kinds of communities. People can cheat all over the place, people are terrible to their children, and sometimes it feels like no one is paying attention or trying to make relationships functional over the long term. And I’m glad we have no-fault divorce because it gives many people, especially women, opportunities for happiness that we might not have had otherwise. It makes it possible for people to escape abusive relationships. But I’m not sure how our culture will solve certain types of lifestyle questions that benefit from stability and consistency, like having children.

Nothing can be assumed about relationships anymore. So there is an opportunity for something better to be created around relationship norms. And I think there are opportunities for moral order. I do see people trying stuff. In my liberal Bay Area community, there is interesting community enforcement that happens through events and co-living spaces. For example, if a person is widely known to have raped a bunch of people, that person might get banned from co-living spaces where cool events are happening, or they might get banned from the best events. This is a way for community enforcement and moral standards to have teeth. But this also creates a lot of effort for the people who run these events and spaces. People end up creating their own community judicial processes, and then the community processes have their own problems.

Our society needs to have a real serious conversation about interpersonal commitment and morality. But I think that’s everyone, it’s everywhere, not just weirdos in the Bay Area. The whole culture is a mess.

So I used to be very focused on these countercultural ways of living. I thought it was important that more people be accepting of alt lifestyles, not in an evangelical sense but because I thought alt communities had insight on how to do this stuff better. Now I’m less like that. I feel like I have seen the Matrix on all these cultural issues because I understand both the liberal and the conservative perspective. What is real underneath the culture war narratives?

Where and how can we create stable communities with members who truly support each other? Is it in the form of a liberal co-living space? What about a conservative religious village? I almost don’t even care anymore about the affiliation of people who are creating a community. I mean, I do care because I want to be part of a healthy culture and I want to fit in. But I also just want the culture to work for some people, somewhere, over a long period.

People need ways to live that make sense. For many people, what that means is stability — stable lives, stable worldviews, a stable nation to support them — especially for parents, as the stewards of the next generation of humanity. There’s so much you can do if you have a stable base and a lifestyle that makes sense for you, while fostering commitments. And if you don’t have those things, there are so many things you can’t do.

So how do we iterate on community living and create kernels, seeds, healthy soil, for community bonds moving forward? I’m opting out of co-living for now. But I think the conversation is much bigger than just co-living.

— from my 2024 piece, “My Life In The Co-Living Scene, and Related Alt Culture Observations”

Anyway.

My favorite moment in Benjamin’s piece comes near the end, when he gave me romantic advice about a complicated relationship situation.

Benjamin: “The best advice I can give you, from my personal experience, is something I worked out a long time ago. I like this a lot. It is: don’t do stupid things.”

Lydia leans her head back and cracks up laughing.

Benjamin: “Just ask yourself, before you do something: ‘would a stupid person do this?’ Really check in with that. And if they would, don’t do it.”

— from Benjamin Wachs’s interview with me

This is great advice, and so helpful. I’m doing my best! Thank you Benjamin!

If you’d like to read more about my history in “the counterculture,” I have lots of past writing about Burning Man, and co-living communities, and the anthropology of polyamorous families, and alternative sexuality. Benjamin also touched on my experiences being canceled, which I discussed in my 2025 piece “Canceled Left and Right.”

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