If you are a bit of a word nerd, then I have something that might fascinate you:
The words free and friend are closely related, and both derive from an ancient root meaning love.
Maybe the path from love to friend seems straightforward.
But free? What’s love got to do with it?
Well, here’s the surprising explanation:
Apparently, the original meaning of free was “not a slave”. A free person was able engage in social relationships such as friendship and marriage. On the other hand, slavery was a condition in which all social bonds were cut off, and the only relation was being owned by the master.
Perhaps that sounds abstract. An example might help:
If a Roman legionnaire was captured in war, made into a slave, and then escaped and made it back home, he would have to go through laborious rituals to recreate his entire social network, including remarrying his wife. That’s because becoming a slave was equivalent to “social death” and the severing of all social ties.
That thing with the Roman wife and the free/friend etymology are two curious factoids I got from the book The Dawn of Everything.
This book takes a bunch of new anthropology and archeology research that has come out over the past few decades, and it turns upside-down what you might think of as well-established human history.
I’m telling you about all this because yesterday, I promised to tell you the most valuable thing I have gotten (so far) from the Dig.This.Zoom training.
Well, the recommendation to read The Dawn of Everything is it.
Partly, that’s because The Dawn of Everything is full of interesting tidbits like the free/friend etymology above.
But really, I found this book valuable because of how inspiring it is. Because through detailed argument and seemingly endless research, it makes the following point:
Human beings choose and shape the societies live in. There’s nothing inevitable about the way the world is, or about the way it’s going to develop.
Aaron Winter, the copywriter who is putting on the Dig.This.Zoom training, recommended this book to suggest that something similar holds on a smaller scale as well.
Aaron’s point was that you can choose and shape how you work, and with who you work. There’s nothing inevitable and you are not bound by industry norms, not if you don’t want to be.
Again, I found this inspiring. I always enjoy being reminded that we all have agency, and that we can choose and shape how our lives turn out, even though it might not be obvious in any given moment.
I’m not sure I’ve done enough to either motivate you or convince you with this email.
But perhaps you resonate on some level with the idea that today’s society is not the only possible one, and that very real paths exist to something better.
Or perhaps you are greedy for lots of interesting facts and arguments that will make you a more interesting person to your friends, acquaintances, or newsletter readers.
In either of these cases, you might get some value, or perhaps a lot, out of The Dawn of Everything. Here’s the link if you want to check it out: