Are Communities of Practice Stressing Us Out?

Walking to work Thursday morning, my mind was filled with numerous details from the myriad of communities of practice I’m a part of. My psyche was swirling with thoughts of tasks that I had to complete at work that day, I was processing the ideas and discussions in our class the evening prior, reminiscing about my conversation with a close friend two nights prior and thinking that I should call my other long-distance friends more. All while dodging other pedestrians on the sidewalk and obeying traffic signals at crosswalks. By the time I was half-way to work I knew that my stress levels were rising from just thinking about everything I needed to get done. Then it donned on me: Are our primate brains wired to withstand the demands and details of multiple communities of practice in a “city”? Have diverse communities of practice evolved faster than our primate brains?

As we have learned through reading Michael Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (as listed on Chapters.ca) and through our discussions in class, we know that human society has evolved faster than the human species and as a primate species, humans are fairly young. So have our brains evolved quickly enough to keep up with the multiple demands we place on it in modern day society or are we becoming more stressed as we introduce more communities of practice to our lives?

As we read in Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (as listed on Chapters.ca) we don’t necessarily have to physically be “in” a community of practice in order to be a part of one. This can be problematic for the over-analysers and thinkers out there like me. At any given time I have multiple details about multiple items swirling around in my brain, largely unrelated to each other. We know that our human brains are robust enough to accommodate complex thinking and provide us with the capacity to recall important details, lessons, and events in our lives.  But how much is too much? Are we trying to accommodate so much that we’re putting undue stress on ourselves?

What's on your mind?

Workplace stress is a leading cause of stress in North America.  According to a 2010 Statistics Canada study (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2011002/article/11562-eng.htm), “slightly more than 1 in 4 Canadian workers described their day-to-day lives as highly stressful”. The majority of the people identified work as their main stressor. As Dr. Plumb discussed in class, people didn’t jobs that required them to work for money until a few hundred years ago; meaning that there was a huge community of practice with many sub-communities of practice that humans didn’t have to deal with. According to an article published in Biological Psychiatry by J. Douglas Bremner (Vol. 45, Issue 7, pages 797-805, 1 April 1999), an excess of stress can “result in damage to the hippocampus, a brain area involved in learning and memory, with associated memory deficits.” This could also explain why I only have the capacity to deal with a few stressful events at a time, easily forgetting details of non-related items when I’m experiencing stress.

Stressors of highly stressed employed population aged 20 to 64. Statistics Canada, 2010.

A second major contributing factor to human stress in North America is finances http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/06/02/10637.aspx). People are worried about accumulating debt and how they’ll pay back the money they owe. Enter in the communities of practice within banks, loaning agencies, credit card companies, and so on. As I mentioned above, humans didn’t always work for money. Since currency wasn’t always used as a means of obtaining goods, people wouldn’t have had to worry about incurring monetary debt. As we know, there is a debt crisis in the Western world affecting millions of people. Humans are accruing more debt than ever before, which would lead me to conclude that humans are also experiencing more stress about finances than ever before, putting even more strain on our primate brains when we have to deal with our financial situations in banks or on the phone with customer service representatives.

Other causes of stress can include family and relationships, and major life changes such as career change or birth of a baby (http://www.heretohelp.bc.ca/publications/factsheets/stress). Although our ancestors would have had similar communities of practice with their families and others, and of course experience childbirth, I believe their communities of practice would have been much less detailed and layered. Hundreds of years ago, humans’ families all lived in the same place at the same time. They didn’t have to worry about keeping tabs on what they were doing from afar or figure out how to post pictures on Facebook for their relatives to see. Nor did they get thrust into the pressures of ensuring their children kept up with the latest styles and fads so that they fit in with their peers.

Although communities of practice provide humans with a sense of belonging and shared understanding, I do believe that the multi-layered “cities” or “multimembership nexus of perspectives” (Wenger, p. 105) we create in our lives is getting too intense for our primate brains. If people are becoming more stressed due to multiple demands of their overlapping communities of practice, causing damage to the hippocampus and memory loss, worst case scenario is that our transmission of culture would start to break down as a result of less communication and information sharing with each other. Perhaps our brains will evolve to withstand the added stress of complex cities of communities of practice one day. Until then, it’s up to us as members of the human species to take care of ourselves and deal with our stressors so we can stay healthy and transmit culture for generations to come.

We need to transmit culture to ensure viable communities of practice for generations to come.