by Pearson
From the failed poisoned piña colada plan to the action movie shootout no one asked for, the White Lotus season 3 finale mostly sucked. But for today, let’s talk about the one plot line from this season that truly landed home.
We spend the entire season with three women approaching middle age who have known each other since their youth. We learn every reason these women have to hate each other, and we see very little—almost nothing—of why they’re even still friends. The show sets us up to believe these friendships have lived long past their expiration date, and we’re encouraged to think of the women as vapid and backstabbing.
In the finale, one of the women, Laurie, delivers a monologue that shows us another side to their relationships. At the dinner table with her two friends, she says:
I just feel like as you get older, you have to justify your life, you know? And your choices.
And … when I’m with you guys, it’s just so, like … like, transparent what my choices were, and my mistakes. I have no belief system. And I … Well, I mean I’ve had a lot of them, but … I mean, work was my religion for forever, but I definitely lost my belief there. And then—and then I tried love, and that was just a painful religion, just made everything worse. And then, even for me, just, like, being a mother, that didn’t save me either. But I had this epiphany today. I don’t need religion or God to give my life meaning, because time gives it meaning.
We … we started this life together. I mean, we’re going through it apart, but we’re still together, and I … I look at you guys, and it feels meaningful. And I can’t explain it, but even when we’re just sitting around the pool talking about whatever inane shit, it still feels very fucking deep.
The show plays with long-standing media tropes that portray female friendships as superficial and destined for betrayal. We’re led to expect these women will implode in some final blowout. Instead, we see something quieter and more radical: the power of bearing witness to and participating in one another’s lives. In this subversion, the show hints at something deeper—how time, shared experience, and working through conflicts and contradictions forge bonds between us.
In a world where so many search for meaning, Laurie’s thoughts offer insights for us as organizers. Unlike Laurie, as socialists, we don’t lack for a belief system or meaning. What we do lack, however, is time.
I mean this in three senses:
First, we struggle against commodified time: our time is a commodity for extracting profit, both through our labor in the workplace and through our attention—captured by social media algorithms, targeted ads, and endless notifications designed to keep us scrolling.
Second, we struggle against crisis time: our world encourages us to feel as though every moment contains a crisis. Climate crisis, an endless news cycle of disaster, work and personal demands, and very real human and animal suffering in the world constantly pull us into a state of emergency.
These two types of time obstruct our ability to live with a third type of time, what I’ll call relational time—the type of time Laurie talks about: time that builds the types of trusting, accountable, honest, and meaningful relationships we need to build the socialist reality we want.
To clarify, I don’t just mean the in-between moments of connection that happen organically while we’re focused on organizing tasks (nor do I mean the physics concept of the same name). I mean institutionalizing time and events where relationship-building is itself the point: time spent to clarify our communal understandings of our ideas; to create space for joy and grief; to connect to each other, ourselves, and our humanity.
Our oppressors have constructed this world to keep us trapped in commodified and crisis time, constantly working, reading notifications, or responding to crises. Life structured in this way erodes our capacity for relational time—for connection and solidarity. This is on purpose.
Organizing is, ultimately, a relational task: one of undoing the threads of capitalist alienation and rebuilding our connection to each other and the world. Commodified and crisis time leave people isolated, alienated, and disorganized; relational time helps fight against these forces. From an organizing perspective, these different modes of time present both a challenge and an opportunity.
The challenge: The tasks we seek to accomplish—overthrowing the ruling class, abolishing capitalism, building socialism—are about as difficult of tasks as humans can set themselves to. Our success depends on relationships built on trust and meaning. Yet our world is designed to impede exactly these types of relationships.
The opportunity: We’re all humans, and it’s in our nature to relate to each other—to form bonds, friendships, and families. A world manufactured against human connection is an unnatural one. If we can forge connections grounded in our common bonds, we can build our collective power and capacity to shape a world that reflects our shared humanity—one rooted in care, presence, and belonging.
Through this lens, we can imagine friendship as a revolutionary act. Learning to build friendships founded on a shared imagination of the world we want to create might just be the most threatening action we can take against the capitalist state.
Returning to the White Lotus, context matters. Laurie and her friends are three wealthy white women from America. It’s much easier to unplug and be present when your actress friend pays for a week-long vacation in Thailand.
The material realities of building a working class movement are different. As always, there are no shortcuts in organizing. If we want to build a movement full of strong, trusting, meaningful relationships, we have to put in the time. But I’d like to encourage us to view time spent building these types of relationships as more than a nice bonus. It is the infrastructure of political transformation.
Coming off of Connecticut DSA’s annual convention, I’m feeling grounded in the work we have already done to build a thriving movement on the left full of blossoming friendships and trust in and care for each other. If we keep relational time and relationship-building at the core of our movement, then we can grow into a movement that fights for a better world—and embodies one.
