Bad Karma: Open CouchSurfing

I’m afraid of Open CouchSurfing too. Why? Because negativity is contagious and they sure are a negative bunch! This loose collective of “pirates of CouchSurfing” started off on a noble cause - truth, justice and the CouchSurfing way (my words).

Basically, the pirates noticed cracks in CouchSurfing’s foundation - insufficient financial transparency, inadequate communication from the leaders, centralized power, accusations of cronyism and perhaps the most concerning of all - censorship creep. Gosh, had they become Veit?

I agreed with some of what the pirates had to say. They wanted CouchSurfing to become an independent foundation the way Wikipedia is. I get that. Unfortunately, some CouchSurfing members can be a little cultish and refuse to acknowledge weakness in the system. Ironically, it seems like “Open CouchSurfers” in their overzealaous enthuasiasm became it’s anti-thesis. Rather than focus on constructive goals like promoting their holy grail of hospitality a.k.a. Bewelcome, they just became sad, bitter and resentful of CouchSurfing.

I got to the point that this negativity affected me greatly. I was resigned to the fact that this social experiment had failed. I quit being a CouchSurfing Ambassador and stopped hosting, surfing or even meeting other CouchSurfers. I returned to the real world.

Six months passed.

I woke up one day realizing that my life was missing something. I felt disconnected from the global community. I no longer felt like a world traveler. I was just another rat in the rat race.

I missed CouchSurfing. Aptly enough, it was close to June 12th - CouchSurfing’s so-called “birthday”. So I decided to turn up to a local event in Toronto. And there, amongst the dozen or so different nationalities, I felt like I was home. Here were my people.

So do I think that CouchSurfing as an organization is perfect now? Of course not. But nothing in life is perfect. It is what you want it to be. If you focus on the flaws, it’s flawed. If you focus on the amazing people you meet through the site, it’s amazing. It’s all about gratitude and realistic expectations.

This entry was posted on 23. August 2008 at 00:01 and is filed under bad karma. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.