Ubuntu and the Relational Power of Summer Camp
By Jeff Carter
This past summer I heard a couple of teenage campers mention something they called “Internet Brain Rot.” Are you familiar with this concept? They explained that this is the idea that too much time online— especially consuming social media feeds like TikTok and Instagram, short videos, and memes— “rots” your brain. It fragments your attention, reduces your thinking to quips and hashtags, and disrupts your memory, leaving you feeling mentally drained. It literally changes what you think and how you think.
The campers admitted they know this firsthand. They’ve experienced the thrill of being online and the yucky feeling that often follows it. They’re drawn inescapably to their online lives even as they know “being on your phone” too much feels bad. Despite being fun, they also sense the loss of something important, even if they can’t quite explain what it is.
The Relational Crisis
I have a theory that what’s lost, what makes online use ultimately dissatisfying, is something fundamental, something much deeper than mere cognitive changes. It erodes our capacity for authentic human connection.
Despite its claim to do the opposite, online use separates us from others, both physically and emotionally. It repackages the real world into pleasurable bite-sized pieces, as determined by some mysterious algorithm, thereby limiting and fragmenting what we experience. It keeps score with “my followers, my likes, my content feed,” implying that your individual experience, separate from everything else, is all there is.
This leaves us with fractured individualism, polarized echo chambers devoid of empathy, and defined by constant competition. Living online promotes zero-sum thinking (“I win, you lose!”), and reduces many relationships to mere transactions (“What do I get out of the deal?”). It clearly undermines the sense of shared reality, our “common sense.”
We know that for young people, excessive screen time negatively affects their attention and mental health. That’s been studied and clearly documented. But this is a deeper issue. Digital environments are actively undermining our kids’ relational skills and community orientation.
Young people are losing practice in the patient, face-to-face work of navigating differences, sharing resources, and finding identity through contribution to collective well-being. They’re struggling to develop a “relational capacity,” suffering from too much “me,” and not enough “we” guiding their instincts.
That’s the tragedy of falling into the trap of digital environments. It’s ultimately dispiriting and dehumanizing.
Understanding Ubuntu
There’s an African concept that helps us understand this further. Ubuntu originates in the Nguni Bantu languages of southern Africa. Archbishop Desmond Tutu helped popularize it in his anti-apartheid and human rights activism in the 1980s. Ubuntu rests on the notion of shared humanity and interconnectedness within community. It recognizes that we become fully human only in and through our relationships with others.
We exist in a web of relationships, and our individual success is inseparable from community well-being. In practice, this makes compassion, mutual care, respect, and generosity central values. Each reflects the reality that who I am as a person is inseparably entangled with you. Ubuntu places relational identity in front of any notion of a completely independent self.
To forget Ubuntu— to act selfishly irrespective of others— is to diminish your humanity. It is to wither. From this perspective, strengthening and improving the quality of our relationships in community is essential to human flourishing.
Think of a jazz band. While each musician adds their own individual skill and creativity, it’s how they work together, how they share the spotlight, that creates the best musical moments. Each player has to listen and respond to the others for something unique to emerge. Without the others, each individual would fall flat. That interdependence is Ubuntu— and it’s exactly what gets eroded when we live online.
Camp as Antidote
You can probably guess where this leads. Summer camp is an antidote to the isolating effects of life online because it’s an excellent example of Ubuntu principles in action. If anything, Ubuntu lives at Rockbrook. This place is foremost a “community fueled by kindness, respect and care.”
Free from the brain-rotting influence of online media, we focus instead on shared experiences, connecting with each other, and maintaining a place of encouragement and support. At Rockbrook, we embrace camaraderie instead of competition. There’s a spirit of lifting everyone up, cheering for everyone. “I succeed when we all succeed.” Every day, girls are reminded that they’re not alone, that instead they’re included in the group, propelled by its collective energy.
What’s powerful about positioning camp through an Ubuntu lens is that it reframes these experiences as essential developmental work rather than just recreation. The daily negotiations of cabin life, the shared meals, the group problem solving- these aren’t just fun experiences but crucial practice in the relational skills that digital environments can’t teach.
That’s why laughter is contagious at camp, why the girls here are genuinely helpful, why you see so many spontaneous expressions of affection, and feelings of joyful contentment. They are proving the power of Ubuntu to enrich their experience.
What Youth Development Misses
Most youth development discussions center on building individual capacities, things like academic achievement, leadership skills, emotional regulation, and career readiness. Focusing on these, however, inadvertently reinforces individualistic patterns without acknowledging the fundamental role relational skills play. Beyond individual skills, young people also need to develop an “Ubuntu consciousness,” something we know makes communities, and individuals within them, truly thrive.
The summer camp experience proves this is both possible and transformative.
The Greatest Lesson
More than just “who we are,” camp celebrates “who we are to each other,” in relationship with all of those around us. Perhaps this is its greatest lesson: a rich, meaningful life is built with others. If we lean in, with kindness, with heartfelt connection, everything is better.
That’s Ubuntu. And that’s Rockbrook.
