It's a systems problem, start with your neighbor

We’re in a time of high isolation in terms of single family homes, nuclear family units, and a growing class divide. We are live in a society organized by profit, and those in power make more money if we’re all living individual lives instead of sharing or collectivizing. If every household has the smallest number of people in it all working frantically to keep it all functioning, then they need as many shortcuts and conveniences as possible. In that case it is easily justified to pay for any efficiency or support that keeps the household going, creating more opportunities for profit.

Let me be clear… this is not just an individual-person problem. This is a systems problem. We’re doing what we have to do to make ends meet given the way the systems are set up. We can get food from a restaurant, have our groceries delivered, and we can get almost anything from Amazon prime shipping so that we don’t have to make that extra trip to the store.

These systems, though, continue to create more space between us. Now we don’t run into our neighbors at the grocery store, or get to know the clerk at CVS. According to a 2023 Surgeon General’s report only 16% of people report feeling deeply connected to their communities.

And it’s also true that systems are the aggregate of individual actions, that culture is built from the ground up. While we have a systems problem; systems are made of people, which means the entry point for change is always human behavior at the small scale.
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Brief connections with our local community members, though they might seem trivial, have real effects on cognitive, emotional, mental, and physical health. That means that this growing distance between people isn’t just about our feelings, our bodies also respond negatively to not having deep and meaningful social connections.

It’s not that the particular things we’re doing are bad, I definitely love restaurants, but it’s the system of separation that is the problem. And it goes far beyond what I’ve named here so far (you can follow some of the links provided for more examples and details).

When folks do gather it tends to be in identity groups, creating distance between not only us as individuals, but between people like ourselves and people who think or understand things differently than we do. The common phrasing “birds of a feather flock together” reflects this tendency, which in social science is called ‘homophily’.

This habit of gathering with people like ourselves is amplified by the ways that there is more space between us and other local folks. The affinity for someone who feels comfortable and reinforces what we already know, think, and believe, is enhanced by not interacting with people who are different within our communities.

And this impacts our ability to hold each other in our humanity.

When we see everyone outside of our affinity groups as “others” then they become mysterious entities that we need to defend ourselves from. They are perceived as threats to our own beliefs, expectations, assumptions, and perceptions.

And, when we center differences rather than our similarities, it’s easy to create narratives that pit us against each other. We can be convinced that other people are “bad” or any number of negative things. It’s easy to lose sight of how they are also just humans, trying to make ends meet too. It’s easy to feel like they are separate, and to withhold our compassion and empathy. But this continues the separation.

If we are really as lonely as the polls say we are, and we are lamenting not having “community” around us when we need them, we need to name and intentionally resist the narratives that create isolation.

The hard part here actually isn’t seeing the system, or noticing the effects, it’s in repair. I don’t actually believe that systemic repair must happen simultaneously with individual action... I truly think systemic repair is born of the small individual actions. Culture doesn’t arise magically, it comes from the actions of the humans participating in it.

How do we restore community? Because “community” doesn’t just mean someone is here when I need them, it means that I am also there when they need someone. Community is inconvenient, time consuming, and sometimes irritating. Being in community requires skills that individualists don’t tend to possess, because the skills of relationship aren’t prioritized when you spend most of your time alone, or with one or a few other folks, or when systems of hierarchy establish acceptable behavior with others.

And so being in community invites us to acknowledge, tolerate, and dance with difference. This requires communication skills, the ability to hold each other in humanity, compassion, empathy, and good listening, to name a few. So if we want more community, I suggest starting here. With our own skills. So that when we find that group of people we’ve been waiting so long for, we can engage with them in ways that affirm our lives and theirs.

That means we do the little things that feel hard: find out your neighbor’s name even though you’ve both been living there for years, linger at the local store for a tiny conversation with the cashier beyond “how are you?”, talk to another mom at the playground instead of scrolling on your phone. Small connections with others really matter.

Recent studies suggest that just 40 seconds of compassionate interaction between two people can have measurable, positive, and enduring physical benefits. Small acts of kindness and connection, like telling a short story in a group that doesn’t know each other, relaxes everyone. Repeated, these small acts change us, contributing to our own sense of belonging.

It turns out that culture is made of individual people taking small steps to collectively rewrite the dominant narrative. We can take small actions, and create community around them, we can build a different kind of system from the ground up.
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As we gather together, we gather momentum.