Community & Connection

Community & Connection is based on Commitment, but instead we choose Convenience

Community

I was discussing with someone, a self-identified digital nomad*, who mentioned that they’re struggling to find a community.  Yet it’s ironic as a digital nomad is inherently someone who is easy come, easy go.  You’ve designed your life such that you can do it anywhere in the world, basically your only connection being your wifi that allows you to work and earn a living and then you choose everything else around it.  It’s life à la carte.  Sounds pretty good, right?

It’s pretty good until you realize, as Peter Levels, founder of NomadList, did that he had friends everywhere but none where he was.  He had no roots or feeling of connection.  One shouldn’t be surprised right?

It takes time, effort and commitment to become part of a community.  Yet I would argue that our capitalist system trades in commitment for convenience (using money of course) and this trade is the inherent reason why we feel we’re lacking in community today, and this has trickle down implications.

Communities, to some degree, require some level of commitment whether it be that you can all work online, or that you’re all practicing Christians, or you merely like the same hobby.  This commitment forms the basis of the community.  If you simply have a group of fair weather friends, then when shit hits the fan, and they disappear, you know it’s not really a community.

Cities

I live in a “community” of 16 high rise residential buildings. I only know 1 of my neighbors***, contrast this to the suburbs I grew up in where there was the neighbor for everything.  

There was a neighbor that let me play in their backyard pool.  The neighbor that would watch me after I got out of child care. The neighbor that watched me after school had gotten out and my parents had yet to get off work. The neighbor with other kids my age whom I’d play with.

We all knew each other well and would help each other out, for example by watching each other’s homes when they went on vacation, pulling their garbage curbside, cutting their grass, walking their dog, building a chicken coup together etc. The need to rely on each other formed social bonds that extended to multiple areas of life. It was the tit for tat social layering that made you feel as belonging to a community.

This is mostly gone now as you can order a service for a lot of these.

Daycare, and after school care have become more of an expected part of raising a child, and the high school neighborhood babysitter is gone.  What happened to the village?

I believe urbanization played a role in removing the community by replacing it with convenient services that could perform individual functions of what used to be relied on amongst community members.

Coupling up

When there were social bonds, single people met each other through their community whether that meant through friends, family, work, at a bar, school, college or neighbors, now it’s purely via online.  Yet overlapping social bonds are what create healthy relationships.  It’s not simply a relationship in isolation, the relationship is part of a larger community which has now been lost.  

There have been numerous studies that have shown that overlapping spousal networks is healthy for the couple.  Remove that and you’ve got a recipe for increasing divorces and shorter relationships.

Also what’s missing from this data is how many fewer people are coupling up in general, that can be seen by either increase in sexless men or childless women over 30.

(https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-rise-of-childless-america - they have a post based on country too)

Fewer coupling up means fewer…babies!

Birth rates

I’ve thought about Japan’s falling birthrate and a lot of the issues that people point to as a cause of the declining birth rate (the pill, dating apps, built environment of suburbs lacking a 3rd space etc) didn’t exist in the 1970’s Japan when the birth rate collapsed.  Stephen J Shaw points to the oil shock of the 1970’s for the cause, and for the US it was the 2008 Great Financial Crisis but those are merely the points in which the birth rate hit a downward inflection point, but it was going down even before then.  Why?

My theory goes back to lack of community, and a retreat from civic life based on the premise of the book “Bowling Alone”.

Florida vs Utah

I met an entrepreneur who happens to be Mormon and has done the whole digital nomad with a family lifestyle.  He mentioned in Florida, where people are a lot more transient, most neighbors were hard to get to know and recluse, and wouldn’t let their kid over their house despite playing with their kids for 2 years.  Meanwhile, the first day he gets to Utah, the neighbors' kids knock on the door and ask to play with his kids.  A night and day reaction and it certainly helps that when you have stronger social ties (being part of a church instead of just being neighbors) it creates greater social cohesion and bonds.

(source: US Census)

Florida is clearly trending towards an inverted pyramid and Utah remains, for now, a pyramid. It probably doesn’t take much to guess which environment has a better family life.

Israel is an outlier in the demographic trends as it’s both industrialized and has a high birth rate (including among secular Jews), but what it also has is a strong community forged by the constant threat of war. 

In conclusion, I believe capitalism incentives us to use money to solve problems of convenience, reducing our commitment to our community and thus leading to a whole host of social problems including decreased social bonds, and falling birth rates.

I don’t believe that this was any overarching conspiracy, but merely the consequence of individual actions being bad for the collective health of society.

*A digital nomad is a curious thing to me.  I’ve been one (it’s a lifestyle label, not a career) but it’s funny because we place such emphasis on the ability to work remotely so that we can see new places, and chase a different form of consumerism (experientialism) yet for anyone that’s lived the life, it’s 90% the same life (get up in the morning, have breakfast, work, go to gym), just in a different place, and likely a better quality. After a while though you realize how self-centered and hedonistic it can be.

**I also love that Mormons have a church and Facebook group specifically for single 20-35 year olds (which is how the Mormon I’d spoken to had met his wife).

***I’m trying to change this by having my neighbor over for dinner, asking them to take care of our plants while we’re gone in exchange for baby sitting their daughter.