I want community – but am I prepared to put the work in?

Community is billed as the cure-all for isolation, ageing and even climate change. Are we prepared to put the work in?. In the year since I moved into my flat, I’ve received a few notes under the door. Some were warm welcomes – most notably, a Swiftie-style friendship bracelet from my downstairs neighbour, who’d heard me (“very faintly!”) listening to the new album. Others were Christmas cards, or courtesy notes warning of forthcoming maintenance or outages.

Then, there were the requests – to turn the volume down or make some other small accommodation that’s necessary when living among others. The other day, I returned from running errands and glimpsed a scrap of cardboard on the mat. Somehow I knew it belonged to the latter category. Could I “PLEASE” break down large cardboard boxes and put them inside the recycling bin instead of sliding them in between, read the anonymous note, adding: “It makes the area look like a rubbish dump!”.

I felt a flush of irritation. Was twice-underlining the “PLEASE” really necessary, on top of the caps? Would it have not been friendlier to sign their name?. Then, the fit of pique passed. The request was completely reasonable, and my quibbles didn’t make me any less wrong. This minor run-in made me think about community – what we mean by it, and what it asks of us. The word is used freely, to describe all kinds of aggregates. It can encompass people whose daily lives are closely intertwined through their jobs, home life or hobbies and those who simply follow the same Instagram influencer or like the same brands.

When it’s real, present and felt, community can be a source of social connection, belonging, shared purpose and meaning. More often – and increasingly, in the absence of other social safety nets – it’s invoked in the abstract as something we desire, or should be working toward. The benefits of strong relationships and social support are well-documented and indisputable. Earlier this month, the outgoing US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, prescribed community as a balm for the “pain, disconnection and division” of the contemporary status quo.

The word “community” has warm, fuzzy connotations. But a siloed, individualistic culture also makes it harder to establish and maintain community; creating a shared identity and spirit of reciprocity takes effort and is not always comfortable. We may say community is the future, the cure for what’s ailing us about modern life and, as Murthy put it, “the irreplaceable foundation for our well-being” – but are we prepared for the challenges of creating it?.

In August 2016, when Charles Vogl’s book The Art of Community was first published, people heard the title “and thought I was talking about singing Kumbaya around the campfire”, he says. Vogl outlined “seven principles for belonging” in his book, developed during his time volunteering at a homeless shelter in Santa Ana, California, and in the Peace Corps in Zambia; labour organising in New York; and studying faith traditions at Yale University, among other roles at other organisations. Today, Vogl advises tech companies and organisations on how to build community.

As Murthy and others have emphasised, social isolation is a public health issue, associated with an elevated risk of anxiety, depression, heart disease, dementia, stroke and premature death. But inflation and the high cost of living are eating into individuals’ leisure time, depleting their availability and energy for socialising. “People work so hard, they don’t have time to go to potlucks,” Vogl says.

Because people increasingly socialise online, there also has been an “actual erosion in social skills”. For younger people in particular, the loss of experience and opportunities throughout the pandemic has resulted in a lower appetite for social risk, he says: “They’re more comfortable texting than they are talking.”. Factor in lower religious affiliation, falling social trust and the time-honoured (though possibly declining) trend of moving every few years, and community is indeed in danger of becoming a fabled good, Vogl says.

Community can also – knowingly or otherwise – be mis-sold. A group of artists or athletes, for instance, can’t really be considered a community if the prevailing feeling is of competitiveness or resentment, Vogl points out. Even events that explicitly set out to foster community can fall short by being too large, loud or impersonal – what Vogl calls “an arena experience”. Sometimes that is a failure of planning, but it can also indicate the organiser’s shallow investment or transactional intent.