Community

What is this thing that people are lonely for?

A while ago, a colleague asked a question on social media. It’s widely recognized that there is a loneliness epidemic. As Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote in a report on loneliness,

In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic cut off so many of us from friends, loved ones, and support systems, exacerbating loneliness and isolation.¹

And loneliness and isolation have real effects on people. They have real effects on physical, mental, social, and spiritual health. Murthy continues,

Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity. And the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished.²

Anyway, my colleague asked what people are lonely for. Surely, we’re not just generally lonely; there is someone or something that we are missing, that we are lonely for. Are we lonely for other people? Are we lonely for specific people? Are we lonely for some way that things used to be?

What are we lonely for? What are we pining after? What are we desperately seeking?

And when I saw that, I had the same thought that I usually have whenever someone points out a problem that seems rooted in our disconnection from one another. We are lonely for—we are pining after and desperately seeking—community.

So let’s talk about community.

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I think about community a lot. That probably started when I read Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. It continued when I researched and wrote my own book, Radical Charity. And it comes up regularly when I hear a podcast or read an article about some seemingly confounding problem that could be solved if we just paid attention to and cared for each other.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how we define community.

In the United Church of Christ, joining a congregation officially involves joining a covenant. The person who is joining stands in front of God and the congregation, affirms their baptism (or, if they haven’t been baptized, takes their baptism), and makes a set of promises. And, as part of that, the congregation makes a smaller set of promises to that person. In a sense, we are bound as a community by the promises that we make to God and to each other.

There’s an official version of those promises in the Book of Worship. But back in the day, in 1842, long before my congregation was part of the United Church of Christ and long before the United Church of Christ existed, when my congregation was merely a Congregational Church, part of what the congregation promised new members that they—the congregation—would, among other things, '“joy in your joys and sorrow in your sorrows.”

And I think that is what people are lonely for: not just people in general and not certain specific people and not even some vague way that things used to be—though we are sometimes lonely for those things—but for people who will joy in our joys and sorrow in our sorrows and feel in all of our other feelings. And, maybe, for people in whose joys we can joy and in whose sorrows we can sorrow and in whose other feelings we can feel.

Or, to put that another way, we are lonely for people who will ask us how we’re doing and actually be interested in the answer. Interested in hearing about it. Interested in doing something with the answer that we give.

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We are good at creating things that are like communities. I’m not quite sure what to call these things: shallow communities, surface level communities, artificial communities, simulated communities, or something else. Whatever we call them, they’re relationship webs that we refer to as communities—and that might even look like communities from the outside—but that don’t have the depth that real communities have.

A pizza party for November birthdays at work is not a community, even if your employer wants to pretend that it is. A confetti effect for a hug emoji on a social media post on a social media post is not joying in another’s joy or sorrowing in another’s sorrow. A shared bumper sticker is not a shared covenant.

Those—and more—are just the things that capitalism thinks look enough like communities that it can sell them and that you will buy. They are the Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi of social organization: simulations of the things that we long for. At best, because they are simulations, they simply fail to satisfy our longing. At worst, because we don’t recognize that they are simulations, we find ourselves chasing after the thing that will leave us empty.

Capitalism is good at creating Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. After all, it doesn’t have to offer anything real. And we will keep buying it in the hope that this time it will satisfy us (even though it never has before).

And what we need for our physical, mental, social, and spiritual health—the well-being of our whole lives—is real community.

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I don’t have an answer for the question that inevitably follows: How do we create authentic communities? How do we create communities where we joy and sorrow and feel together?

In fact, it may be that we can’t do that. It may be that we cannot create authentic communities. At least, it may be that we cannot create authentic communities on purpose.

It may be that the most we can do is treat how are you? as a real question. I may be that the most we can do is ask it sincerely, and answer it honestly, and listen to the answer attentively. And it may be that by doing that—by, more or less, really acting like we already live in authentic communities—we cause authentic communities to arise spontaneously around us.

It may be. I’m not sure. But it may be.

And I’m going to keep trying it. So I’m asking the question sincerely. Drop a comment, answer honestly, and listen to others attentively. How are you?

1. Vivek Murthy, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, 4.

2. Ibid.