Do you want to build community or are you just lonely?

A couple of weeks ago, my friend L texted me an article by Serena Dai called The Easiest Way to Keep Your Friends with the note “Reading this at laurel hardware…made me think let me text some of my boys.” The image of my very fashionable friend reading about loneliness in a packed Los Angeles bar felt like the perfect snapshot of this moment in time.

In her essay, Dai argues that the key to maintaining relationships is consistency. Like most people, my closest friends are the ones I went to school with, worked alongside, or played sports with. It was through that regularly scheduled programming that we became close. Even if these interactions were typically pedestrian, I saw how the moods of my classmates and teammates shifted, what they wore on different days, or what they ate for lunch. These daily rituals, where we grow alongside one another, tell us so much about other people.

I first heard the term “intentional community” from the staff in my college dorms. It struck me as odd because, until then, every community I’d been a part of already existed. I had never had to create one myself. I just hopped on the bandwagon. But of course, as I would learn as I grew older, no great organization, movement, or society appears out of thin air. It requires individuals coming together (and continuously returning) to create something bigger than themselves. Once we’re no longer in school, these “friends of convenience,” as Dai puts it, become much harder to come by. There are no more morning meetings, no after-school activities—just recess indefinitely. Any sense of community now requires deliberate effort with no built-in structure or accountability to keep us engaged.

In adulthood, clubs (e.g. book clubs, rotary clubs, etc.) are the closest thing we have to extracurriculars, but as the documentary Join or Die warns us, club participation is in decline—an issue with far-reaching societal consequences. The film essentially profiles the work of social scientist Bob Putnam whose groundbreaking book Bowling Alone tracks the downturn of club membership in America with the diminishing of social capital (i.e. the value of a person's social networks and the relationships within them). This affects everything from voter turnout to distrust of government to economic mobility. Putnam’s book was published in 2000—before social media existed—so the social capital he described has since evolved into something more transactional: clout.

Unlike traditional social capital, which is built on trust and mutual support, clout is often more about visibility than depth. Instead of forming relationships based on shared experiences and reciprocity, we curate personas and connections that serve a social currency. The problem is that clout doesn’t necessarily translate into real-life support systems. People may know of you, but that doesn’t mean they’ll show up for you when it matters. It’s important to note that during a period of history when we are supposedly more connected than ever, paradoxically we are also more isolated than ever. This, of course, isn’t entirely social media’s fault. However, it has made “liking” a colleague’s Instagram story about a career milestone or sharing an infographic about a social justice issue way easier than actually showing up to an event or volunteering for a cause. “We’re now watching Friends, rather than having friends,” as Putnam puts it.

I think it’s no coincidence that the term “building community” has come up a lot more recently, especially given the period of extreme isolation that we’re still climbing out of because of COVID. The pandemic, video conferencing, and remote work, have all separated us from one another. And while I certainly understand the desire to connect more with friends and family, what I think is often misunderstood in these discussions is that community is actually the outcome of people coming together—not its root cause. It’s like saying “I want warmth!” and expecting heat to appear. The way it actually works is you gather wood, build a structure, strike a match, and tend to the flames. The warmth (like community) is the result of that effort. As the co-director and narrator of Join or Die puts it, “You don’t always need to set out to build community. Community is what happens when you do what you love together.”

One example of community that I have admittedly dismissed is Greek life in college. The “bro” culture, the silly rituals, and the social hierarchy don’t exactly align with my general worldview. But my father-in-law, who is a committed lifelong fraternity brother, has shifted my perspective on the role this type of community can play in one’s life. For context, the first time I met this man, he described himself to me as a “guy’s guy” who just wants to “fetch a ball and take a nap.” He’s about as fratty as a dude can get, and in many ways we do not relate to each other. But about a month ago, one of his fraternity brothers passed away from cancer, and dozens of his brothers gathered to mourn his death. They sang songs and helped the family out wherever they needed, all of which I found deeply moving. And this coming together is not unusual for them. Since college, many of them have moved near each other, they’ve raised kids together and remained meaningfully involved in each other’s lives. So while I can poke fun at frats all I want, I cannot deny the communal bond these men share, which has literally lasted their entire lives. Frankly, I wish it was something I had more of in my own life.

My generation, the first to grow up with social media, has experienced a profound shift in how we build and maintain community: how we find out about events, how we prove our attendance, and how we actually interact with each other in person. I find this clout-forward way of socializing to be quite impersonal. When someone snaps a picture with me at a party, for instance, are they doing it because they actually like me or because it signals community building to their followers? Do I want to share this clip from a concert I attended because I think people will enjoy it, or am I trying to prove that I have good taste in music? Conversely, if I choose to not attend a function, do I really want to see how it was through someone else’s lens?

These questions, among others, have made me reconsider my relationship with these apps, and about a month ago, I deleted all of them. That is, of course, if you don’t count Substack, which is fittingly a hot topic to discuss on Substack. Already I’ve observed how my habits of connection have changed. Instead of passively broadcasting updates to an invisible audience, I’ve been sharing photos and videos directly with my friends—moments from traveling or something banal I captured on a walk. And in turn, they’ve been calling or texting me out of nowhere just to check in. The interactions feel different, more deliberate, more like how friendship used to feel before everything became content.

What I didn’t mention about my friend L earlier is that he recently moved across the country. Before he left, he was someone I would see pretty regularly. We are part of several overlapping communities, and we would hang out together one-one-one as well. That’s obviously much harder to do now that he’s 3,000 miles away, so that text he sent me is important for a couple reasons. First, it would have elicited a very different response if he’d simply posted it to his Instagram story. It would have been totally impersonal and virtually meaningless. But because he sent it to me directly, he was essentially saying “You, Scott, are someone I want to remain in my community, despite us being far away from each other.” It’s a small but moving gesture—a spark he tossed into the air, hoping it might catch. But that fire doesn’t burn just because he wants it to. I have to reciprocate. It burns when we keep showing up, fanning the flames, until the warmth is something we can share. Come to think of it, I actually owe him a call back.