Finding Your People
If it's easier than ever to find people, why the loneliness epidemic?
This is the final part (for now) on communities.
If you missed the first two, you can find Community Saves Lives here and Travel Together here.
Anti-social Media
In the last twenty years, our access to the internet has really distorted what it means to be social, and part of communities.
Platforms like Reddit have done an incredible job at creating pockets of communities in the most varied niches (mostly people with different interests in what cats do). Increasingly this is seen on TikTok and other platforms. Celebrities become their own communities, and common people have to worry about their own personal brand and how consistent their behaviour is with that image.
For anyone growing up in a town or area where they don’t feel understood, or valued, welcome, or even valid in their own skin, these platforms have been true life savers.
But they’re not community in the truest sense.
I want to be clear here: I’m not repeating that lazy idea that social media is evil, I’m saying it’s a different thing altogether.
A couple of years ago I was invited over the Berlin to meet with community leaders from all over the world - Boston, Accra, Valencia, Hyderabad, Gaborone, Tripoli, Belo Horizonte, Varna, and so many more - as part of a Facebook Groups initiative.
Over the course of a few winter days in the company of community leaders from across the world it was clear how the varied ways that people come together can create safety, validation, opportunity, friendship and love.
There were stories of single parents who were able to gain economic opportunity through their communities, ex-military who were desperately underserved by public mental health services but put their continued living down to the empathy that comes from their communities, and plenty of more mundane everyday examples which are still packed with importance.
Online communities are an important part of how we grow as people.
But they’re not the same. This felt validated in part by the fact that all of those global representatives being together in one place was so effective - rather than us just having a video call or relying on the Facebook group we were already all in.
Online communities need different curation. They have different rules, etiquette, and cultures.
Wallflowers and lurkers can themselves feel connected enough without commenting and engaging actively, but that doesn’t move the conversation forward.
Online platforms lack that community spontaneity, those side chats and “tell me more” moments that you can’t do on Teams and Zoom.
It’s something that’s really missing in our newly remote lives.
I’d also probably say that the culture on platforms like Twitter/X are so vicious that the term “social media” is probably redundant at this stage. It gets about as antisocial as you could imagine, and the default mode is to challenge without assuming the best in others. Basically like road rage, but for people sat on the toilet.
Homesick
The online communities can become a part of our life quickly, but there can be a lot of effort that goes into building communities.
That said, we often lose a lot of that effort if we decide to move away.
Increasingly we live further from where we grew up, especially if you are a higher earner or travelled for Uni.
That means you’re ditching a sunk social cost to start again from scratch.
I felt like this when I first moved to Cardiff. For the first 12 months I could have happily left and never returned. I had no ties, connections, or relationships that I would miss.
When we think of cities we think of their buildings, infrastructure, and history, but it’s the people that make all of that matter. There’s no point having a great transport infrastructure if you don’t feel drawn to another’s company.
Professor Jeffrey Hall found in a 2018 study that it takes 200 hours of time together to form a close friend, and it helps if that contact time is in a short period of time rather than spread out.
As you get older - and life gets more complicated - it gets trickier to make the time needed to build those relationships and communities. 200 hours would be two hours a week for two years, which might work if you’re dating them but probably is less likely for any other kind of new friend. It is said to take 50 hours to move from acquaintance to casual friend.
It took the best part of that first year to have the events and interactions with my new corridor neighbours that moved them to acquaintances and then, in time, to friends (that have stuck).
That social environment is probably the most intense you could ever experience, it isn’t representative of life (unless you live in a city with a housing market that forces you to house share well into your 30s).
I think that’s why as adults we’re more likely to find friendship and love at work - 38% of us have supposedly dated a coworker, and 14% of marriages come from workplace romance.
We don’t have as many intense social interactions as life gets more complicated unless we join a club, society, team, choir, orchestra, or cause.
This is where the “5 a day” style slogan is needed. We all feel so busy with everything going on in life that we don’t realise how much we need to socialise. Meeting up with good friends is like gym for our mental health.
Why I Believe
That’s a bit about why I believe so much in the power of community.
I guess there’s a perspective on this which would raise the question: what does any of this have to do with business?
It’s a good, and appropriate, question if your perspective on the world is that business and enterprise needs to stay as it always has been. In the era of B Corps and social impact, I’m more of a believer that we can use business as a force for good.
We’re living in a loneliness epidemic, and it’s clear that there's no doubt that it is impacting our health and well-being.
It won’t be business that fixes this, but business plays a role to show another way. This is especially true right now when we’re not seeing any new ideas or thinking coming from the state.
I feel like social entrepreneurs have a role to help visualise how these solutions can be - and I’ve talked before about why we need that so much right now.
We don’t know what the solution will be, but we need to see examples and new ideas to really visualise it.
For me, in our game, it’s those moments of overhearing one coworker express to another how useful and valuable that serendipitous moment where support was shared has been for them. Or seeing a new partnership emerge, or even romance blossom.
We can’t charge people more money if they fall in love, but that’s not the point. The point is that if you can create this much good for people then you must. I’ve mentioned this Steve Kerr quote before, but it really should be repeated daily: “It is a civic duty to give people joy.”
Community is the answer, now we need to work hard to make sure that the right questions are being asked - and demands made - to accelerate this cause.
What would your community-first, anti-loneliness slogan be? I’ll make up some laptop stickers for the best ones and one day we can get it printed on the side of a bus and see how we get on.
Read next…
Travel Together - part two of this series
Community doesn’t mean being identical, just alike…
Community Saves Lives - part one of this series
We need to talk more about the true meaning of life.
Learning to let go is an essential skill as you scale and grow.
“I’d also probably say that the culture on platforms like Twitter/X are so vicious that the term “social media” is probably redundant at this stage. It gets about as antisocial as you could imagine, and the default mode is to challenge without assuming the best in others. Basically like road rage, but for people sat on the toilet.”
That resonates with me Gareth. I removed myself from Twitter in 2017 because I felt it was a negative environment for me at least.
Six years later, even a seemingly benign platform like LinkedIn can become unexpectedly gladiatorial.
Community is indeed the answer to those who migrate to become angry folk with no real reason. And I like your definition of community too!