Pivot Back To Live Communities

Highlighting examples of in-person groups that look and feel healthier than their virtual alternatives.

The Teardown

Wednesday :: July 31st, 2024 :: Approx. 12 min read

👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we evolve in concert with the technology that enables our day-to-day lives. If you’d like to get emails like this in your inbox every week, hit the subscribe button below.

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The Punch Line: Strive For In-Person Community

When you think about the word community, what comes to mind? Is it tied to a local neighborhood? Does it align with club sport or activity? Do you watch or participate in an internet forum about a particular topic? Is there a large active texting group microseconds from your fingertips?

Most of you belong to a variety of communities, some virtual, and some in the physical world. As an example, I belong to a local running club rooted in an obvious physical activity. Many of the members found the community through Strava, and participate in a humorous WhatsApp group focused on running, for the most part. I haven’t yet found a lifter cult, though I suppose I can baptize myself at a (very) nearby CrossFit.

Whenever I finish a run or grab casual dinner with members of the group, I’m glad I made the effort to attend. It’s fun to joke and laugh and have serious conversation with people, live. It’s fun to use and watch body language. It’s fun to enjoy what happens organically in front of our eyes (e.g. karaoke with inappropriate team names)

Why am I bringing up the topic of community today? It’s because we’ve lost some of our local in-person community skills and interests in favor of virtual alternatives. Live conversation and debate help rinse your brain of frustration that builds from constantly checking email, Slack, Teams, texts, and keeping up with everything else that dominates life.

And, I think we’d have many healthier communities too.

How do we accomplish that goal? Not through Nextdoor, Facebook, or Reddit.

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The Town Board Meets In Person

I recently attended a meeting of my town’s administrative board about flooding and storm water management. My town is prone to flooding due to its outdated infrastructure, dense built environment, and unique status as a drainage basin for other surrounding communities.

Water flows downhill, and my town is downhill from just about every town nearby. Torrential rains seem to pelt us more than ever, turning roads into ravines, and major rains into migraines.

The hearing was part presentation from consultants, part commentary and questions from board members, and open questions from the audience. We saw lots of slides packed with dense information presented from screens too far away for our old blurry eyes. The consulting engineers glosses over numerous complicated details.

The consultants discussed costs as well. Infrastructure upgrades cost money, lots of money. Any resident that spoke expressed some level of disgust with the stated costs, asking for prioritizations, itemized lists, and further negotiations. They assumed that the costs would inevitably be higher and that the projects would take forever, if they happened at all.

I spent the meeting listening to the presentation and noting the behavior of attendees with each other. There was shared comaraderie. People banded together because they already knew or learned (during the meeting) that they lived near each other. One after another made the point that the community should be involved in the project — the essence of the meeting to begin with.

One older gentleman rose last in line for commentary and hobbled to the microphone. He asked questions in a directed and ordered manner, but with an intellectual precision not present in some of other commenters. I sensed he was both asking questions and phishing for answers and contradictions to remind everyone in the room about the gaps in their thinking. Not long after jumping on the soapbox, he mentioned his professional training: meteorologist. A ha, I said, he is my pathway to talking with someone else about this meeting.

After he sat and the meeting ended, I turned around and asked him where he was a meteorologist. I had worked with many during my years in insurance, a breed different than the polished green screen artists you watch on TV. He wasn’t specific, perhaps misunderstanding my question, but said he had worked in the private sector. I mentioned my time in insurance, and focus on property insurance, and his eyes widened. His body shifted to a welcoming pose from an uninterested slouch.

He told me about a subsequent meeting organized through some sort of environmental task force. I couldn’t clarify before the conversation was interrupted, but I gathered that the meeting he referenced might be of interest and another way to build some community rapport.

I strolled out with a sense of genuine happiness. I felt like I was doing something for my community (the town) by going out of my way to hear from and meet with the people.

My years of time spent analyzing precipitation and flood model data may, somehow, help the town. But, what I’ll really be doing is building community connections.

Technology Often Builds The Worst Community

Nothing makes or breaks a community like a natural catastrophe. In 2021, Hurricane Ida’s remnants caused widespread flooding throughout my town (same as above).

Folks at the lowest elevations had no chance to avoid the water. But plenty of people in other areas experienced flooding too. Driveways designed without the foresight of downhill water intrusion allowed feet of water into unprotected basements.

The immediate aftermath of the storm was a positive moment for technology. People throughout the area posted their needs or their services on Nextdoor. One friend offered hot showers to strangers. A town resident typed a desperate plea for a water pump. One by one, those with problems met those with solutions.

Not long after that outpouring of support, NextDoor users reverted to the mean. They asked for pet sitting, kid-sitting, recommendations for contractors, and launched lots of complaints and quips covering just about every imaginable topic. Here’s an example:

Doesn’t know how type park. Has a whole driveway in front of them but they have to block the sidewalk. Seminary Ave

(in reference to a cone in a parking spot on a public street)

So I have a Karen on my block. How can I resolved this stupid issue. People think they own the parking when it’s the city streets can anyone advice and or get the city involved

And, those types of posts are - in my estimation - the primary activity on NextDoor. Spitting ones and zeroes into putrid virtual air for reactive purposes and validation rather than real resolution.

Could there instead be an opportunity for regular neighborhood meetings? Instead of digital yelling, people could meet in person, with each other, anywhere. Maybe a coffeeshop. Maybe a local bar. Or maybe someone’s house.

The still-present hangover from the COVID-19 epidemic may have changed our willingness to engage in that latter grouping.

But, together in person, people would probably resolve conflicts faster, enhance inter-personal connections, and assist each other with needs. I hope.

Context is so much easier to accomplish face-to-face. Trying to find a plumber? Use the weekly meeting. Need a specific tool? Ask the local group. Forget that you can yell into the internet.

The Decline Of Religious Community

I sat with three family friends recently. We discussed a wide range of topics, but one stuck with me more than the others: community through religion.

My faith - if I have one anymore - is Roman Catholic. I attended church nearly every week when I was a kid. My brother and I stayed still as glass or fidgeted like ants, with no predictable signal to help our parents prepare in advance.

I never saw church — and by extension CCD — as a place for community. My age and robust naivety worked in the other direction. But, it was obvious then that people knew each other at church. They knew each other from church too.

It was this latter feature that came up in my conversation with family friends.

Lacking an attention to religion and not attending church, temple, etc. was a way of giving up the opportunity for community and connection.

Not attending was a choice, not a problem. You could, instead of attending church, create community in other ways. But it was one option that required minimal amounts of money, and little time in the grand scheme of life. An hour long service or gathering isn’t destroying the balance of an entire week, for most people anyways.

Since that conversation, I’ve ruminated over the idea of attending church again. On one hand, I’m old enough to understand the non-religious merits of community. But, short of believing, I am honest about very faint interest. I don’t think I want to spend my time redeveloping an understanding of Catholic religious topics for the sake of community time.

That said, spirituality is an important topic. Modern spirituality feels somewhat co-opted by hyped terms like self-care, therapy, and so forth. Something like self-care, though, makes lots of sense. Wikipedia’s contributors describe it like this:

Self-care is influenced by an individual's attitude and belief in his or her self-efficacy or confidence in performing tasks and overcoming barriers. Cultural beliefs and values may also influence self-care. Cultures that promote a hard-working lifestyle may view self-care in contradictory ways[25] Personal values have been shown to have an effect on self-care in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.[28]”

Social support systems can influence how an individual performs self-care maintenance. Social support systems include family, friends, and other community or religious support groups. These support systems provide opportunities for self-care discussions and decisions. Shared care can reduce stress on individuals with chronic illness.

Believing in some sort of path, or result, or outcome is way of injecting spirituality into life. If religion is the steering mechanism on top of the effort, so be it.

The goal is then to pick that path and find the associated community, or build it yourself.

So, will I go back to church to be more involved in the broader community? It feels, in this moment, very unlikely.

But I have a more appreciative view of going than I had prior that conversation with family friends, and before I considered the structure of religion in, well, non-religion ways.

That the outcome that stuck was one about religion is a symbiotic feature of the conversation. It was refreshing to speak with those friends, and exercise my conversational mind. They enjoyed the conversation too. We stimulated our intellectual muscles through our two-hour conversation.

Dads Allegedly Don’t Make Plans

My wife is a member of various groups of other women in the area. A group is sometimes branded girl gang, or mom group, book club, and etc.

Many of these groups come together around connections made within our school district. My wife and I are friends with numerous groups of parents from the surrounding neighborhood and area. Women seem to turn on their magnet suits and gravitate to each other.

Restaurants in the area know about this phenomenon and offer ladies nights. Everything is priced at a discount, especially the drinks. So, you see hordes of mom-groups or whatever they’re called on the chairs, stools, and bar seats.

The guys in town - mostly dads to be clear - don’t do this, I’m told. We don’t make plans with each other. Our spouses wonder why not.

So, recently, a town friend (guy) organized a hang with lots of his town-friends at a local bar. I know, very original. The table was covered in pitchers of beer and greasy soggy wings. Some guys smoked. Doesn’t it sound irresistible?

One amusing topic for the group was just how successful the gathering seemed to be. Twenty or more guys crowded into large but moist outdoor tent to talk.

Many of them shared some variation of this opinion: my wife thinks that I don’t ever make plans so she told me to go out.

Otherwise, we covered a pretty ordinary list of topics: sports, work, home renovations, frustrations with never-ending lists of things to do at home, and made plenty of lewd and inappropriate jokes.

I had a great time.

But hearing that this group was seemingly incapable of organizing sparked the obvious question: why don’t make plans with each other?

The truth and answer: I don’t know. I can’t identify one specific cause that drives the behavior more than others. But here are my ideas:

1. Men, perhaps, aren’t widely known as planners. Planners plan things. Transitively, men don’t plan. I fall into this trap too, though I plan some things. My wife may vehemently disagree.

2. We engage in social activities organized around things. Several friends in town play recreational hockey and don’t need to plan with those teammates. They are, there (anywhere), together, once or twice a week. Another example: my run club.

3. Men are less motivated to meet in person, content instead to let conversations develop positively or implode horribly in one or more messaging groups.

4. Men are either more isolated and lonely, or more comfortable being alone, or somewhere in between. I often feel I have circuity geared towards time alone. I have just one male friend that I can recall saying this: I need to be around people.

Possibly to derive an answer, or just live life, I’m trying to be more proactive and inclusive. I’m sending messages to get together, or to affirm that I see messages, congratulate people, etc. And I’m offering space and time to other guys to get together without much intention or pressure. It’s relatively easy to get into this sort of exchange:

Dude A: Oh, you play golf too?

Dude B: Yea, I try to get out

Dude A: How often do you play?

Dude B: Once a week, if I’m lucky, I only played a few times last year.

Dude A: Cool, well, not sure what you’re doing over next few weeks but I’m always looking for other golf partners.

Dude B: Sounds good, hit me up whenever.

In case you’re wondering where I sourced this gripping conversation, it is from a forty-minute chat I (Dude A) had with another guy (also dad, Dude B) as we rode the train from town to New York City.

We didn’t make plans. But we roughly agreed to get in touch.

A game of golf seems like an intention but, in reality, it’s an excuse to get together and talk whatever nonsense spills from our mouths.

That seems like the typical path for this sort of community: informally excused from other parts of life to get together.

Next up: we’ll (us men) will learn how to master that recurring calendar invite.