“If Only We Could Recapture a Feeling of Community”
“If only we could recapture a feeling of community” is a phrase we hear so often across so many social groups it has become a cliche. From those trying to create new countries to new ways of living, there are many, many individuals trying to gather people together in a way that feels strong and cohesive. Even we have taken a crack at the problem by designing a model for a new type of small town (https://Eureka.Town) and partnering our school, the Collins Institute, with Praxis, a group attempting to create a new nation-state in the Mediterranean (converting one of the islands with a dwindling population into a largely autonomous special economic zone).
It would be natural for people to look at what we are doing with the Index and think that one of our goals is to address the emptiness so much of our society faces. When you listen to interviews with those who attend “secular churches,” they cite the “community” as being their primary motivation for joining.
That said, creating a feeling of community is not one of our goals with the Index. While some social institutions are broken and need to be rethought (such as dating markets, education, and child-rearing—all institutions we do aim to fix), we don’t think “community” needs work and will explain why in the next two sub-chapters.
We see there being two underlying causes related to a feeling of community that are worth addressing:
- Our existing school system does not teach people to socialize. If we address this problem, people will be better equipped to create their own communities.
- When people feel loneliness and a deep hollowness in their hearts, most are misattributing the feeling to a missing community when, instead, other shortfalls are at play. If we address these shortfalls, concerns about “lost community” will evaporate.
Teaching Fundamental Social Skills
As we’re creating a new educational paradigm with homeschooling as its default format (CollinsInstitute.org), we constantly hear people hand-wringing about how homeschooled children “are not going to learn social skills.” What these people apparently don’t know is that studies on children’s interpersonal adeptness have demonstrated that homeschooled kids both have better social skills and are better at working in teams (the belief that they are not is a bit of the “bad toupee” effect, in which you only notice the homeschoolers with bad social skills and don’t realize many well-socialized children were homeschooled—just as you don’t realize when someone is wearing a good toupee).
One researcher reported that: “Homeschooled children’s social skills scores were consistently higher than those of public school students” in cooperation, assertiveness, empathy, and self-control.[[31]](#_ftn31) This should come as no surprise; one group learned their social skills primarily from adults and the others from the weird Lord-of-the-Flies-style social experiment that is our legacy school system.
More importantly, our legacy school system acts as a social crutch that fails to teach kids how to seek out new friends. Most traditionally-schooled children develop a habit of only befriending those to whom they are exposed through circumstance and convenience because they share a class, extracurricular, or parental friend groups. In contrast, students who lack the convenience of being regularly exposed to a large body of peers every day feel more pressure to seek out friends based on shared interests and affinities, either by proactively joining clubs or groups, starting initiatives and societies of their own, or seeking people out online.
When they leave high school or college and enter adult life, students who weren’t forced in their youth to find and make their own friends lack the skills (and frankly, the balls) to find and keep satisfying company, despite being surrounded by communities, people, and groups that would be very easy to identify and engage through cold outreach.
Among other essential life skills like personal finance, we therefore need to incorporate basic social skills (i.e., how to network, find friends, keep friends, cold email and call interesting people and organizations, join and start communities, etc.) into children’s basic education, along with academic fundamentals.
Treating Underlying Causes of Loneliness
Merely giving people the skills required to find, join, and create their own communities as adults won’t address the underlying issues that leave many craving a “feeling of community.”
Even within vibrant and robust community environments, we regularly hear people bemoan the absence of a feeling of community and encounter people striving to capture that feeling through successively bizarre social experiments. Even the strongest, most compelling communities we know fail to fill the void in many members’ hearts—and that’s because a “lack of community” was never the problem.
The source of the void people experience can be parsed out by a look at which groups do and don’t suffer from this feeling of emotional and social emptiness.
Do people we know living in literal poly group houses—in which groups of like five people who are all in a relationship with each other live together and regularly have large gatherings—still regularly theorize about new outlandish models to fix the “community problem?” Absolutely. In fact, they theorize around “community” building more than almost any other demographic we know. Clearly, the presence of strong interpersonal adult relationships isn’t enough.
So who isn’t complaining about some missing feeling of community? Anyone with an above-repopulation-rate, intact family unit (three or more kids and a committed partner). It would seem that the presence of kids plays a strong role in filling this void.
Going into puberty, we are warned that we are about to experience a massive change in our emotional needs (a change in what makes us happy, shifting points of focus, heightened social sensitivity, etc.). This shift occurs because earlier humans who didn’t experience it did not learn to have sex or find partners, failed to reproduce, and died out.
Going into adulthood, we are not similarly warned about another change in our emotional needs—though we should be. Not a single one of our direct ancestors was childless. The vast majority of our ancestors had very large families by modern standards (the average in America a couple hundred years ago was seven kids, and as recently as 1972, the average American first-time mother was 21[[32]](#_ftn32)). Should it be any surprise that our biology is hard-coded to make us feel as though something profound is missing when we don’t have little feet pitter-pattering about our house or are sweating the small stuff over a measly one or two kids?
Humans are not terribly good at identifying emotions or feelings—especially if they are not told to expect them. Famously, if you tell a person you are about to touch them with something scolding hot but then touch them with something cold they cannot see (like a popsicle), they will think they are being severely burned. It makes perfect sense that there would be a contented emotional set associated with having a house full of kids (which is totally different from the “baby crazy” emotional subset tied to wanting kids when you don’t have them). We say this as people who had that “I want better community” feeling as well, which only began to fade when we had our second kid and didn’t totally disappear until we had our third. You can see this in the data, with kids both increasing a person’s sense of well-being and sense of purpose but not their hedonistic “happiness” levels—the sense of community people report looking for is likely this “well-being” emotion.[[33]](#_ftn33)
This feeling of hungry emptiness came to be replaced by a positive emotional subset for which there is no English word (perhaps another reason why people don’t know to pursue it). This emotional subset comes on strong when we’re at home working while our kids climb all over us, when we watch them run from stall to stall at the local harvest festival, and when their raucous games reverberate throughout our house. It is easy to understand how people misidentify missing this emotion as missing community because it is very much tied to a “number of people.”
The problem is that not just any people will activate this emotional subset and attempts to create artificial “families,” as many have, overlook this key point. We can only make guesses as to why kids seem to be so key in this equation. Perhaps this contented emotional subset is only triggered by hormonal cues tied to your children and not merely by people with whom you are close or sexually intimate—though weirdly, we suspect it may actually be triggered by the tonality of their voices and the sounds of small feet.
It is notable that members of hard cultures largely appear to lack the emotional void even when they have below three kids. Just as we are descended mostly from people who had large families, our brains (the hardware) have co-evolved for much of human history with added software (the cultivar laid on top of them). It should be no surprise that people feel something is missing when you strip out that software. The more structured discipline and purpose we bring into our family, the less we felt this “desire for community” emotional state—even when we only had one kid.
With all this being the case, we don’t really work on the problem of “community” with the Index because it is not a real problem outside of modifications we have already made to education with things like the Collins Institute (the new educational paradigm we created). If you—like the many, many ancestors who preceded you—live with a strong culture, submit yourself to a wider (secular or otherwise) theological framework that gives you conviction and purpose, and have kids, the “community feeling” void you feel will disappear.