The Inconvenience of Community

I recently came across the story of Joyce Vincent for a second time. The first time I came across her story was sometime last year (methinks), and I thought it was very heartbreaking. But coming across it again, and viewing it in the context of the conversations I’ve had with a lot of people about community over the past year, has heavily moved me to write. To give some background, Joyce died in her flat in London, and nobody found out for over 2 years. Not neighbours, not friends, not family members. She wasn’t an unknown, solo figure. In fact, the people who knew her described her as ambitious and popular.

What struck me the most about Joyce’s story was how much more plausible it is for such deaths to happen in the present day. Not only is it more plausible, such cases are actually on the rise. Termed kodokushi in Japan and historically viewed as a problem of loneliness-related deaths in elderly people, the scope is increasingly including much younger people – people as young as their late teens. There are many factors leading to this amongst young people, but the fragility and erosion of communities sit at the centre of it.

Growing up in Nigeria, the way most relationships worked was that people were always in your business, sometimes a bit too much – but that “bit too much” was the price to pay for being part of a community. In fact, I was recently reminiscing with my friend about how friends would randomly show up at our door when we lived together in Nigeria – no heads up, no announcement, just an expectation that we had to host them even if that expectation sometimes meant we left them to “feel at home” while we were in our bedrooms.

However, after moving to London for work post-uni, things felt a bit different on that front. It was unspoken, but you just knew. To be clear, I don’t think this is a London thing, because I now see the same friction play out amongst friends and acquaintances back in Nigeria. The world (for young people) has just become a bit too individualistic.

The shift from community to hyper-individualism hasn’t happened in a vacuum. The infrastructures affording young people the chance to build communities are breaking down, often unintentionally. I have two personal theories on this. The first is the obvious rise in cost of living, which has made it too expensive for a lot of people to do anything aside from sleep and wake up, and has caused a hit to the activities that people just previously did with friends.

My (more insidious) second theory revolves around the increasing obsession with other people’s perception of one’s self. I don’t want to debate why that obsession came to be in the first place, but you can see the effects. “Won’t proactively reach out to hang out because you don’t want to come off as begging it”, “won’t approach people for help because you don’t want to come off as struggling”, “won’t show up at group events because you want to be mysterious”, “won’t set up intros because you’re worried what opinion will be held of you if the relationships resulting from your intros break down”, “don’t want to be seen hanging out with some friends in person because what if people realise they don’t match your online aesthetic”, “won’t say hello to that neighbour in the lift because you don’t want trouble”. It’s not a reach to deduce that if you keep doing these things over a long enough period of time, community and the sense of it starts to erode.

When I set out to write this piece, the goal was merely to express a burning topic in my mind rather than proffer solutions to a problem. However, I do have a few thoughts, albeit anecdotal, on rebuilding the sense of community. For one, we all need to start being more intentional about building our own communities, being proactive with them, and coming to terms with the fact that there’s a price to pay for it (as is the case for so many other things in life).

In conversations about building a community, I find social media to be a recurring topic. My stance on it is pretty simple: you don’t know these people. Sure, you can have a community on social media, but unless you’re going beyond just liking someone’s photo and responding to their posts, I don’t think that’s enough. There’s no intimacy in that, and it only gives a lazy illusion of having a community when there isn’t one.

Interestingly, something that I’ve found to work in building your own community when applied correctly is joining offline social and activity (book, hike etc) clubs. I say “when applied correctly” because if you join such clubs but don’t go out of your way to say hello to people, or you don’t show up repeatedly enough for other people to identify, and identify with, you, then you never build that intimacy either.

In the end, perhaps the more important question to take away from this is how much inconvenience we’re willing to accept in exchange for the kind of community we want to build.