As a city dweller, Lane's vision of building up a rural parish is so foreign and appealing to me! But even here in San Francisco, I've found that responding to "need" to be a really helpful and accurate frame for what works to build community. Since the pandemic, SF has been embroiled in all kinds of political controversies that really boil down to the question of: can cities be a good place for young families to build a future?
A lot of the time, the answer feels like no. But from the desperation of that "no", a lot of SF families have come together to work towards a yes, and the past few years have been really energizing and community building as I've gotten to know other families here through work to advocate for better public schools, more housing, pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, etc.
Yes but... how did you reach the dozens who showed up to help in a crisis? When we were having our second child, we had nobody to watch our first while we went to the hospital. There was nobody I really felt comfortable asking for the favor of being available around the clock for this duty. When a neighbor had a lineup for her third birth, I was jealous. She said they were people her kids were familiar with due to standing playdates. We had failed to generate any standing playdates for our 2yo. Even now that my kids do have "besties" I'm not necessarily close with their parents. There was one time I was so desperate I crowdsourced an intractable problem on the community whatsapp. But that required a pre-existing whatsapp of people who consider themselves a community, which I am lucky to have, but that's purely due to religion. How do you get a group of people to consider themselves a community when they have very little apparent to bind them together? This I do not know. I actually live in a small development that ought to have a community feel, but it doesn't. Most people keep to themselves and interact only superficially.
That's a really good question. In our case, we moved to a rural area and there were just so few people, so few young families. The local Catholic parish was dying, and mostly old people attended. So the young families like us who actually went to Church, and worked to revive the parish ended up becoming friends. This attracted more young families from the Bay Area and other places, who would come to church on holiday and decide to move here after seeing the young families and the work we were doing.
We also bought land in 2009, before that was really popular. And several of our friends also bought ranches, and falling down houses in need of repair. And we didn't know what we were doing, so we helped each other and had work days and learned how to run ranches and remodel houses together. It was necessity, really. But in places that are more built up, in cities, I think necessity is still there, maybe even more abundant, but we are habituated to not see it, and then when a real pressing need arises like the birth of a child or an illness, we are working from zero. I think playdates might be necessity for young families; and other things that we need but maybe won't die if we don't have could be basis for forming friendships.
chiming in with something that worked for me in case it inspires something for you to try. during covid i realized how badly i wanted to help my friends in ways i never thought to offer or ask for myself in the Before Times.
so, i started sharing this with friends as we casually caught up or texted.
and then, with three friends (one at a time, over time) i went out on a limb and just said what i was dreaming of! i said "i want to try a different kind of friendship and a different way to be together. i want to watch your kids so you can have a break and to come to your house with no dinner plan and eat leftovers or whatever is in the freezer together." and then we just started trying stuff and talking about it and imagining and working together to get there.
five years later, it's awesome and is more than my early days of dreaming of what could be.
Yes this is a great example of changing from college or acquaintance friendship to a more intentional “what do we need right now, in this stage of life?” friendship.
That’s such a great way to put it! Because we started small and talked about our friendship ambitions openly we’ve evolved as our lives have. I’m proud to say that each of these three friends are emergency contacts that can pick my kid up at school (and vice versa). Years ago it would have felt wild to me to have a friend on the list alongside my mom. Today it feels normal in the most soul satisfying way.
It may just take more time. And adjusting around the margins for more social contacts.
We also had no local friends to ask when our second was born. By the time we had our third, we had multiple offers of help. Small town, small daycare for our oldest, so we knew most of the other families and ran into them in town regularly. Lots of church involvement. Lots of awkwardly inviting people over. It took 4-5 years to build that up. Familiarity through regular contact was crucial.
I totally agree — building real community takes time, and that phase with a 2-year-old plus a newborn is especially tough. You haven’t had enough space yet to form deeper friendships, but your need for support is huge. If you’re able, this can be a good moment to pay for some backup just to ease the load.
At the same time, you are at the start of the "making community" phase. I hope you see your kids’ besties as powerful doors to connection. Every playdate is a built-in opportunity to chat with another parent, invite them to stay for a coffee while the kids play, or start a low-key friendship. Not every bestie comes with parents who are a fit — but it’s the easiest, lowest-lift place to start.
When my kids were young, I set up playdates with families whose parents I found interesting, even when my kid didn't ask to hang out with their child. Those hangouts became openings to friendship, and the kids often developed a deep friendship too. However, I don't believe kids have to be great friends for you to build a great family-to-family friendship. You choosing the connection is often reason enough.
This is such a vulnerable and honest comment, and I want to start by saying: You didn't fail. You just faced an Olympic-level challenge.
The problem you faced—needing 24/7, high-trust care for your 2-year-old—is not a simple favor; it’s an extreme trust crisis. And you are absolutely right: you can't buy or crowdsource that kind of deeply earned trust.
In urban and suburban settings, we optimize for efficiency. If we need something done, we find a service for it, or we automate it. That convenience is great, but it starves the relationship-building muscle.
This is the key: A community can't perform an "Olympic-level" crisis intervention if its members haven't spent years doing "low-pressure, high-frequency workouts" together.
The standing playdates and the lineup of emergency sitters your neighbor had are the result of that daily, messy, inefficient training. It’s the constant chatting with your contractor, the grocery clerk, the teacher—the web of interaction that exists entirely outside the professional transaction.
This is absolutely possible in a small development or urban setting, too. My own emergency contacts in the Bay Area were people who started as seemingly random connections—our next-door neighbors and a couple who fostered one of our dogs. Those relationships took root not because of shared profession or religion, but because we chose to invest time in the inconvenient, non-essential interactions.
The way you get a group to consider themselves a community when they have little apparent to bind them is by showing up for those small, high-frequency moments. It’s choosing to spend that valuable, non-billable time with the people near you and your family. That "waste" is the only thing that converts a housing development into a human village.
I eagerly read these community focused articles trying to get ideas and build anticipation for a community I am hoping to join/ build. We bought a house and are moving to a suburban town where is an up and coming young community and although I personally know one person there I dream of becoming involved and really part of a community of like minded people. I think need- I know the woman all make meal trains for new babies, families all contributed to starting a new synagogue! It’s exciting and worth the work when I think of the meaningful impact on my family.
There probably are places where fixing up a local park could help build community. Unfortunately, we had the opposite experience when my husband rallied a couple of other dads to clean up our neighborhood baseball field. These guys spent a month of weekends and a couple thousand dollars to get the field playable for the kids. They earned shrieking on NextDoor with real-life animosity from a whole segment of the neighborhood who were basically mad that these guys spent time and money on something that wouldn’t benefit them personally since they didn’t have kids and didn’t like baseball. It was one of our first tries and building community in a new place/post Covid and was so demoralizing. Since then, we’ve really taken a step back from involving ourselves in anything where we don’t share religious and/or political convictions with the other parties.
We always tell people the best way to get involved with a church is volunteer at their Greek (or whatever other theme) festival. Working together with people is the way to build bonds
Well, yes. This happens almost every time you try to do anything. It happened to us. People attacked us for trying, basically.
I think Steven Pressfield's books, especialy The War of Art illustrate this "resistence" phenomenon really well.
Any creative work, any building, any sign of LIFE is going to create friction and pushback. I think you just need to be tough enough to plough through, anyway. And, as a bonus, nothing builds community and friendships faster than the feeling like it's just you and your friends against the whole world.
This story might highlight how technology amplifies extremes and warps our sense of what real life is actually like. If you and your husband had *never gone* on Nextdoor, would the situation have felt different? Did as much hostility show up in face-to-face interactions as it did on Nextdoor? (Meanwhile, I agree that people don't like change, and push-back will happen––it's part of human nature––but it shouldn't be this bad!)
Platforms like Nextdoor, Facebook, and other ad-driven feeds are not built to strengthen community. They end up rewarding the most reactive, aggressive, funny, or triggering voices. Yes, they also highlight some amazing, positive voices and are incredibly useful––but they have fundamentally reshaped our perception of what people actually care about, and not for the better. They make social capital feel thinner and more fragile than it truly is. Did that distortion possibly play a role here?
I really wish that Nextdoor was the problem. Unfortunately in this scenario there was lots of yelling in his face and eventually two of our front windows were shot with a pellet gun.
This is in a neighborhood with million dollar homes.
We have a supremely narcissistic faction of neighbors that have done their best to destroy anyone who would like to do anything that doesn’t benefit them (say, spending HOA funds on drainage in our hurricane-prone area instead of landscaping for the green area behind their houses). It’s really sad and the baseball field wasn’t the first bad turn, but things definitely have gotten worse since.
It came at a particularly difficult period of “resistance” on multiple fronts as a family and basically convinced me to not invest any time in building community outside of our parish. My husband has built another group as well in the past few years but it’s not based on proximity but rather shared convictions.
I'm SO sorry that this is the community you have to live around. What a shame and how unnecessary. It shows how much work we have to do in some communities.
I agree with Lane Scott here. Any attempt to do anything will bring bucket crabs and backbiters crawling out of the woodwork. You could cure cancer and someone would tell you that you are a horrible person for putting so many doctors and nurses out of a job. Gotta find something you care about enough to say “people are going to hate me for this, and I am going to do it anyway!”
Man, this is bringing up memories. I should write another post about this. At some point I just decided I was the cool kid now; it didn’t matter that some people were naysayers. If you can be confident enough in your vision the naysayers come along, eventually, anyway. Be the cool kids. Who cares what anyone says or thinks.
I have had similar thoughts as I’ve always had confidence issues around other women/moms. Like, don’t bother the nice ladies with your ideas or your overtures of friendship, Erika. Then I more or less woke up one day going “wait, I'm funny and smart and original and well read, and I have a beautiful and uniquely furnished home that I’ve lovingly curated, and six nice children half of whom are grown and moving toward being productive independent adults: I do not need to be afraid of what other nearby women, especially ones who are fifteen years younger than I am, think. I am basically their rock star aunt. I can act like it and walk into any situation with my head held high and just Do and Say the Cool Things. It’s fine!”
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what “building community” means in the last ten years, but I think this is an underexamined angle. It is so true that community won’t just appear out of who we hang out with in our free time - everyone keeps trying this and it doesn’t work. And yet society is designed so that we need things from other people as little as possible. I think what’s pivotal to the “need” element is that nothing can substitute for the community that develops out of true vulnerability.
Thank you Lane for articulating something many people sense but struggle to say aloud. Your framing of necessity as the birthplace of community felt both bracing and hopeful. It challenges the idea that we can belong without being vulnerable.
What your essay stirred for me is how modern efficiency may be the silent enemy of community. When systems are optimized to remove friction, they also remove opportunities for mutual reliance. I wonder if rebuilding community requires us not just to add gatherings, but to leave certain needs unmet by design — so that people have a reason to show up for one another.
This is such a wonderfully thoughtful article and resonated a lot with me. I’ve been down on how hard it feels to build community, mainly bc sometimes I feel like I’m alone in craving it so much.
I think it’s interesting that in the daily needs we build community, but I also have found that proximity is an easy way to find unusual friends even without needing them. In my old neighborhood we had many older, retired neighbors and I didn’t necessarily need their help but their proximity opened the doors to us finding shared interests (neighborhood safety, simply being interested in each others lives).
Now I’ve moved closer to my kids school for ease of community building, but it feels like the organized communities actually take precedence in people’s orientation more than the organic. My friends and connections desire community, but they are often busy with after school activities or work to find time for the organic. Thus I feel I do a lot of “work” trying to organize the organic. Does that make sense? Definitely love the idea of feeling the obligation to make your own community and not expect it to be built in!!
One of my favorite parts of Lane's fabulous piece is this important truth: community isn't pre-fabricated, waiting for you to find it. It has to be built.
That said, the intensification of parenting means building community is harder than it has ever been. Yes, we have to be willing to do the work, but it's so much MORE work now––because families are so booked up with paid work, intensive parenting and the cold war of sports and activities that when you do put in all that effort, it's met with friction ("let's find a date––how is three weeks from now from 10:15-11:15am?").
You describe community as benefiting from particular people rather than just an organization (although an organization can be helpful for bringing them together and being something in common), and from remaining rather than aging out. I agree.
That does suggest that areas where people stick around are better for community than areas where people frequently leave.
For that reason, I think that neighborhoods where people own their homes rather than rent them stand a better chance at community. So in a sense you can buy a better chance at community by buying a home.
And, it might be good to buy in a town where there's not a ton of turnover. On the other hand, people in the foreign service and other closely organized expats often say they make lifelong friends even if they're only posted together for a year or two. Maybe that's like college or the military in that you have an intense and formative experience with a definite set of people.
Lifelong long-distance friends and relatively long-term local buddies are sort of two different types of friends. I'd rather have the latter, and it's easier to weave them into a local community, but the former are also nice.
I know this article is over a month old now, and perhaps this question is better suited for someone who lives in a metropolis, but I’d like to hear your thoughts nonetheless. Does your community include everyone from your parish? If so, a) I’m in awe, b) how do you manage to do that? If not, how do you keep it from feeling like an exclusive clique?
As a city dweller, Lane's vision of building up a rural parish is so foreign and appealing to me! But even here in San Francisco, I've found that responding to "need" to be a really helpful and accurate frame for what works to build community. Since the pandemic, SF has been embroiled in all kinds of political controversies that really boil down to the question of: can cities be a good place for young families to build a future?
A lot of the time, the answer feels like no. But from the desperation of that "no", a lot of SF families have come together to work towards a yes, and the past few years have been really energizing and community building as I've gotten to know other families here through work to advocate for better public schools, more housing, pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, etc.
Yes but... how did you reach the dozens who showed up to help in a crisis? When we were having our second child, we had nobody to watch our first while we went to the hospital. There was nobody I really felt comfortable asking for the favor of being available around the clock for this duty. When a neighbor had a lineup for her third birth, I was jealous. She said they were people her kids were familiar with due to standing playdates. We had failed to generate any standing playdates for our 2yo. Even now that my kids do have "besties" I'm not necessarily close with their parents. There was one time I was so desperate I crowdsourced an intractable problem on the community whatsapp. But that required a pre-existing whatsapp of people who consider themselves a community, which I am lucky to have, but that's purely due to religion. How do you get a group of people to consider themselves a community when they have very little apparent to bind them together? This I do not know. I actually live in a small development that ought to have a community feel, but it doesn't. Most people keep to themselves and interact only superficially.
That's a really good question. In our case, we moved to a rural area and there were just so few people, so few young families. The local Catholic parish was dying, and mostly old people attended. So the young families like us who actually went to Church, and worked to revive the parish ended up becoming friends. This attracted more young families from the Bay Area and other places, who would come to church on holiday and decide to move here after seeing the young families and the work we were doing.
We also bought land in 2009, before that was really popular. And several of our friends also bought ranches, and falling down houses in need of repair. And we didn't know what we were doing, so we helped each other and had work days and learned how to run ranches and remodel houses together. It was necessity, really. But in places that are more built up, in cities, I think necessity is still there, maybe even more abundant, but we are habituated to not see it, and then when a real pressing need arises like the birth of a child or an illness, we are working from zero. I think playdates might be necessity for young families; and other things that we need but maybe won't die if we don't have could be basis for forming friendships.
chiming in with something that worked for me in case it inspires something for you to try. during covid i realized how badly i wanted to help my friends in ways i never thought to offer or ask for myself in the Before Times.
so, i started sharing this with friends as we casually caught up or texted.
and then, with three friends (one at a time, over time) i went out on a limb and just said what i was dreaming of! i said "i want to try a different kind of friendship and a different way to be together. i want to watch your kids so you can have a break and to come to your house with no dinner plan and eat leftovers or whatever is in the freezer together." and then we just started trying stuff and talking about it and imagining and working together to get there.
five years later, it's awesome and is more than my early days of dreaming of what could be.
Wow, I love this so freaking much
Yes this is a great example of changing from college or acquaintance friendship to a more intentional “what do we need right now, in this stage of life?” friendship.
That’s such a great way to put it! Because we started small and talked about our friendship ambitions openly we’ve evolved as our lives have. I’m proud to say that each of these three friends are emergency contacts that can pick my kid up at school (and vice versa). Years ago it would have felt wild to me to have a friend on the list alongside my mom. Today it feels normal in the most soul satisfying way.
It may just take more time. And adjusting around the margins for more social contacts.
We also had no local friends to ask when our second was born. By the time we had our third, we had multiple offers of help. Small town, small daycare for our oldest, so we knew most of the other families and ran into them in town regularly. Lots of church involvement. Lots of awkwardly inviting people over. It took 4-5 years to build that up. Familiarity through regular contact was crucial.
I totally agree — building real community takes time, and that phase with a 2-year-old plus a newborn is especially tough. You haven’t had enough space yet to form deeper friendships, but your need for support is huge. If you’re able, this can be a good moment to pay for some backup just to ease the load.
At the same time, you are at the start of the "making community" phase. I hope you see your kids’ besties as powerful doors to connection. Every playdate is a built-in opportunity to chat with another parent, invite them to stay for a coffee while the kids play, or start a low-key friendship. Not every bestie comes with parents who are a fit — but it’s the easiest, lowest-lift place to start.
When my kids were young, I set up playdates with families whose parents I found interesting, even when my kid didn't ask to hang out with their child. Those hangouts became openings to friendship, and the kids often developed a deep friendship too. However, I don't believe kids have to be great friends for you to build a great family-to-family friendship. You choosing the connection is often reason enough.
This is such a vulnerable and honest comment, and I want to start by saying: You didn't fail. You just faced an Olympic-level challenge.
The problem you faced—needing 24/7, high-trust care for your 2-year-old—is not a simple favor; it’s an extreme trust crisis. And you are absolutely right: you can't buy or crowdsource that kind of deeply earned trust.
In urban and suburban settings, we optimize for efficiency. If we need something done, we find a service for it, or we automate it. That convenience is great, but it starves the relationship-building muscle.
This is the key: A community can't perform an "Olympic-level" crisis intervention if its members haven't spent years doing "low-pressure, high-frequency workouts" together.
The standing playdates and the lineup of emergency sitters your neighbor had are the result of that daily, messy, inefficient training. It’s the constant chatting with your contractor, the grocery clerk, the teacher—the web of interaction that exists entirely outside the professional transaction.
This is absolutely possible in a small development or urban setting, too. My own emergency contacts in the Bay Area were people who started as seemingly random connections—our next-door neighbors and a couple who fostered one of our dogs. Those relationships took root not because of shared profession or religion, but because we chose to invest time in the inconvenient, non-essential interactions.
The way you get a group to consider themselves a community when they have little apparent to bind them is by showing up for those small, high-frequency moments. It’s choosing to spend that valuable, non-billable time with the people near you and your family. That "waste" is the only thing that converts a housing development into a human village.
I eagerly read these community focused articles trying to get ideas and build anticipation for a community I am hoping to join/ build. We bought a house and are moving to a suburban town where is an up and coming young community and although I personally know one person there I dream of becoming involved and really part of a community of like minded people. I think need- I know the woman all make meal trains for new babies, families all contributed to starting a new synagogue! It’s exciting and worth the work when I think of the meaningful impact on my family.
There probably are places where fixing up a local park could help build community. Unfortunately, we had the opposite experience when my husband rallied a couple of other dads to clean up our neighborhood baseball field. These guys spent a month of weekends and a couple thousand dollars to get the field playable for the kids. They earned shrieking on NextDoor with real-life animosity from a whole segment of the neighborhood who were basically mad that these guys spent time and money on something that wouldn’t benefit them personally since they didn’t have kids and didn’t like baseball. It was one of our first tries and building community in a new place/post Covid and was so demoralizing. Since then, we’ve really taken a step back from involving ourselves in anything where we don’t share religious and/or political convictions with the other parties.
We always tell people the best way to get involved with a church is volunteer at their Greek (or whatever other theme) festival. Working together with people is the way to build bonds
Well, yes. This happens almost every time you try to do anything. It happened to us. People attacked us for trying, basically.
I think Steven Pressfield's books, especialy The War of Art illustrate this "resistence" phenomenon really well.
Any creative work, any building, any sign of LIFE is going to create friction and pushback. I think you just need to be tough enough to plough through, anyway. And, as a bonus, nothing builds community and friendships faster than the feeling like it's just you and your friends against the whole world.
This story might highlight how technology amplifies extremes and warps our sense of what real life is actually like. If you and your husband had *never gone* on Nextdoor, would the situation have felt different? Did as much hostility show up in face-to-face interactions as it did on Nextdoor? (Meanwhile, I agree that people don't like change, and push-back will happen––it's part of human nature––but it shouldn't be this bad!)
Platforms like Nextdoor, Facebook, and other ad-driven feeds are not built to strengthen community. They end up rewarding the most reactive, aggressive, funny, or triggering voices. Yes, they also highlight some amazing, positive voices and are incredibly useful––but they have fundamentally reshaped our perception of what people actually care about, and not for the better. They make social capital feel thinner and more fragile than it truly is. Did that distortion possibly play a role here?
I really wish that Nextdoor was the problem. Unfortunately in this scenario there was lots of yelling in his face and eventually two of our front windows were shot with a pellet gun.
This is in a neighborhood with million dollar homes.
We have a supremely narcissistic faction of neighbors that have done their best to destroy anyone who would like to do anything that doesn’t benefit them (say, spending HOA funds on drainage in our hurricane-prone area instead of landscaping for the green area behind their houses). It’s really sad and the baseball field wasn’t the first bad turn, but things definitely have gotten worse since.
It came at a particularly difficult period of “resistance” on multiple fronts as a family and basically convinced me to not invest any time in building community outside of our parish. My husband has built another group as well in the past few years but it’s not based on proximity but rather shared convictions.
I'm SO sorry that this is the community you have to live around. What a shame and how unnecessary. It shows how much work we have to do in some communities.
It's interesting how high-income neighborhoods often have the most stressed and least connected inhabitants. Children in high-income homes are a new risk group for mental health due to the intensive parenting, lack of community and pressure. (See Jennifer Wallace's work: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_achievement_culture_has_become_so_toxic?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
I agree with Lane Scott here. Any attempt to do anything will bring bucket crabs and backbiters crawling out of the woodwork. You could cure cancer and someone would tell you that you are a horrible person for putting so many doctors and nurses out of a job. Gotta find something you care about enough to say “people are going to hate me for this, and I am going to do it anyway!”
Exactly.
Man, this is bringing up memories. I should write another post about this. At some point I just decided I was the cool kid now; it didn’t matter that some people were naysayers. If you can be confident enough in your vision the naysayers come along, eventually, anyway. Be the cool kids. Who cares what anyone says or thinks.
I have had similar thoughts as I’ve always had confidence issues around other women/moms. Like, don’t bother the nice ladies with your ideas or your overtures of friendship, Erika. Then I more or less woke up one day going “wait, I'm funny and smart and original and well read, and I have a beautiful and uniquely furnished home that I’ve lovingly curated, and six nice children half of whom are grown and moving toward being productive independent adults: I do not need to be afraid of what other nearby women, especially ones who are fifteen years younger than I am, think. I am basically their rock star aunt. I can act like it and walk into any situation with my head held high and just Do and Say the Cool Things. It’s fine!”
Anything involving NextDoor.com is demoralizing. Do yourself a favor and unsubscribe from that site.
Oh, I agree! Nextdoor should make people more polite since you know where they live but it seems to have the opposite effect.
How old are your kids? I think that’s normal in the small/young kids phase. But teens seem to stretch and push the family outward again.
Indeed they do…
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what “building community” means in the last ten years, but I think this is an underexamined angle. It is so true that community won’t just appear out of who we hang out with in our free time - everyone keeps trying this and it doesn’t work. And yet society is designed so that we need things from other people as little as possible. I think what’s pivotal to the “need” element is that nothing can substitute for the community that develops out of true vulnerability.
Thank you Lane for articulating something many people sense but struggle to say aloud. Your framing of necessity as the birthplace of community felt both bracing and hopeful. It challenges the idea that we can belong without being vulnerable.
What your essay stirred for me is how modern efficiency may be the silent enemy of community. When systems are optimized to remove friction, they also remove opportunities for mutual reliance. I wonder if rebuilding community requires us not just to add gatherings, but to leave certain needs unmet by design — so that people have a reason to show up for one another.
This is such a wonderfully thoughtful article and resonated a lot with me. I’ve been down on how hard it feels to build community, mainly bc sometimes I feel like I’m alone in craving it so much.
I think it’s interesting that in the daily needs we build community, but I also have found that proximity is an easy way to find unusual friends even without needing them. In my old neighborhood we had many older, retired neighbors and I didn’t necessarily need their help but their proximity opened the doors to us finding shared interests (neighborhood safety, simply being interested in each others lives).
Now I’ve moved closer to my kids school for ease of community building, but it feels like the organized communities actually take precedence in people’s orientation more than the organic. My friends and connections desire community, but they are often busy with after school activities or work to find time for the organic. Thus I feel I do a lot of “work” trying to organize the organic. Does that make sense? Definitely love the idea of feeling the obligation to make your own community and not expect it to be built in!!
One of my favorite parts of Lane's fabulous piece is this important truth: community isn't pre-fabricated, waiting for you to find it. It has to be built.
That said, the intensification of parenting means building community is harder than it has ever been. Yes, we have to be willing to do the work, but it's so much MORE work now––because families are so booked up with paid work, intensive parenting and the cold war of sports and activities that when you do put in all that effort, it's met with friction ("let's find a date––how is three weeks from now from 10:15-11:15am?").
Katherine Goldstein’s great piece in The Double Shift captures exactly why you’re struggling, Katie: https://thedoubleshift.substack.com/p/are-kids-activities-stopping-parents
You describe community as benefiting from particular people rather than just an organization (although an organization can be helpful for bringing them together and being something in common), and from remaining rather than aging out. I agree.
That does suggest that areas where people stick around are better for community than areas where people frequently leave.
For that reason, I think that neighborhoods where people own their homes rather than rent them stand a better chance at community. So in a sense you can buy a better chance at community by buying a home.
And, it might be good to buy in a town where there's not a ton of turnover. On the other hand, people in the foreign service and other closely organized expats often say they make lifelong friends even if they're only posted together for a year or two. Maybe that's like college or the military in that you have an intense and formative experience with a definite set of people.
Lifelong long-distance friends and relatively long-term local buddies are sort of two different types of friends. I'd rather have the latter, and it's easier to weave them into a local community, but the former are also nice.
I know this article is over a month old now, and perhaps this question is better suited for someone who lives in a metropolis, but I’d like to hear your thoughts nonetheless. Does your community include everyone from your parish? If so, a) I’m in awe, b) how do you manage to do that? If not, how do you keep it from feeling like an exclusive clique?
I'm also wondering and have a couple other questions myself!