Why we struggle to build community

Our worldview is not built to build.

Last year, an article in Slate came out that immediately caught my eye:

In it, author Clare-Haber-Harris poses an important question: if everyone wants a village to help them, why is no one behaving in a village-y way?

I have an answer to this question!

Right now, we are living in what I call Old Happy—a society and culture structured around the systems of individualism, capitalism and domination. From a very early age, you’ve been conditioned by these forces to adopt a specific set of beliefs and values—about who you are, what you should do, and how you should relate to other people.

These beliefs include:

• You need to focus on yourself above all else

• You must succeed and achieve as much as possible

• You need to win in life’s competition

• You shouldn’t worry about other people’s well-being

• You are never, ever good enough

These messages are not only conveyed to us by the institutions that we engage with, like media and school, but also through our parents and caregivers, who were already conditioned into these beliefs and now pass them along to us. We learn that values like hyper-independence, achievement, perfection, and separation matter most. Finally, as we get older and are forced to participate in these exploitative systems, we have to engage in some of these behaviors in order to survive, which further entrenches our worldview.

When you’ve grown up in this culture, and someone tells you to go out and “build community,” how do you think that’s going to go?

Building community requires a completely different worldview. One that recognizes that well-being is not something we can achieve, win, or fulfill alone.

And it also requires a completely different set of behaviors, ones that are mighty hard to adopt when you’re entrenched in Old Happy. You have to show up for people when it’s inconvenient for you. You have to connect with people and build relationships of mutuality, where you ask for help and where you give it. You have to be willing to spend time you disagree with and care about them as a person.

Everything that is required to build community goes against our Old Happy conditioning. And because happiness is our greatest goal, we are always going to prioritize whatever we think will make us happiest. That means that, when the going gets tough, people will give up on building community, on connecting, on empathizing—even though those are the activities that will, ultimately, create lasting well-being.

We can’t just tell people to build community. We have to give them the tools to transform the worldview that’s preventing them from doing so. And that transformation can only happen when we start questioning the systems that keep us isolated, overburdened, and disconnected in the first place.

Here are a few tools you can use to help you get started.

1. Reflect on how Old Happy has affected you. What choices did you make because of its influence? How did those choices influence your well-being?

2. Start identifying Old Happy in the world around you. The more you can spot it out there, the easier it is to spot it in here. Just name it, non-judgmentally: “That’s Old Happy.” There are plenty of examples in the news every day.

3. Make a conscious effort to prioritize one moment of connection each day. Afterwards, pause and consider: how did that feel for you?

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