• she/her

healthcare bureaucrat in philly, v adhd, orthodox jew, ect ect, im love my wife



chirasul
@chirasul

if you're in your mid to late 20s or early 30s and you're reasonably confident that you'll be employed and housed and fed and you have some fun hobbies, you might still feel a kind of restless gnawing emptiness inside you. and you'll try a bunch of stupid shit to make this feeling go away. buying new things, trying new substances, moving to new towns, getting new jobs, getting more expensive hobbies. it might help, but not enough. we need more. we need some real shit.

the major thing you may be missing, the last need unfulfilled, is a community. a community that both benefits from your contributions and will readily help you when you are in need. and that's tough! it's a tall order in the age of the internet-connected smartphone, where social relationships are largely theoretical in the sense that they give very little to you and demand even less in return. just another source of dopamine as needed. you need more than the group chat and the semi-yearly meetup. you need community to be as regular a part of your life as taking out the trash or going grocery shopping. you need people to see you at your very worst. you need to be asked for inconvenient favors at inconvenient times. it's really, really good for you.

a community is not any less necessary if you are insecure in your housing, food, employment, and enrichment btw. but it's a basic need that has been so obfuscated by capitalism and by social media that few people correctly identify this need as unfulfilled, and fewer still are able to meet it. you need to be around other people in real life, in person, regularly. you need to need them, and you need them to need you. not my fault! evolution made you into this type of creature. trying to get by without this will have you as poorly off as if you tried to replace all meals with clif bars or replace your apartment with a monthly storage locker. you need more.

i dont know if you know this but one of the things that made humans set apart from other animals is community, and, more importantly, compassion for each other. community is as innately coded into our DNA as, like, the desire to eat a variety of foods. it is integral. it is the most ancient and compelling part of being the cognizant, social animal that you are. i know it's really hard to see it because modern society puts a LOT of distractions in front of it, but please seek it out. you will grow.

it might be obvious but capitalism is once again responsible for deferring the need for community and trying to make you feel like you don't need it by replacing it with a bunch of lesser things. because capitalism benefits from you feeling lonely and disconnected from each other. a person who can't rely on other people will buy more things impulsively. a person who can't rely on other people will rely on machines and chemicals. we need each other in order to meet our most basic needs in spite of the society around us. we need to move in together and rent apartments/buy houses in the same towns and give each other things to look forward to where we can laugh and eat and be together. we gotta help each other. it's mandatory!


numberonebug
@numberonebug

I feel this does not leave the reader with much of a next step, so as a 20 or 30 year old who is enmeshed in a vibrant warm community just some half formed thoughts on how that happens

Basically, at its core, the trick is to just show up! Find a reoccurring social space that you can tolerate and show up as often as you can, for as long as you can, and when you see that the space or a person in the space needs something give it to them as is within your means. It's important to remember that you don't have to like everything and everyone in the space, what you're looking for in a space is that the things you dont like motivate you to help it grow. Remember, if you like everybody in a space then it's a friend group not a community

I'd say 80% of finding community is like, I call it the "highschool cafeteria effect", in highschool the only reason we made friends with any of those people is that we saw them every day, familiarity was the corner stone of those connections

The other 20% is honestly probably going to require an internal shift. We talk a lot about how built environments and systems and ect ect are making community hard to find but honestly we do not talk much about how we live in a culture built to center atomization and isolation and that does influence how we think. The hegemonic experience is selfishness and to have community you do kind of have to unlearn that. You have to look at yourself less as an individual and rather as relational to your community, if that makes any sense. Basically, just, community isn't a commodity one can buy, to get anything you do have to put in effort and time and resources, in ways that don't come natural at first

Now when I said "find a place" I know your eyes rolled because yeah that is easier said than done. I do have the cheat code of an organized religion, so lucky me, but there are other options. Is there a park near you that has volunteer clean ups? Is there a hobby or interest of yours that people meet up for? Is there a political issue you're passionate about that you could organize for? Sign up to mailing lists and follow Instagram pages for local community events and organizations and eventually you'll find something. Scrapping the bottom of the barrel, is there an organized religion you could tolerate lol?

If there truly is nothing going on, then you're probably not alone in having a gnawing hunger for more, and would have success building something, anything, but that's a larger conversation that I don't have experience with. If that's not an option then you might just want to move lol, that's what led me to leave my home town honestly


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in reply to @chirasul's post:

I have a very strong sense of community with the people I'm in voice chat with all day but we don't live close to eachother and it's all virtual which limits the ways we can help eachother ;-;

it's fucking true as hell. the more I go through and see others go through the more I know it's not just nice to have, you really gotta find a way to have it or it affects your quality of life constantly. you gotta get asked to help someone put up shelves, you gotta have a buddy who can come over when shit has suddenly gotten hard and everything feels hopeless at 4 am. you gotta help each other with your little projects and give each other the extra tomatoes you grew and just sit on each others' lawns on a summer night and feel wanted and grounded under the stars. you gotta.

I just wish that needs like this had remotely actionable methods of fulfilling them. Like, how am I supposed to find community off of the internet when I'm trapped in a socially conservative, rural area without the material means to relocate to somewhere where it's actually feasible? Just being aware that this is a need I have doesn't help me any if there's no possible actions I can take to remedy it that don't involve becoming homeless just so I can relocate.

in reply to @numberonebug's post:

Thank you for adding onto this post! It's one of the posts on here there has influenced me the most.

My add on is check your local library. My library has all sorts of events and groups all the time. Several library branches near me having crafting clubs. Book clubs. DnD, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Coloring while listening to old records. Even if it doesn't become "something more", just getting out of the house and being social around other people can feel freeing.

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