Blog/2025-10-09/Community
A common complaint online is that there is no longer a sense of community in America and that everyone is lonely. All right, that seems believable since so many people are complaining. Another common complaint is that it's impossible for anyone to make friends and so on. A third complaint is that it's impossible to date. Fine, everyone online is always saying things like this so at some point the preponderance of statements makes it sort of believable. Except...everyone who complains online is weird. So what if that's the common element here: that a bunch of strange online people go to a social networking site and post constantly about how lonely they are.
An example that makes me suspect this might be the case is that of my apartment building here in SOMA: 3 floors of parking, 6 floors of housing, a converted hotel housing 600 souls. From what I can see of my neighbours, they come in all sorts of ages but a large number are tech or tech-adjacent as one can imagine from San Francisco. So here we have the perfect storm: a downtown apartment building without porches where neighbours could encounter each other and get to know one another's families. The place must be full of shut-ins, surely. Exactly the kind of place where the lonely people never meet anyone.
Except that's not nearly true. There's a building WhatsApp community someone made which has all the residents in it with a General chat, a Buy/Sell chat (which inexplicably mostly has free stuff), one for Desis (that's Indian people), and for moms, dads, and the board game group. The general chat has a 'wiki' (a shared Google Doc) where people keep track of the fixtures and appliances that the building has (condo buildings like this are built with a set of fixtures and appliances that it's easiest to just replace 1 for 1 without modification). Someone enterprising in the community has a Diwali event and a Holi event. And as the screenshot above shows, there's no small amount of borrowing and sharing that goes on. I've jump started cars twice myself[1].
There is one chap here who believes his newspaper is being censored by the building management, who must also be responsible for the one insect he found in his unit, so it's not all like that, but for the most part it's a pretty relaxed experience. Everyone seems rather normal and our interaction with acquaintances are quite pleasant. I wouldn't say I have any friends from the building per se since my one buddy moved here after us and our other friends are a couple of blocks away walking, but the community in the sense of anonymous interactions between people is quite pleasant.
If I didn't have any friends already in the neighbourhood, I'd probably go to the game nights and so on instead of just playing poker, Terraforming Mars, Dune:Imperium, or Dominion with my friends at home. Overall, I suspect this is what most people's lives are like: they have a common community of other generally decent people who help each other out and a closer set of friends they spend their time with. If they want to, they can increase participation in the former group to graduate people into the latter. It doesn't seem particularly hard to do so, and if people are having trouble with all these things that hundreds of well-adjusted people just do, it's possible that the problem is the common element discussing all these things.
