I get the feeling that most of us don’t really belong anywhere anymore? Like we’ve each been quietly pushed into our own little boxes; online, in our neighborhoods, in our families, even in our own heads. I don’t know that it was necessarily anyone’s grand plan. It’s just where things drifted. The internet came along and sold us on a promise of connection, but what it really gave us was mind-altering separation disguised as community.
Now we live in our own personal echo chambers. Tiny, personalized little worlds where our own opinions bounce back at us until we start mistaking for “our truth”. We spend our days scrolling through feeds full of people, or bots, who think just like we do, and we call that “being informed.” We post, we like, we argue with strangers, but most of it is just shadows fighting shadows.
It’s no wonder everyone feels so sure of their own version of reality. We’ve been trained to believe that our personal truth is the truth. That there isn’t one baseline anymore with a shared sense of what’s real or right. Just endless fragments of half-beliefs orbiting around themselves.
And because of that, we’ve all been “othered.” Not just by society, but by design; by convenience, by comfort, by the walls we’ve built to keep from feeling lonely that somehow just made us lonelier.
The irony is that we did it to ourselves. We moved to the suburbs for space, got online for connection, and ended up with neither. We traded neighbors for usernames, and now we don’t even know who lives next door.
If there’s a way back from all this nonsense, I don’t think it’s going to come from another app or some big national movement. It’s probably going to come from small things, real places, real people, actual eye contact. The stuff we used to take for granted.
Go talk to your neighbor. Go to the farmers market. Show up at the community meeting. Argue about potholes instead of politics. It’s messy and it’s human, but it’s real.
Because if we don’t start building small circles of belonging again, we’ll just keep drifting further apart; shouting our truths into the ever-expanding void, waiting for someone to echo them back.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did.
Cheers, friends.