So another place I think you might poke around and find this myth: the debate between childfree people and people with children.
I was on Instagram (I know, that's a me problem) the other day and a creator I usually love posted a meme about how parents get to just go home early whenever because "kids" and the comment section was FROTHING. The usual stuff — parents doing the Rodney Dangerfield dance about how they get no respect (we don't!) or systemic support (also we don't!) and that American culture generally seems invested in making more babies and then screwing the people who need to raise them (also true!)
The child-free folks argued that it wasn't their job to pick up the slack because little Timmy has a tummy ache (fair!) and that having a kid is the only vaguely acceptable reason for needing to leave the office unexpectedly (also true!). But then it got mean.
"No one made you have a kid — that's your problem." — people mad at parents for having kids
I see this a lot (mostly with younger single folks) on the internet — the feeling that someone else having a child is an imposition on their comfort, and I think it has everything to do with the kind of frankensteining of Individualism and the Cult of Convenience that our phones and 2-day shipping has brought us. This vibe of "we have to share this planet but we don't have to like it — you clean up your own mess and I'll clean up mine." (I 100% used to be this person, and then I had a kid! Sorry to the moms and dads who I disregarded in my youth!)
There was a great On Being episode recently where Sarah Hendren talks about disability as this anti-american idea, like self-reliance is the most important personal value you can hold, even though every single one of us will at some point be dependent on someone else — even if just for a few days when we have the flu. She points out the ableist nature of this ideology, but also the incredible beauty of dependence. The humility it gives us. To know that we can't always take care of ourselves is a gift. Anyway, I loved this piece and I thought you might enjoy that thought thread for your book!
I think about individualism all the time in terms of housing. I grew up driving past Co-Op City in the Bronx to the suburbs of Westchester and thinking snootily: "how can people live all squished up in those big ugly buildings?" Cheaply, sustainably, and in community for along time, is how! But I was taught not to want that, and I think we've wasted a lot of time idealizing living apart when we could have been figuring out how to live together.
I have so many thoughts on this topic personally and professionally! I was raised by a collectivist mother in a fairly WASPy, individualistic suburb in the 80s. My childhood best friend and I were recently discussing how we met and how it would never happen today. When I was 9, my mother informed me that new people had moved into a house about 25 houses away (1 mile down the road) and that I needed to go organize the other neighborhood kids and welcome the new kid. We rode our bikes over to introduce ourselves and she's been my best friend every since. The idea of sending my 9 year old on a mission to a stranger's house a mile away down a busy road is inconceivable to me.
Personally, I am obsessed (might be too strong a word) with creating community and collective care. I am a deeply disorganized person and a crappy cook but I have been hosting friend potlucks weekly for 15 years and creating informal mutual aid networks with other parents for snow days and childcare. I feel very lucky to have the community that we do. I also feel burned out and isolated by all of the factors AHP mentioned.
Professionally, I work remotely from home, which is pretty isolating. However, my job is focused on supporting communities in building collective resilience to climate change. Climate change is an outcome of colonization, extraction, and individualism. Nurturing communities that can thrive everyday and during climate disruptions depends on collectivism and community care. During the deadly heatwave in the Northwest in 2021, social isolation was a contributing factor in heat related deaths. Getting to know your neighbors can be life saving in many ways.
This was perhaps one of the most EPIC articles I’ve read on Substack to date. You deserve a standing ovation.
My native culture is very community-oriented and for me to come to the US at a very young age means I’ve grappled with this dichotomy of two very different cultures my whole life.
I think there’s a balance to be struck between the two but the sheer level of individualism in this country is just unsustainable. What ends up happening when you become so individualistic is that you have no energy left to make real change happen. You’re so busy just surviving (because it truly is survival of the fittest here) that you barely have the energy to dream something better let alone make it actually happen.
I'm going to get in huge trouble for this, but I'm thinking a lot lately about how "parenting" as a verb contributes to the perpetuation of individualism--both for ourselves and for our kids. There are a lot of times when we can either go to church/supper at our friends' house/a political action or we can keep the baby's nap/eating/general crankiness schedule. For me it's actually much easier to feel guilty about skipping the baby's nap than about skipping a community event because it's been so firmly impressed upon me that any discomfort on his part will be a Trauma that I am Responsible For Inflicting. Also, it's just easier for *me* in every way if the baby sleeps his full perfect cozy nap, and much harder to immediately quantify the benefits to me of going to XYZ gathering. But the more we feel into the kid-having life, the more I realize I want my kid to feel like a part of a family and a community, which he actually can't do if I act like these things revolve around him.
There's a self-perpetuating quality to so much about whiteness and neoliberal capitalism in that it takes on the form of hazing. Lately my husband and I have been talking about this because we had a really traumatic birth and zero parental leave. Once you are in the position in a large company to make decisions about parental leave, you're usually in your late 40s or 50s, and you can't fathom why you should "give" people something you didn't have. You make up your own little mini-myth about how your own lonely, panicky years made you the person [...economic unit?] you are today! The more you contort your life and your psyche to accommodate individualism, the less you can even really see any alternative.
In a recent episode of "If Books Could Kill" Michael made a seemingly throwaway comment about "individualizing structural problems" and I really appreciated such a pithy way of summing up what we didn't properly account for when building this democracy. Maybe part of what we thought would serve as some kind of interstitial fluid between the individual and the government was churches and charities, but that is an unregulated marketplace of inefficiency that feels teed up for some kind of reckoning. I'm thinking particularly of the intensifying ire against higher education from all directions, the way NGO's compete with each other for the same pot of funding, the way the pressures on the individual to donate to charity expanded beyond churches and local efforts to every single problem in the world, and also decisions like that of the 11th circuit in the Fearless Fund case, questioning the liberties of charities.
I have no real insights, it's just a topic I think about frequently. Between 2016 and now, I've become deeply burned out on giving, which is sad! But it feels like the individual isn't just responsible for the individual, but also for faraway conflicts and the failures of capitalism and the ideas in other people's minds that need changing and what's broken in journalism etc etc Could I be more available to my community if I didn't feel like I somehow needed to help out in Gaza? Is it selfish to focus on my community if my community's needs pale to nothingness compared to the needs of other communities?
Regarding your book: I would love it if you could interview some of the families in my extremely weird neighborhood about adult friendship dynamics in a community defined by the boundaries of your neighborhood. I've never lived anywhere like this before and it is baffling and also fascinating from an anthropological perspective.
Your recent piece on being "in the portal" was so painfully resonant I found it hard to read the comments. I think my discomfort with how much suddenly changed at precisely the moment I expected things to settle is still too tender to examine. I look forward to eventually going back and re-reading it, and all the wisdom from your readers that surely follows. I also look forward to eventually feeling some kind of harmony/clarity around this period in my life.
Anyway, this question of individualism comes up for me in processing what it means to be "in the portal" because part of it, for me, is having the tables flipped on all of my assumptions around what I can reasonably expect from my friends (the nearby ones, the "closer" ones who are far away, the ones with kids, the ones without kids), from my aging parents (and from my parents when they were young, as I reflect on my own childhood), from my husband, from my sisters, from my kids, from myself, you get it. I feel like I've moved from a place of just being disappointed in absolutely everyone, to expecting nothing from anyone (also not good!), to assuming a space of observation of what people are actually capable of in different moments and having some compassion about it and also creating some softness around whether or not that's good enough for me right now. Still very much in this portal, still in the swirl.
This was so excellent, AHP! The opening description was so spot on it was chilling - I have friends who fit this characterization perfectly.
In terms of rejecting individualism, I have written here a number of times about how my husband and I live in the upstairs apartment of a two-flat, above my brother and sister-in-law, who are my best friends and who own the house. My husband and I are currently going through IVF, with the intention of having a baby hopefully soon. Instead of moving out to a single-family home, we decided there's no better situation than built-in family help and social support during what we know will be a challenging transition into parenthood. So, we spent a few thousand dollars putting up drywall in our mudroom and redoing the floors, turning it into a functional fourth room. This new room will eventually become my husband's home office, so his current home office can become a nursery.
This situation will still likely not last forever, as the public schools in our neighborhood suck, but we're pretty proud of ourselves for telling people that no, we do not plan to move once a baby enters the picture, as we've chosen family proximity over home ownership and more space. It feels so right to us, and yet I'm still so self-conscious telling people that growing our family does not make us take more seriously the cultural expectation that we buy a single-family home if we can afford it.
My husband and I just moved to a neighborhood entirely based on how close the houses were to each other and how dense the pedestrian population was - young families and old walking everywhere, stopping to chat and hang out with each other's dogs, being regulars at the corner diner, children walking together to the school at the top of the hill. We can't wait to get to know everyone in meaningful ways so that we can start to build a network where everyone can look out for one another and everyone's kiddos, in the spirit of Jane Jacobs.
I'm always actively trying to combat the myth of individualism in academia in my day-to-day work life, as well. There's a nefarious insistence that we get ahead, do our research, get tenure, all alone and I think that's extremely dangerous especially for early-career people of color. You don't have to and you shouldn't have to do it alone and finding your support ecosystem is vital to surviving and thriving in spaces that were never intentionally built for you.
I watched a talk Tyson Yunkaporta gave some time back (not online anymore that I can find) where he talked about having been doing decolonization work for going on 30 years. "But nobody," he said, "is giving back their real estate." I think about this constantly (obviously, to the point where I can barely talk about it coherently anymore because my head's so full of it), but the question of private ownership of land and what Yunkaporta and Nick Estes have talked about as "turning land into capital" feels completely foundational to maintaining these myths and hierarchies.
I come from two cultures, the one I was born into and the US-ian one I was brought into, on and off, as a child and young adult. My culture (Puerto Rican) is very community-based, despite (or maybe because of!) the colonialism that has left the island in such poverty throughout the years. My parents live in a very rural area and yet everyone cares for each other. (It does help that most people are related, LOL, but even so, they are good neighbors to each other.) My parents bring people in town extra produce from their farm, and others do the same for them. My parents take elderly people to church. Nobody starves in our hometown unless they really work at it. There is a lot of poverty, to be sure, and addiction too, though crime is minimal due to how rural it is (which is not to say that crime doesn't occur, but at much lower rates than in the bigger towns). My parents when living in the US created this same type of community for themselves through their church, but it was much harder because of the individualism built in to the US-ian system. When I see how much my parents do for their community, I'm honestly embarrassed at myself. I could do so much more but I don't (introversion is real), and COVID (and still being COVID-cautious) makes it even worse. It's hard to build a big community when most people don't have those concerns anymore. Not to go off on a tangent... Anyway, both of these sides (community vs. individualism) war inside of me, despite the fact that I *know* and can clearly see the benefit to the community-based life. Living in NYC, I'm very much participating in the "I don't know you, you don't know me, we leave each other alone" type of existence in my daily life. I would say, though, that my work colleagues do provide a lot of community for me and vice versa, given that it's non-profit, values-based work. But I'd also like to build more community in my personal life and find that very hard to do here.
I had the privilege of enjoying the community my parents had. There were neighbors' homes to wander into, other adults to teach you skills ranging from baking to changing a flat tire, heck, family & friends even came together to provide financial support for major milestones (going to university, getting married, planning a funeral). BUT this community orientation has a cost and comes with risks. As noted in the essay (but maybe in a different sense), some power has to be given up. If you cannot trust that other people care about you, it is probably unwise to operate from a community standpoint while others in your network are being individualistic. It is maybe the prisoner's dilemma? My experience has been that I have been unable to replicate the community life that many in my parents' generation had. Maybe trust is in decline or people don't want to give up power or we are just self absorbed.
This is such an interesting discussion and I’m still mulling over the prompt, but I was really struck by how accurately you were describing the two bookends of my parenting-kids-under-18 life. My husband and I moved to a place where we didn’t know anyone when I was 20 weeks pregnant and didn’t make any friends. It was awful, but we left the day our daughter turned one and moved a state away, where, after some time, we did make friends. Then, as we approached our kids (16 and 14) going into HS, we moved again. It’s been two years and zero friends.
My youngest sister just found out she’s pregnant with her second. She and her husband met in HS and moved from GA to IL for him to go to graduate school. He finished in 2020 and got an offer to come back to our hometown, which is a decent sized city and where our mother and his mother both live. They both also have tons of friends from HS who settled there. My sister has a good community around her—a lot of friends with babies the same age as her first, my mom and her MIL watch her child every day (which allows her to do her job, which involves extensive travel), etc. But she hates living there and it looks like my BIL may have an opportunity to leave his current position and find something else if they want. And a big part of me understands this—I wouldn’t choose to live there, either—but the part of me that has raised my kids far from family and was desperate for connection when they were young is resisting offering any unsolicited advice about moving just for the sake of leaving (it’d also be conflicting with my other sister’s advice, which is inevitably centered around her feelings of superiority related to her choices).
I think a lot of the staying power of individualism comes from propaganda surrounding the fiscal requirements of a more collective society but also, at least in my experience, in this feeling that “I struggled, so should you.” I work in an industry that has few women, and was disappointed to find that many of the women who came before me were not supportive or helpful to the next generation. They came up through the school of hard knocks and if we are going to learn, then so should we. Similarly, during the pandemic many of us were almost furloughed from my company, and the attitude of the older generation was “well I was furloughed too.” This from older men and women who have the benefit of a really strong collective bargaining agreement and union representation. I am forever confused by the individualist nature of union members, but thats a different topic. I think the key to moving toward collectivism is not only our personal attitudes but the general belief that we need to make things better for the next generation. Also a full revamp of our untethered capitalist system, but that one will be harder.
I moved from San Francisco back to my very rural (pop 430) hometown in Iowa last year. The battle between community and individualism is so alive here. I've found that there's a lot more reliance on community, due partly to distance from cities and partly to poverty - everything from volunteering more to raising money for each other's mutual aid. I've found it so easy to get involved and find meaning in helping the community. And yet there's also deep-rooted animosity toward any governmental/programmatic attempts to "interfere" (or "help" depending on your viewpoint).
But I would argue that some of the latent rage in these areas isn't necessarily/only because other groups are "getting ahead" (although that's part of it). I think it's become clear in the last forty years, as the Farm Crisis decimated small farmers and destroyed locally-owned businesses, that the myth of American individualism has not fulfilled its promises of opportunity - even for the white male landowners that the myth was originally created to uplift. And if the myth isn't true, and there's no myth or promise to replace it with, how do you reframe your life toward more community (especially when everyone since McCarthy has been telling you that "communism" is the biggest evil ever)?
I'm so looking forward to reading more of your thoughts on this topic!
DAMN this was a good one.
So another place I think you might poke around and find this myth: the debate between childfree people and people with children.
I was on Instagram (I know, that's a me problem) the other day and a creator I usually love posted a meme about how parents get to just go home early whenever because "kids" and the comment section was FROTHING. The usual stuff — parents doing the Rodney Dangerfield dance about how they get no respect (we don't!) or systemic support (also we don't!) and that American culture generally seems invested in making more babies and then screwing the people who need to raise them (also true!)
The child-free folks argued that it wasn't their job to pick up the slack because little Timmy has a tummy ache (fair!) and that having a kid is the only vaguely acceptable reason for needing to leave the office unexpectedly (also true!). But then it got mean.
"No one made you have a kid — that's your problem." — people mad at parents for having kids
I see this a lot (mostly with younger single folks) on the internet — the feeling that someone else having a child is an imposition on their comfort, and I think it has everything to do with the kind of frankensteining of Individualism and the Cult of Convenience that our phones and 2-day shipping has brought us. This vibe of "we have to share this planet but we don't have to like it — you clean up your own mess and I'll clean up mine." (I 100% used to be this person, and then I had a kid! Sorry to the moms and dads who I disregarded in my youth!)
There was a great On Being episode recently where Sarah Hendren talks about disability as this anti-american idea, like self-reliance is the most important personal value you can hold, even though every single one of us will at some point be dependent on someone else — even if just for a few days when we have the flu. She points out the ableist nature of this ideology, but also the incredible beauty of dependence. The humility it gives us. To know that we can't always take care of ourselves is a gift. Anyway, I loved this piece and I thought you might enjoy that thought thread for your book!
https://onbeing.org/programs/sara-hendren-our-bodies-aliveness-and-the-built-world/
I think about individualism all the time in terms of housing. I grew up driving past Co-Op City in the Bronx to the suburbs of Westchester and thinking snootily: "how can people live all squished up in those big ugly buildings?" Cheaply, sustainably, and in community for along time, is how! But I was taught not to want that, and I think we've wasted a lot of time idealizing living apart when we could have been figuring out how to live together.
I have so many thoughts on this topic personally and professionally! I was raised by a collectivist mother in a fairly WASPy, individualistic suburb in the 80s. My childhood best friend and I were recently discussing how we met and how it would never happen today. When I was 9, my mother informed me that new people had moved into a house about 25 houses away (1 mile down the road) and that I needed to go organize the other neighborhood kids and welcome the new kid. We rode our bikes over to introduce ourselves and she's been my best friend every since. The idea of sending my 9 year old on a mission to a stranger's house a mile away down a busy road is inconceivable to me.
Personally, I am obsessed (might be too strong a word) with creating community and collective care. I am a deeply disorganized person and a crappy cook but I have been hosting friend potlucks weekly for 15 years and creating informal mutual aid networks with other parents for snow days and childcare. I feel very lucky to have the community that we do. I also feel burned out and isolated by all of the factors AHP mentioned.
Professionally, I work remotely from home, which is pretty isolating. However, my job is focused on supporting communities in building collective resilience to climate change. Climate change is an outcome of colonization, extraction, and individualism. Nurturing communities that can thrive everyday and during climate disruptions depends on collectivism and community care. During the deadly heatwave in the Northwest in 2021, social isolation was a contributing factor in heat related deaths. Getting to know your neighbors can be life saving in many ways.
This was perhaps one of the most EPIC articles I’ve read on Substack to date. You deserve a standing ovation.
My native culture is very community-oriented and for me to come to the US at a very young age means I’ve grappled with this dichotomy of two very different cultures my whole life.
I think there’s a balance to be struck between the two but the sheer level of individualism in this country is just unsustainable. What ends up happening when you become so individualistic is that you have no energy left to make real change happen. You’re so busy just surviving (because it truly is survival of the fittest here) that you barely have the energy to dream something better let alone make it actually happen.
I'm going to get in huge trouble for this, but I'm thinking a lot lately about how "parenting" as a verb contributes to the perpetuation of individualism--both for ourselves and for our kids. There are a lot of times when we can either go to church/supper at our friends' house/a political action or we can keep the baby's nap/eating/general crankiness schedule. For me it's actually much easier to feel guilty about skipping the baby's nap than about skipping a community event because it's been so firmly impressed upon me that any discomfort on his part will be a Trauma that I am Responsible For Inflicting. Also, it's just easier for *me* in every way if the baby sleeps his full perfect cozy nap, and much harder to immediately quantify the benefits to me of going to XYZ gathering. But the more we feel into the kid-having life, the more I realize I want my kid to feel like a part of a family and a community, which he actually can't do if I act like these things revolve around him.
There's a self-perpetuating quality to so much about whiteness and neoliberal capitalism in that it takes on the form of hazing. Lately my husband and I have been talking about this because we had a really traumatic birth and zero parental leave. Once you are in the position in a large company to make decisions about parental leave, you're usually in your late 40s or 50s, and you can't fathom why you should "give" people something you didn't have. You make up your own little mini-myth about how your own lonely, panicky years made you the person [...economic unit?] you are today! The more you contort your life and your psyche to accommodate individualism, the less you can even really see any alternative.
In a recent episode of "If Books Could Kill" Michael made a seemingly throwaway comment about "individualizing structural problems" and I really appreciated such a pithy way of summing up what we didn't properly account for when building this democracy. Maybe part of what we thought would serve as some kind of interstitial fluid between the individual and the government was churches and charities, but that is an unregulated marketplace of inefficiency that feels teed up for some kind of reckoning. I'm thinking particularly of the intensifying ire against higher education from all directions, the way NGO's compete with each other for the same pot of funding, the way the pressures on the individual to donate to charity expanded beyond churches and local efforts to every single problem in the world, and also decisions like that of the 11th circuit in the Fearless Fund case, questioning the liberties of charities.
I have no real insights, it's just a topic I think about frequently. Between 2016 and now, I've become deeply burned out on giving, which is sad! But it feels like the individual isn't just responsible for the individual, but also for faraway conflicts and the failures of capitalism and the ideas in other people's minds that need changing and what's broken in journalism etc etc Could I be more available to my community if I didn't feel like I somehow needed to help out in Gaza? Is it selfish to focus on my community if my community's needs pale to nothingness compared to the needs of other communities?
Regarding your book: I would love it if you could interview some of the families in my extremely weird neighborhood about adult friendship dynamics in a community defined by the boundaries of your neighborhood. I've never lived anywhere like this before and it is baffling and also fascinating from an anthropological perspective.
Your recent piece on being "in the portal" was so painfully resonant I found it hard to read the comments. I think my discomfort with how much suddenly changed at precisely the moment I expected things to settle is still too tender to examine. I look forward to eventually going back and re-reading it, and all the wisdom from your readers that surely follows. I also look forward to eventually feeling some kind of harmony/clarity around this period in my life.
Anyway, this question of individualism comes up for me in processing what it means to be "in the portal" because part of it, for me, is having the tables flipped on all of my assumptions around what I can reasonably expect from my friends (the nearby ones, the "closer" ones who are far away, the ones with kids, the ones without kids), from my aging parents (and from my parents when they were young, as I reflect on my own childhood), from my husband, from my sisters, from my kids, from myself, you get it. I feel like I've moved from a place of just being disappointed in absolutely everyone, to expecting nothing from anyone (also not good!), to assuming a space of observation of what people are actually capable of in different moments and having some compassion about it and also creating some softness around whether or not that's good enough for me right now. Still very much in this portal, still in the swirl.
This was so excellent, AHP! The opening description was so spot on it was chilling - I have friends who fit this characterization perfectly.
In terms of rejecting individualism, I have written here a number of times about how my husband and I live in the upstairs apartment of a two-flat, above my brother and sister-in-law, who are my best friends and who own the house. My husband and I are currently going through IVF, with the intention of having a baby hopefully soon. Instead of moving out to a single-family home, we decided there's no better situation than built-in family help and social support during what we know will be a challenging transition into parenthood. So, we spent a few thousand dollars putting up drywall in our mudroom and redoing the floors, turning it into a functional fourth room. This new room will eventually become my husband's home office, so his current home office can become a nursery.
This situation will still likely not last forever, as the public schools in our neighborhood suck, but we're pretty proud of ourselves for telling people that no, we do not plan to move once a baby enters the picture, as we've chosen family proximity over home ownership and more space. It feels so right to us, and yet I'm still so self-conscious telling people that growing our family does not make us take more seriously the cultural expectation that we buy a single-family home if we can afford it.
My husband and I just moved to a neighborhood entirely based on how close the houses were to each other and how dense the pedestrian population was - young families and old walking everywhere, stopping to chat and hang out with each other's dogs, being regulars at the corner diner, children walking together to the school at the top of the hill. We can't wait to get to know everyone in meaningful ways so that we can start to build a network where everyone can look out for one another and everyone's kiddos, in the spirit of Jane Jacobs.
I'm always actively trying to combat the myth of individualism in academia in my day-to-day work life, as well. There's a nefarious insistence that we get ahead, do our research, get tenure, all alone and I think that's extremely dangerous especially for early-career people of color. You don't have to and you shouldn't have to do it alone and finding your support ecosystem is vital to surviving and thriving in spaces that were never intentionally built for you.
I watched a talk Tyson Yunkaporta gave some time back (not online anymore that I can find) where he talked about having been doing decolonization work for going on 30 years. "But nobody," he said, "is giving back their real estate." I think about this constantly (obviously, to the point where I can barely talk about it coherently anymore because my head's so full of it), but the question of private ownership of land and what Yunkaporta and Nick Estes have talked about as "turning land into capital" feels completely foundational to maintaining these myths and hierarchies.
I come from two cultures, the one I was born into and the US-ian one I was brought into, on and off, as a child and young adult. My culture (Puerto Rican) is very community-based, despite (or maybe because of!) the colonialism that has left the island in such poverty throughout the years. My parents live in a very rural area and yet everyone cares for each other. (It does help that most people are related, LOL, but even so, they are good neighbors to each other.) My parents bring people in town extra produce from their farm, and others do the same for them. My parents take elderly people to church. Nobody starves in our hometown unless they really work at it. There is a lot of poverty, to be sure, and addiction too, though crime is minimal due to how rural it is (which is not to say that crime doesn't occur, but at much lower rates than in the bigger towns). My parents when living in the US created this same type of community for themselves through their church, but it was much harder because of the individualism built in to the US-ian system. When I see how much my parents do for their community, I'm honestly embarrassed at myself. I could do so much more but I don't (introversion is real), and COVID (and still being COVID-cautious) makes it even worse. It's hard to build a big community when most people don't have those concerns anymore. Not to go off on a tangent... Anyway, both of these sides (community vs. individualism) war inside of me, despite the fact that I *know* and can clearly see the benefit to the community-based life. Living in NYC, I'm very much participating in the "I don't know you, you don't know me, we leave each other alone" type of existence in my daily life. I would say, though, that my work colleagues do provide a lot of community for me and vice versa, given that it's non-profit, values-based work. But I'd also like to build more community in my personal life and find that very hard to do here.
I had the privilege of enjoying the community my parents had. There were neighbors' homes to wander into, other adults to teach you skills ranging from baking to changing a flat tire, heck, family & friends even came together to provide financial support for major milestones (going to university, getting married, planning a funeral). BUT this community orientation has a cost and comes with risks. As noted in the essay (but maybe in a different sense), some power has to be given up. If you cannot trust that other people care about you, it is probably unwise to operate from a community standpoint while others in your network are being individualistic. It is maybe the prisoner's dilemma? My experience has been that I have been unable to replicate the community life that many in my parents' generation had. Maybe trust is in decline or people don't want to give up power or we are just self absorbed.
This is such an interesting discussion and I’m still mulling over the prompt, but I was really struck by how accurately you were describing the two bookends of my parenting-kids-under-18 life. My husband and I moved to a place where we didn’t know anyone when I was 20 weeks pregnant and didn’t make any friends. It was awful, but we left the day our daughter turned one and moved a state away, where, after some time, we did make friends. Then, as we approached our kids (16 and 14) going into HS, we moved again. It’s been two years and zero friends.
My youngest sister just found out she’s pregnant with her second. She and her husband met in HS and moved from GA to IL for him to go to graduate school. He finished in 2020 and got an offer to come back to our hometown, which is a decent sized city and where our mother and his mother both live. They both also have tons of friends from HS who settled there. My sister has a good community around her—a lot of friends with babies the same age as her first, my mom and her MIL watch her child every day (which allows her to do her job, which involves extensive travel), etc. But she hates living there and it looks like my BIL may have an opportunity to leave his current position and find something else if they want. And a big part of me understands this—I wouldn’t choose to live there, either—but the part of me that has raised my kids far from family and was desperate for connection when they were young is resisting offering any unsolicited advice about moving just for the sake of leaving (it’d also be conflicting with my other sister’s advice, which is inevitably centered around her feelings of superiority related to her choices).
I think a lot of the staying power of individualism comes from propaganda surrounding the fiscal requirements of a more collective society but also, at least in my experience, in this feeling that “I struggled, so should you.” I work in an industry that has few women, and was disappointed to find that many of the women who came before me were not supportive or helpful to the next generation. They came up through the school of hard knocks and if we are going to learn, then so should we. Similarly, during the pandemic many of us were almost furloughed from my company, and the attitude of the older generation was “well I was furloughed too.” This from older men and women who have the benefit of a really strong collective bargaining agreement and union representation. I am forever confused by the individualist nature of union members, but thats a different topic. I think the key to moving toward collectivism is not only our personal attitudes but the general belief that we need to make things better for the next generation. Also a full revamp of our untethered capitalist system, but that one will be harder.
I moved from San Francisco back to my very rural (pop 430) hometown in Iowa last year. The battle between community and individualism is so alive here. I've found that there's a lot more reliance on community, due partly to distance from cities and partly to poverty - everything from volunteering more to raising money for each other's mutual aid. I've found it so easy to get involved and find meaning in helping the community. And yet there's also deep-rooted animosity toward any governmental/programmatic attempts to "interfere" (or "help" depending on your viewpoint).
But I would argue that some of the latent rage in these areas isn't necessarily/only because other groups are "getting ahead" (although that's part of it). I think it's become clear in the last forty years, as the Farm Crisis decimated small farmers and destroyed locally-owned businesses, that the myth of American individualism has not fulfilled its promises of opportunity - even for the white male landowners that the myth was originally created to uplift. And if the myth isn't true, and there's no myth or promise to replace it with, how do you reframe your life toward more community (especially when everyone since McCarthy has been telling you that "communism" is the biggest evil ever)?
I'm so looking forward to reading more of your thoughts on this topic!