Periodically I see Bay Area people discuss whether they have access to real communities, the kind where you give and get support and stay connected long-term.
When I moved to Boston, I joined a women’s team that did Morris dance (a dorky English folk dance) because I had grown up doing it. I was depressed on and off, and sometimes didn’t make it to practice because I was too sad.
But one of the things that made me stick around, even when I didn’t feel like it, was when someone who’d been involved with the team died and the team danced at their funeral. I knew it was increasingly rare for people to participate in a community where we expect to attend each other’s weddings and also each other’s funerals.
This weekend was the 50th anniversary of my dance team. In 1975, the women getting it started were in their early twenties. Now some have died, some attended with wheelchairs or walking sticks, and some are still dancing. The middle generation of dancers are hitting our 40s and raising kids, and a new generation of twenty-somethings are joining.
The central activity is dance practice once a week, but it goes beyond that. The team is part of the wider folk dance scene in the region, and some people see each other at other dances. Parents pass hand-me-downs to each other, people cat-sit for each other, and someone brings the extra vegetables from her garden. There are “drinking practices” during the summer when we’re not having dance practice. Two of the widowed members of my team are going on vacation to Spain together soon.
A key thing for continuing beyond one generation: do people quit when they have kids? Part of why my team survived was that it took good care of members who brought their kids to practice.
Want a community that will last? Find one that has already lasted
Many of the communities my friends join are only just forming, or have only been around a few years. If you particularly want to be part of a community for a long time, you might look for activities that have already been around for decades. Some common types:
- Religious congregations
- Your own extended family. In Jeff’s family, the glue that holds together the Boston-area extended family is his dad hosting weekly family dinners.
- The Masons are still a thing. I had a coworker who was active with a mostly Haitian-American lodge.
- Service organizations, like whatever Rotary and Kiwanis are?
Those are more mainstream ones, but there are also a lot of small weird communities you’ve never heard of.
- My friend met her husband through change ringing, where you get together to ring church bells in very specific patterns for hours and then go to the pub
- I once ended up at a picnic shelter with a bunch of old people having a lunch as part of some kind of international exchange organization they’d been part of for decades
- From the above-linked Astral Codex Ten post on community, “I have been part of a foam combat (‘boffer’) organization since college. You may want to say ‘that’s not a community, that’s just a hobby’, but the people in this sport form a strong community with tight bonds outside the game itself. Not only do I go to practices twice a week, I have 2 D&D games and 1 board game night every week with mostly members of the community, members of the community are my friends that I go out to movies and dinners with, play video games with voice chat on Discord with, talk to online in Discord servers and web forums and group chats, go to parties with and gossip about with other community members. . . . If you didn’t know me very very well, you might know that ‘oh yeah, he does some kind of sword fighting thing on the weekends I think?’, and not know there’s a large and strong community there.”
- My town has a street band festival that spawned a year-round music group, and I suspect has a tight-knit community behind the scenes.
I don’t really know how you find these spaces except by happenstance, but they’re there.
Downsides
You might not find such a community you want to be part of. Common reasons:
- It involves beliefs you don’t hold (this is why most of my friends wouldn’t seriously consider a religious community, even if the congregation doesn’t particularly care.)
- The space isn’t satisfying or fun for you
- You don’t like the people
I also think you can make meaningful communities, like friend groups, from scratch. And you can have meaningful community that you’re not part of for a long time, e.g. if you aren’t living that city long-term.
It takes time: making it to events when you’d rather stay home, serving on committees for projects you didn’t think were a good idea, onboarding new people and not just hanging out with your existing friends.
You won’t get Amish-level social support without Amish-level control of your life. A once-a-week activity isn’t as intense as the kind of traditional societies most people have traditionally lived in, for better and for worse. But many people I know don’t even have an ongoing once-a-week community outside of work.
Life is with people
Running any kind of activity over the long term also means putting up with each other’s annoying qualities. In our team, there’s eye-rolling about
- The frustrations of organizing a weekend-long event together
- What she said in that email that time
- The annual micromanaging of the fruit in the May Day fruit salad, the rinsing of the recycling, etc
Part of the bonding experience is snarking to other people about all this on the drive to the bar afterwards.
There’s an anthropology book about life in shtetls, Life Is With People. I’m an introvert who enjoys my space, but I remind myself of the title periodically. It seems likely that the loss of community is a pretty big deal to people’s happiness, and I don’t want to lose it.
