The Fall and Rise of the Community
In his 1897 book Suicide, Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology, discovered that the rates of suicide among Catholics and Jews were much lower than that of Protestants. While the education and wealth levels of Jews and Protestants were comparable, the defining difference between them was their level of social cohesion. Catholics were poorer than the other groups, but were much happier than the Protestants because they had a strong sense of community rather than independence and self-sufficiency.
Much of Durkheim’s work was devoted to figuring out how to maintain social integration and cohesion as the world marched on towards modernity through the Industrial Revolution. People were moving from rural towns where everyone knew everyone else and they all belonged to the same church, to cities where they knew almost no one and could expect to interact with people with different cultures and religions. The community they had been part of for their entire lives was suddenly lost to them and they had to start anew.
It’s been 119 years since Durkheim’s Suicide, and it seems like people have lost touch with their local communities more than ever. Many people coming out of college or relocating for jobs are moving to new cities they didn’t grow up in and don’t have any roots in. And with the rise of secularism comes an inability for people to just join a church and become introduced to a community that they can form a relationship with.
While the internet has made it possible to stay connected with people from all over the world, those connections aren’t as fulfilling as those that lead to real-world, face-to-face interactions and experiences. The past century of modernization has allowed people to live in bigger and bigger houses farther away from each other. And now, with the flood of on-demand delivery companies and more people working remotely, people hardly have any reason to leave their home and have actual human contact. The interactions people would have when they would run into each other at the neighborhood grocer, or coffee shop, or pub are going extinct.
Research has shown that people are becoming more socially isolated. We have fewer close friends that we can see everyday and confide in with our struggles in life. Depression, addiction, and suicide rates have been rising for decades — wreaking havoc on families and communities. There’s no doubt that humans are social animals who need and desire regular human interaction and a sense of community acceptance and integration. Without that, we crumble. We begin to lie to ourselves about our own worth and lead ourselves down paths of self-destruction. We search for things that give us momentary relief from that sense of isolation and loneliness.
Modernity may be the reason for the falling prominence of local community in our daily lives, but it may also be the way out. We don’t need to reject urban life and technology, we should just use it to our advantage. I’m founding a company, Krewe, to do just that. Krewe is a simple app that connects people with a small social group in their neighborhood and gradually allows them to expand that group so that a strong community can form. We want you, and encourage you, to see the people you’re connected with as often as possible (hopefully every day) so that you can build strong, meaningful relationships. Everyone should feel like they’re part of a community, especially one that they can interact with in real life.
