The social Instinct — Homo Sapien Nature
It’s been almost two years now since the world had come to standstill hearing the name Covid-19. Little did all of us know that we had to stay indoors and cut out all human connections to the outside world!
We are in the age of pandemic, have more digital devices, and are more connected to each other than ever before, but why do we still crave that human connection?
Why do we look for online communities to share our thoughts, learnings, happiness, looking for help, and so on?
The simple fact is that we as Homo Sapiens have it in our basic DNA to have that sense of belongingness.
Let’s rewind a few centuries back to understand a human-formed community and why we crave this connection!!
Our ancestors who are fundamentally nomads traveled from place to place in search of food and shelter. The idea of living alone in the woods is quite a task and that’s when they started forming small groups from the inbuilt DNA of social instinct.
This led them to form groups which were the basis of forming friendships, and hierarchies to share and solve their basic survival issues.
As centuries passed and the sapiens evolved into the agricultural revolution — they still settled down in groups/ villages for the necessity of cultivation and community living to grow.
Today, as we have evolved into the 21st century — we still work in teams in our organizations, we still have teams in our educational places, and live in gated communities.
As a species, we have evolved and still continue to evolve along with the advancements of Artificial intelligence, but our basic need for human connection still stands strong.
It all comes down to the question of who we are without being in touch with others of the same species!
This unique nature of our species has brought brands and organizations to bring about community building into the era of digital platforms and use it as an advantage for the basis of product building and marketing. It’s only natural that we as humans join the community that we find where people share similar problems in the hope that we might find solutions.
Coming back to the global pandemic, we are still connected with our devices and form small communities across all platforms just to know what others of ours are doing and to share what we are doing. This includes sharing our day to day to activities on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. We simply want our community to know that we are up to cooking this dish today or watching this movie today!
We are all creatures needing the sense of being with one another from the age of foragers to the age of smartphones. Community building will now and always be a part of us!
A community is more than just a group of people gathering together. It’s a sense of caring about one another and for something.