Dibby’s

Small town Colorado

The first step in rebuilding local communities may be to actually build them. In the East, in the Old World, most people still live roughly near where their ancestors lived. They can fall back on the civilization state. However, in the West, especially the New World, especially America, there is very little in common anymore between people who happen to be in the same geographical vicinity. Due in part to the Internet, Americans are often more connected to someone 3000 miles away than to their next door neighbor. In cities this goes to an extreme, where you often wouldn’t even recognize the person who lives 50 feet above you in an apartment building. This phenomenon has been observed since Bowling Alone (and hence before the Internet), and has many causes, but the net of it is that local communities don’t really even exist in America (and broadly, the English-speaking world) as they used to. That’s why happiness has fallen off such a cliff in those places. There may be ways to rebuild community, but in my view it’d start by building communities in the first place, on the basis of some shared proposition.