This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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We Americans are no longer talking to our neighbors as much as we once did. This is especially true for younger people, with only 25% reporting conversing with their neighbors a few times per week. There’s also an educational gulf. For those without college degrees, a mere 46% have spent an evening hanging with someone from the ‘hood, compared to 58% for the grads. Even when technology is in the mix, just 45% of youngsters are texting or emailing vs. 65% of those who matriculated.
We’ve gone from keeping up with the Joneses to only paying attention to their social media output. The neighborhood, once the cornerstone of community, is becoming extended-stay housing, with people who live next to one another doing little more than offering a passing wave as they pull into or out of their garages.
As an American Enterprise Institute study points out, there are myriad reasons for this. Though work from home has given way to returning to the office, people still spend more time around their homes than they did pre-COVID. Technology is another factor, whether it’s because one doesn’t have to walk a few steps and knock to send a text or because we post so much of ourselves online. There is also the fact that our kids are overscheduled and have to be driven here and there. Sports parents may commiserate, but largely it’s done on the sidelines or in a hotel lounge, not sitting in one another’s backyards.
There is also the trend toward turning what used to be called offices into campuses, replete with stores, coffee shops, bars, restaurants, hotels, daycares, and any and everything else an employee might need. While marketed as a testament to concern about the well-being of those who work there, c’mon. The purpose of these splendiferous campuses is not to enrich the lives of the people; it’s to ensure they never have to leave. The residents of these abominations may not have to worry about loading 16 tons, but we’ve almost come full circle back to them owing their souls to the company store.
The campus also reduces the number of outsiders people will talk to as they go about their day-to-day lives. Gone is stopping for a few things on the way home, perchance to run into someone along the way. Instead, it’s returning a package while talking to the person you were working on a PowerPoint deck with a few hours ago. And it’s not a conversation about how the kids are doing in school or that Ben and Stella are installing a pool, it’s about the PowerPoint they’re going to work on tomorrow.
It’s easy to mock those who yearn for buggy whips and typewriters as hopelessly caught in the past. The loss of neighborhoods is different. It’s not the sort of change that eases life, enriching it along the way, but one that diminishes it. While people may yearn for the freedom of the college years, sprawling office parks without a quad or a stadium are but a pale imitation of the true campus. Likewise, the algorithm can never provide the frisson, or the tensions, that neighbors do. Online, it’s easy to settle into echo chambers, ones where there is no possibility of getting slugged in the mouth. On the streets, more decorum and bonhomie are required. The streets also offer more opportunity to see people as full humans rather than caricatures, ones based solely on their job titles and voting preferences.
Losing neighborhoods — places for community, for tribes — to extended-stay housing atomizes us instead of helping to build those bonds. We are not meant to be atoms, careening around alone in the world save for our immediate family members, people who are also likely isolated in the digital panopticon rather than sitting in the living room together.
It seems dark and difficult to surmount. It isn’t, though, not with a modicum of effort. All you have to do to be the change you want to see in the world, to quote something Gandhi never said, is to go out and be in the world. Take a walk. Get a dog and take him to play fetch. Bake some cookies and deliver them to your neighbor. Sit on your front porch. Randomly fire a pistol in the air to attract attention to yourself.
Actually, don’t do that last one unless your goal is to sacrifice yourself in order to bring the rest of the neighborhood together in opposition to you and your flagrant disregard of HOA regulations as well as common sense. If you’re planning to move, though, no, still don’t do that. Maybe put up one of those giant Halloween skeleton statues but leave it up year-round?
While technological progress and the economy (mostly) just keep humming along, life is more than the sum of our material inputs and outputs. Government is not simply the name for things we choose to do together, but instead a necessary evil since we ate our way out of the garden. Becoming digital recluses is not the mark of progress, but an omen of the dystopian future that awaits us if we don’t start fighting back.
Civilization encompasses the entire tapestry that we weave together, one not solely focused on key performance indicators or politics as sports fandom, but on shared sorrow, hope, fear, and joy. No one should have to put up those stupid giant letter signs announcing the arrival of a child or to honor someone’s birthday. We should just know that the mom and dad could use some heat-and-eat meals or that the party is on Saturday and we’re responsible for an appetizer.
Nor should it take a study to remind us to talk to our neighbors, to go hang out with them from time to time. Most of us who walk this earth are destined to be forgotten. There will come a day when the last person to remember us will die, and our memory will die with him. Much better to leave a legacy focused on working together, on celebrating together, on crying together, on building up the spaces immediately around us together such that we leave them better than we found them. But we cannot do that without doing something far simpler first: saying hello.
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Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4.
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