Self-Sufficient or Self-Suffering?

Do you ever call on your neighbor?

Fred Rogers was an interesting man. An intelligent man of the cloth who wanted to make the world better for and through children. The neighborhood he created spoke on issues of the day and everyday in America. It was a place for children to be reminded they were loved and could be themselves. That neighborhood in the days since his death seems to have been emptied, just like the neighborhoods of America that seem so divided on every issue progressive thought can place in our path. These used to be societal speed bumps, but now they’ve turned into very large, ragged potholes in American societal progress. When you look at media representations of what the American populace thinks of each other, it’s all depictions of division and anger between all sides of an issue. 

But then one Saturday I spent the day padded in with around thirty other men from different parts of America, socioeconomic, geographic, and political. Despite this group being made of intelligent and strong-opinioned people we managed to all openly think and talk aloud about the issues and topics of the day without any consternation. I quickly realized I was facing the direct opposite of what you’d think America was if you looked at it from the outside. I figured out why later that day as I sat and thought in the passenger seat of an Accord Coupe. 

Media bias based on social perception is one thing, but there is an overarching theme being played out by either side and even the middle that inspires social division not along political, ethnic, nor economic lines. Insead the social division is the general degradation of the idea of community. 

See nowadays community is something sold to us by advertisers but not what most Americans believe is the status quo. Individualism has been placed in front of everything in a relentless chase of wealth. I personally blame the excesses of the 1980's followed by the easy credit of the 90’s and 2000’s inspired the culture of wealth adjacency. Wealth adjacency here meaning average people see what the wealthy do and own and go out of their way to emulate them. Which is crazy because the wealthy had long been portrayed in the media as eccentric outcasts with zany existences, not people that you’d be inspired to become. 

But by now here in 2023 we’ve become addicted to wealth adjacency and the ridiculous hoops we have to leap through to keep it up. One core component is the fact that most Americans don’t have the easiest access to community as we know it: home ownership. Pair that with the fact consumer goods have stayed relatively cheap compared to our incomes and well, goods become more valuable societally than a home because why would you want to branch out to people in an apartment or a house that doesn’t belong to you. The “lack” of inventory and now high interest rates has made it even more difficult to own a home than it already was for many. Many people I know couldn't name one of their neighbors better yet tell you anything about who they actually are. That creates an air of aloneness that many couldn't tell you is sad because society has told them they need no one but themselves to succeed or be happy.

Now am I faulting being self-sufficient? No. But I am saying people don't believe in the village mindset at all anymore. People are scared to let their children play outside because they don't know anybody that lives around them and the television keeps screaming at them about kids getting abducted all day. It’s a bias that regardless of your ideologies deep down you know that society is out of whack somehow. The feeling of isolation is a sludge that teems under the surface and creates all types of problems in society too.

So how do we fix it? I thought about a bunch of complex answers to this question but I realized the answer is really simple but extremely hard to execute. In my opinion the answer is simply not making yourself a stranger, at least as best as your level of social anxiety will allow. But what do I really know? I’m just a 30-year-old yelling into the ether, but I'd like to think I'm not wrong. I’d like to think if people met their neighbors or supported more folks in the community that society in America would improve. This is a hard thing to execute when everybody has this nihilist view on the people around them. So my question to you reader is a question I’ve been asking myself for weeks now: how do we rationally make society come together and destroy the ideology of individual wealth? I can’t think of one person I know that got anywhere in life totally on their own. Can you?