The Lack of Community in the 21st Century - Politics and The Media

The Lack of Community in the 21st Century

Community is an interesting thing, a moving organism that everybody needs in their life. When I look back at what community used to mean, it’s nothing like what we have nowadays - if we can even call this a community. Now, it’s almost like that sense of community was completely replaced with a sense of alienation and quiet desperation.

In the past, a community meant a small tribe of about 150 people that lived together, fought together, and succeeded or failed together. Everybody knew everybody. In certain parts of the world that type of community is still in place but that’s not the norm.

If you look at big cities like New York or Los Angeles with as much as 8M people, there’s no way you can have that same sense of community. You can have local communities but, even those get increasingly harder to come by. On top of that, you get a virus like COVID-19 that puts a distance of two meters between people, prohibits hugs and smiles and you can say “bye, bye” to community.

Real-life Communities

If you’re a kid, you probably have a decent sense of community. You’re part of a school, seeing the same people every day, and doing activities together - only as long as you’re not a misfit, like so many. But, once you “level up” in life you get less and less of that.

College can be alright unless you live in first-world nations and indulge in a political war with others. Nevertheless, there are plenty of student organizations you can join and have some sort of community sense.

But, once you enter the real world and get a job, your focus shifts. After the 9-to-5 you’ve got no time, and no energy to volunteer and make a change locally - I don’t. You pretty much have your friends and maybe coworkers. If you hate your job like so many, having a community focused around your work becomes less of an option.

That’s when you’re left all alone. If you’re not socially active either, you can even say goodbye to friends and going out. And the madness starts, this is how you get mental illness and acts of terrible cruelty against others. Loneliness, frustration, anger, and self-loathing - the perfect recipe for a chaotic society.

Politics and The Media

Politics and the media don’t help either. They are the main discourse channel that everybody’s subscribed to, or at least aware of. When you have 250M subscribers (roughly the US population over 14 yo), you can tell them anything you want.

If you decide to talk about love, happiness, and other feel-good stuff, that’s what you’re going to see manifested in the world. But when you talk about hate and divide all day, there’s no way you’re going to have a united country with healthy people.

The US is pretty much divided into two right now, the left and the right, democrats, and republicans. Half of the country hates the other half, or at least that’s what you see when you turn on the TV. There are a lot more reasonable people that don’t care about your political affiliation as long as you’re a good human but they are not featured on the telly.

Regardless if you follow the TV, YouTube, Newspapers, or good-old Twitter discourse, most opinions that get brought up to the top are the extreme ones. Those are the ones that get the eyeballs. You don’t hear about the everyday man but you do hear about the social justice warriors that hate the patriarchy, and the rednecks that hate the gays.

This is not what most people believe but that’s what they feature. When you do this, you paint a biased picture, regardless if you’re CNN, FoxNews, NYtimes, or even damn Buzzfeed. You feature the most radical examples so you can promote your narrative to shame the other political party. This creates a mob mentality that paints a chaotic picture, eradicating any sense of community and making people feel even more alienated.

Don’t Play Their Game

Mass channels of communication will only cripple down people and give them a grim view of the world. We all know that classic television is crooked but YouTube isn’t much better either. The more I look at YouTube, the more I notice its similarities with traditional media. Yeah, it’s a free space where you can share your ideas until it’s not.

People get “canceled” and censored by the mob every day. You say the wrong words and you’re gone. And if you don’t get deleted by YouTube, you self-censor yourself, you tone down your ideas only to preserve the little ad money you get - if any.

The way I see it, the only choice is to stop playing the game. People are not inherently evil, and communities are hugely needed in our modern society. There’s a documentary, “Happy People: A Year in the Taiga” - these folks live in the harshest conditions, without media and political bullshit. But, they live the happiest lives, with no mental illness and that sort of issues. Maybe we should try to be more like them.