Are lonely people the only ones concerned about community?

And other musings on social theory.

Hello Folks,

I spend probably a disproportionate amount of my time these days thinking about loneliness and community. As someone who grew up as an only child in a single-parent household, and then decided to pursue a career in the arts, I think it is safe to say that I have been lonely all my life. Like most storytellers, I turned to my inner worlds because I felt unsatisfied with the world around me. It did not live up to the world inside my head; it did not even come close.

Artistry was enough to keep the loneliness from becoming overbearing, at least for a while. Then, you know, I became a teenager, and social media happened, and everyone was on the internet, and this isolation that might have before felt natural to me was suddenly ostracized and pronounced, on display for all to see. I could look through Snapchat and Instagram and see what social gatherings I had been left out of; I could encounter anonymous online messages reminding me of the fact that my loneliness was directly tied to my lack of popularity and social status. For anyone who has ever been fifteen before, this is not a new story. But like most things at fifteen, it feels like the only story that will ever be.

I’ve written before about landscape and loneliness, and specifically, the way I thought it would all go away for me if I moved to a big city, where I could finally be around people like me. It wasn’t me who was the problem, but the community I was surrounded by. They didn’t get me, and they never would; we were just too fundamentally different. People who shared my interests all lived in big cities like New York and San Francisco, where all the cool people were. It would be impossible to lonely in a place like that, I thought. If I could get there I would find my community. It would be so easy; it would feel so good. It would be everything I had ever been looking for my whole life.

Are you starting to get where this story is going? Yeah. Instead of finding a community, I spent four years in a deep internal crisis about who I was, cycling through personalities, looking for someone who resembled myself within them. Five years ago I was sure I was the loneliest I could ever be. I used to tell myself: you have so much love to give. It just felt like I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to receive it.

Then, one day, it hit me that community wasn’t something I could just sit around and wait for. That in order to find the people who would be able to really know me, I had to know myself first. At seventeen, I loved the idea of being unknowable; at twenty, I just wanted someone to see me. I began writing nonfiction, and I began writing about the South. I realized that the things I valued most in the world— joy, connection, nature— felt at odds with the city I was living in, and that maybe I was wrong to believe this was the only place I could ever be found. I left the country; I went to the woods. I learned to live with people again, in all the best and worst of ways. I realized I didn’t actually enjoy being alone at all (even if I knew periods of isolation were necessary to my creative practice). I began to build a community. I wanted to live like that forever.

And then, you know, we entered a global pandemic, and everyone went inside, and it feels like nothing has ever been the same since. Just me?

I mean, fundamentally, the world is different. Loneliness pre-pandemic had felt for many of us like something under the surface— a thing we felt but often chose not to recognize, pushing it aside in favor of long work days, academic overload, party culture, alcohol and drugs. We had things to ignore it, or suppress it, or make it seem like something that was just part of living in the 21st century. We normalized it. Then the world became vastly far from normal, and we all kept going on as if nothing had changed.

Inside, with all the stimuli removed, it is impossible to keep turning away from yourself, to keep looking outward. But any kind of inner work is often deeply uncomfortable; like artistry, it requires effort and empathy and, sometimes, even pain. It can hurt. It doesn’t slot easily into our capital-driven schedules, into our increasingly-digital world. Often, it requires boredom and solitude and the space to remove things from your life in order to see what is left, and what really matters. It happened, for a lot of people, those who had the privilege to work from home or self-isolate or take online classes, as an inherent consequence of early 2020.

What happened? Did this period of intense isolation lead to self-knowledge, to inner-growth, to the world finally realizing capitalism is at odds with our best interests? Not exactly. For most of us, it just made us more distant. Loneliness pre-pandemic was already cited as an epidemic, but emerging out of it, more than half of U.S. adults consider themselves lonely (58%, a seven-percentage-point increase from 2018).

As an adult, I’m increasingly concerned with loneliness and community-building. Some days, it feels like it is all I think about. The potential communities around me, and the ways in which they could be brought together. The ways in which it feels so often like modern society fails us, and how it feels like the structures of community are at odds with the methods of living required for day-to-day survival. When I used to work at summer camp, every day I looked at a plaque hanging in the dining hall, which said that the camp “challenged campers and staff to live in harmony with nature and each other.” That resonated so deeply for me back then. Now I can’t help but wonder if we live in harmony with anything at all.

Folklorist Dorothy Noyes describes community as a social performance that reinforces one’s social base, noting that “middle class people have the least incentive and opportunity to form dense multiplex networks.” I think this argument extends to surburbia, as well; in urban and rural areas, people are brought together by necessity. In urban spaces, you cannot escape your neighbors; in rural spaces you cannot survive without them. Whether it is through shared walls, community gardens, town squares, marketplaces, or solo-standing restaurants, people are brought together by their very conditions for life. That doesn’t mean that loneliness doesn’t exist; I’ll attest myself to the strange experience of feeling at the peak of loneliness while being in the midst of thousands of people (I think it has something to do with the constant surrounding of people, none of whom know you at all, though that’s a post for another time). It just means that it becomes impossible to live your life entirely in isolation.

But for today’s suburban middle class, it is very possible to live your entire life in solitude. If you can afford to live alone, you can, in fact, go entire days without speaking to other humans. You can work from home, or drive your car into the office, where you might sit at your desk with headphones on, or else in your cubicle, before you drive back to your house at the end of the day. You might stop for groceries and use self-checkout. You might pick up takeout that you ordered through the internet, or you might use an app to have it delivered directly to your door. You might go to the gym and do your workout routine and maybe even shower there without speaking to another person. You might go home to continue to work, or you might turn off the “bad screen” of emails and Slack and turn on the “good screen” of Netflix and Instagram. Even if you go home to a partner, a family, a roommate, you might still follow a routine like this. It’s not uncommon; in fact, for many of us, I would say it’s become the norm.

Social theorists talk about a “world of limited good”, which reinforces the conception that community is a social contract for mutual aid, one whose very prospect is threatened by any breach of that social contract, including individual efforts of one to advance their own interests, which are seen as coming at the expense of others.

To apply this theory to community: what if connection and love and joy are also fixed things? What if there is only so much to go around? What if the only people concerned with community building are people like me, the lonely ones, the ones who feel they have never truly had a place to belong? Indeed, it often seems these days that no one else is haunted by these questions the way I am. In my most existential moments, I have texted friends: well, some of us are just meant to be alone forever. Not everybody gets to have a happy ending.

Other people, I’ve always thought, make it look so easy. Friends. Relationships. Conditions of living in the world. I can’t help but think, sometimes, that perhaps these are finite resources, that I should just give up on possessing them. Loneliness is what it means to be an artist; creation is what comes out of that void. But what if creation could be the thing that brings us together? It’s clear, based on statistics alone, that I am not, in fact, the only one who feels this way; I’m part of the majority now, for better or for worse. We are all lonely. We are all struggling. Artistry allows us to find one another somewhere in that empty, wandering space and build something new together.

I practiced an exercise recently that told me to write out my dream career bio, and think of that as a blueprint for my life. It’s been great, and really stuck with me, but out of all the imagined accolades included, it was the last sentence that really stood out to me as the thing I value most in my life: she lives with her partner in the mountains of North Carolina, where they host resident artists to work on public folklore projects.

That’s not my life, now, obviously. But it is the vision of the life I truly want to live, one where artistry brings people together to create something new, something different, something beautiful. It’s one where collaboration goes hand-in-hand with community, and I am somewhere at the middle of it. It’s what Good Folk does for me, and what I hope it will begin to do for you. Providing solace. Bringing you company. Letting you know that you aren’t alone.

Even if I am the only one this worried about community, and what its future looks like, I’m happy to be here. I’m happy that my life’s work has shifted to this, instead of the wallowing, self-absorbed “art” I used to think I was making. I’m happy to have lived through all those versions of myself, too, though, just as I am happy for the periods of intense isolation my life has brought. In culmination, they have allowed me to get at some deeper truth within myself, and to uncover an unshakeable sense of identity there within it. I wouldn’t trade that, no matter how uncomfortable it was to get here.

I’ll leave you with the words of musician John Grant in The Creative Independent’s Sober 21 zine, which I have been devouring the last few weeks, and is a project which I could— and probably will, at some point— write an entire newsletter about. He’s referring to sobriety, but I think it’s wisdom that applies to the notion of showing up, paying attention, and not tuning out the lonely feelings inside of you, as well (so much so that I printed it out and taped it on my wall as a daily reminder of the kind of artist I want to be).

“There is nothing like being totally awake and aware in a world that doesn’t need any help from me to be stranger than fiction. My powers of observation, vulnerability (which I personally saw as a liability and something to be destroyed no matter what the cost) and ability to be aware of myself, others, and what is going on in the world around me on a daily basis — as well as awareness of who I am at my core — are what make me the artist I am and am continuing to become.”

I’m grateful for you, always, and I’m happy to have you here.

— Spencer

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FIVE THINGS THAT BROUGHT ME JOY THIS WEEK

Welcome to a new addendum for the weekly post. We do resource roundups every Friday, but I try to keep those focused on Southern and rural artists as much as possible. That being said, I do consume things beyond just Southern folklore (shocking, I know!). Starting today, I will be including five things that brought me joy at the end of each newsletter. I invite you to contribute your own in the comments.

1. New music from The Front Bottoms, a band I have loved since high school. This really sums up the transition to adulthood well, I think.

2. The new A League of Their Own show on Amazon Prime, which I devoured in all of three days. I’ve worked with Abbi Jacobson a few times over the years, and it’s so cool to see her flourish as a creator in this role. Talk about an amazing career trajectory, and also just an all-around wonderful human.

3. BBC Radio 1’s Relax station, which I have been a devotee to for years and which is the only thing helping my transition back into an academic schedule.

4. My Lucy Dacus “Music for Hot People” shirt, which I wore three days in a row this weekend. Nothing like watching men try to figure out what it means in the checkout line. Also, shout-out to the girl in the Phoebe Bridgers shirt I had a lovely moment with when we crossed the street at opposite times. Boygenius forever.

5. The Califia Farms cookie butter almond milk coffee creamer. If I recommend one thing to you this week, let it be this.

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