The Irony of Sociability

It is a well-known fact that humans are social creatures - even the least social among us search for some company sometimes or suffer from loneliness if they don’t find any. Our entire society is also based on our sociability, as well as our history and potentially even our evolution. Sociability might be the key characteristics that makes us so successful as a species – it is the ability to help each other and cooperate with others on tasks that a single person could never do on their own. Already in the stone age an entire group of cooperating hunters was required for tasks like hunting a mammoth down.  This was also the main reason humans lived in communities, first in small tribes, later on in villages and nowadays even in huge, multi-million cities.

In the developed world, most people live in cities now which are larger than ever before. The size of our communities has multiplied by a factor of thousands, sometimes perhaps even millions, which has also led us to a huge and rapid progress in every area of our lives, from technology to construction and art. At the same time, the huge number of people means that we must have a more social life than ever before, interacting with more people, meaning that we should also have a chance to connect and become friends with more people than before. However, it feels as if the opposite was happening – in those large communities there is an ever-increasing number of lonely people, especially elderly. Despite the huge crowds of people around us we are more alone than we perhaps ever were.

I have lived in the same apartment in Ljubljana for the last seven years. The apartment is on the twelfth floor of a block of flats. I can hear many of our neighbours every day, how they are listening to music, hovering, chatting with friends or arguing with their family, and through my window I can smell their cigarette smoke and their lunch, especially when they are cooking fish. Yet, I cannot tell you the surname of a single family in our corridor and I am not even sure I can recognise all of them by sight. Even though we live so extremely close to each other, often too close, we are all closed in our own holes and are rushing through our lives to the extent that we could not really care less for these people physically so close to us, unless they disturb us with their activities.

In the cities, we are more exposed to meet new people – in the shops, on the street, at events, everywhere we go really. However, all of these interactions are rather meaningless and last only for a few moments, after which we forget that we had ever met that person. The chances of meeting again are very low and the time pressure of our life also prevents us from chatting long enough with most of them to establish a relationship on a personal level. Thus, there interactions only tire us out to a certain extent with the requirement to be kind and polite to everyone and to do the same small talk over and over again. Perhaps we lose too much energy through this to form more meaningful bonds with others, and at the same time it can be hard sometimes to switch from general small talk to more personal conversations which lead somewhere in a relationship. I find that especially difficult in England, where everyone is so polite that I’m often afraid of asking them something more personal just from fear of being rude.

With my family we are moving to a house nearby to get away from all the noise from our neighbours. The house is semi-detached and in a densely-build street, but my parents are still hoping for more peace and quiet there. If we didn’t need all the services of the city like the public transport, the closeness to work, shops, health centre etc., we would move somewhere far from the madding crowd in the middle of a forest where there would be perfect peace with no people nearby. I am not sure what it is that makes us look for so much peace with little socialising, whether it is the crowdedness in the cities with little personal space and no nature to relax in, or our fast pace of life. I have read an article in Slovene magazine Mladina recently about how we Slovenes typically invest a lot into our real estates, our homes, that we think will be where we can create our little paradise. But we always forget the neighbours in our dreams, who don’t act according to the plan of our paradise and therefore annoy us and destroy everything. Then we practise our national sport of arguing with neighbours, until we invest more or move to a different place where we believe we won’t have any neighbour problems any more (and then everything of course just repeats).

When we live in our houses and flats, locked up in our walls and on our piece of land, we lose the feeling of a wider community, except for the narrowest community such as family. What I mean with that is that we don’t have any stronger connections with the people living next to us and we don’t care to create them. These connections would enable us to help and care for each other, have close friends we can trust just next door. Even though some friendships can be very close and very strong even over a large distance, most work better if you can see people more regularly, and a good friend nearby will always be able to help and support you more than an equally good one from far away. Despite all the technology physical distance still exists. Thus, through not building a community and instead having close friends living away from us, we inevitably lose some intensity on different parts of a spectrum of a friendship.

Having lived with a couple of friends together at university, I have experienced how the dynamics of these friendships is completely different than of others where you don’t share a house. With my friends, we formed a community where you cannot avoid sharing what’s going on in your life with others, whether you want it or not (even when you don’t want to share something, friends will notice it because you won’t be hanging out with them). At the same time, you are bound to get to know them more intimately – what they eat and cook, when they take a shower, how tidy they are etc… It creates a sort of a community to a certain extent resembling a family, especially as you also have to take care of the house together.

A similar system to this seem to be off-grid communities. I have never visited any, but I have read about them and a friend of mine visited one as well. They are basically communities of people living somewhere away from civilisation. They make their living mostly from agriculture and other activities in nature, and the point is that they are on one hand isolated from the madness of our normal 21^st century lives, and on the other hand the people on the community are very closely connected with each other. My friend said that they are very welcoming and can feel like a large family. Aren’t these communities kind of similar to the ones in which humans used to live for millennia, before large cities started to grow? The idea sounds very idyllic, peaceful and happy for me, although I don’t think I would give up the chance of a more interesting life full of challenges at work and in studies in the city for such simple happiness. Maybe that’s very foolish of me.