The Generational Urge to Move into a Commune
We want the city and the village at the same time.
How do we find community as adults?
This question has surfaced amidst a variety of my social circles over the past several years, ranging across different cities, cultures, and ages, all sharing the same sentiment: it is difficult to develop meaningful connections with people once we are no longer kids, which often translates to: people with less time than before.
For most of my life, I thought I knew the answer: be outgoing, host all the time, invite everyone to everything, and always say “yes.” The strategy yielded a bright harvest: I have been fortunate to know a surplus of friends in every setting I have ever lived (or traveled). I am blessed to not be able to count the number of people I consider my family on my fingers. And yet, a feeling of hunger still arises when I think about the word “community.” Not because I believe I lack it in whole, but because the wholeness that I crave—community to the extent that I wish we could experience it—is not something that is embedded into the everyday structure of adult life.
The kind of community I dream about looks like this: a group of people who know each other to the core, who share similar values, who hail from diverse backgrounds, who aspire toward shared goals, who are committed to the area they live in and—most importantly—who see each other out of habit, out of the design of their daily lives. I crave community as a living, dynamic force that exists beyond the efforts of a single person. Where each person knows they will see each other, not because they calendarized an hour to do so two weeks before, but because seeing one another is a built-in rhythm, guaranteed by the collective interest: a natural, coveted part of life, as opposed to something we manage and schedule.
The desire to belong to a group—a living community—is an animal urge. Social connection has always been central to the health and evolution of our species. For most of human history, people lived in tightly knit groups—extended families, tribes, villages—where daily survival required collaboration and time spent together. Friendship, in those contexts, was not generated or planned; it was a byproduct of shared labor, mutual care, and physical proximity.
This kind of cohesion was not accidental, it was structural. Before industrialization, communities were interwoven by design. People worked near their homes, often in agricultural or domestic settings. Meals were shared, child-rearing was communal, and the boundaries between work, leisure, and rest were porous. But with the rise of industrial capitalism came a reorganization of time and space: work moved out of the home and into factories; time became standardized and segmented; the laboring body was separated from the social, resting one. As historian E.P. Thompson writes in Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism (1967), the shift to clock time—central to the advancement of capital productivity—disrupted pre-industrial rhythms of life, replacing communal flexibility with individualized scheduling.
The consequences of industrialization are still with us. In the U.S. today, adults spend significantly less time with other people than in previous decades. According to the American Time Use Survey, people spent just four hours a week with friends in 2021, down from six and a half hours in 2014—a 37% decline in less than a decade (source). While the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated isolation, it did not invent it. Over the past several decades, we have experienced a long, slow unraveling of social closeness, one that bears great consequence. Research shows that loneliness increases the risk of premature death, heart disease and stroke. In other words: social health is mental health, mental health is physical health.
It is no wonder, then, that the desire to return to the social benefits of “the village” is a shared sentiment amongst the majority of my friends—albeit, a modern, urbanized version of the village. We want the village but with better lighting, more space for self-actualization, and the option to close the door: individual apartments clustered on a shared property with courtyards, kitchens, and living rooms designed for gathering. This modern fantasy of the village is, in many ways, the capitalist mind yearning for old times, the tension between the village boy and the knowledge worker. Capitalism has conditioned us to crave autonomy, to value ownership, to want “our own” of everything—our own space, our own careers, our own things. And yet, beneath that desire for independence is the undying need to be surrounded by people who know us. At our core, we are interdependent beings.
Perhaps the closest thing we had to the village was the school. School is a social structure that guarantees the conditions most conducive to belonging: repeated exposure to the same people, a shared experience (learning, growing, surviving), and the freedom to exercise spontaneity and pass idle time. A 2018 study by Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas found that it takes about 50 hours to move from acquaintance to casual friend, 90 hours to become real friends, and over 200 hours to become close friends—and that leisure time, not work or task-based time, is the most effective type of interaction. As students without a rigid 9-to-5 schedule, we could hang out for 200 hours. We could linger. We could get close. Not through planning, but proximity.
When we graduate to working adulthood, that design most often disappears. The structure shifts from social to personal. Our time becomes increasingly privatized: it is allocated to the tasks required to maintain our own lives—working, eating, cleaning, resting, exercising. The remaining time outside of work is often consumed by whatever will help us feel a little more sane, a little less tired. Sometimes that’s socializing. Sometimes it’s a hobby. Sometimes it’s being alone. If we break it down mathematically—assuming we sleep a healthy amount (8 hours), work full time (8 hours), embark on a commute (1 hour), make ourselves food (1 hour), exercise (1 hour), spend time getting ready (30 minutes) and time winding down (30 minutes)—we’re left with four discretionary hours each day, at best.
If we cannot return to pre-industrial village life or move into an urbanized commune, what can we do?
As always, we can do the best with what we have. If we understand the social challenges of the realities we live in (late-stage capitalism, transnationalism), we can begin to account for them. We can care for our social health the same way we care for our physical health through small, intentional choices that sprout a sense of community in our everyday lives—organizing, showing up, committing to a place. Though the answer is trite, it is easily forgotten, especially when the word community has become a trend of its own, much like happiness, marketed as an external experience that one must attain, attract or—in the worst cases—purchase via a monthly membership to a club, app or event series.
I started this written meditation with a simple question: How do we find community as adults? As I have written around the thought, I realize that the answer may reside in a rewording of the question itself. Instead of asking How do we find community?, we ought to ask: How do we form it?
The reality is that community is not something we find, it is something we create. Through effort, ritual, and a willingness to organize. Through building our own villages in the context of modern life: dinner parties, open invitations, group classes, a generous use of public space, spontaneous visits to friends nearby and calling those far away. While our societies may not be designed for the kind of community we once knew, we can create our own beds of community by acting as organizers for each other.
When I think about life’s big questions, I often think about my mother. Her closest friends live hundreds and thousands of miles away. Her job as a counselor was tiring and endless. Yet community was never something she appeared to lack. Throughout her career she built loving relationships with colleagues and students alike. She texts as if it were an olympic sport, sharing every little detail of the day’s story with those she holds dear. And the majority of her hobbies yield things to be shared: vegetables from the garden, figurines made from wine corks, bottles of jam gifted to friends and family.
Earlier, I deduced our community dilemma from the discretionary hours an average working adult has left in a day. When I picture my mother, however, the limits of those hours do not seem fateful. Perhaps attempting to quantify our ability to form community is antithetical, for community as a living, dynamic force came long before the clock. It arose between people living in the world, not those optimizing their lives. And it continues to arise between those who host, those who ask, those who call and those who arrive. Those who consider, time and time again, that all that truly matters is that we are here, together. That time evolves from something measured into something precious as soon as it is shared.
If we all volunteered to form community—across every aspect of our lives—I’d gesture to say that the post-industrial unraveling of social closeness is simply that, an unraveling into raw material, threads with which we weave new shapes of community. New ways of belonging to each other.
We say it is hard to make friends as adults because we want to feel the electricity of friendship more often. When I say we, I mean everyone. We search for community because we want to belong to its bright expanse, to know and be known.
So...Why don’t we? Invite them over. Give them a call. Say yes to the invitation. Place mutual friends together in a room and see what happens. Surround yourself with the same strangers until nothing is strange about anyone. Bring the parts of your personality that exist beyond the stiff format of a workplace into that place—the office or the call—and dare to see those same parts of your coworkers. The more we see each other, the more we feel seen.
The village, so to speak, starts with a villager. ☷
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane
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