the state of the loneliness epidemic

Table of Contents

• cohousing as a return to a friendly neighborhood

• how to build community in your neighborhood when i …

• personal updates - substack, subscribers, spring

hello hello!

last week I had the pleasure of meeting with Elli, the U.S. Executive Director of Sikhona Refuge Center, which is seeking to transition towards an ecovillage model.

Elli asked me a question I hadn’t heard in a little while: “What made you interested in intentional communities in the first place?”

Growing up deep in D.C.’s suburbia, loneliness was as thick and palpable around us as the humidity (which sat around 98%). (it really is a (former) swamp).

I saw isolation in my peers at school, almost all of whom had two full-time working parents who came home exhausted at the end of the day. It was clear in the parents, too, when supporting their kids meant spending hours in the car ferrying them to basketball practices and clarinet lessons, instead of family game nights.

Suburbia is lonely — for all of us.

cohousing as a return to a friendly neighborhood

I was watching a local folk musician play guitar at a gathering in Highland Crossing Cohousing in the suburbs of Denver, CO when Stu pulled me aside to do an interview. We sat on round, black metal tables with built in benches, the kind I associate with playgrounds and poolsides. I squinted to scrawl notes in the fading natural light.

Stu highlighted to me that it’s not just that many American neighborhoods don’t have community infrastructure, like third spaces where people can gather. There’s an active friction and discomfort around community.

A number of my interviewees echoed the sentiment that it seemed easier to create community with their neighbors during their childhoods than it is now. They spoke of friendly, ‘family neighborhoods’ of the ‘60s.

This conversation is mostly about American suburbia. Even though the suburban housing model has existed for over half a century now, Americans are experiencing heightened loneliness and isolation in recent decades, so our housing can’t entirely be to blame. Of course, this is an incredibly complicated topic, but here’s one piece of it.

Stu pointed out an important other factor — intention. Community only exists, a sense of being a real neighbor only exists, among people who share that same intention. For Stu and his family, they had to move to a co-housing community to find that.

how to build community in your neighborhood when it feels hard

so a key question becomes, how can we find people with similar intentions?

• one thing i’m trying this year is giving my neighbors our house’s holiday card, with a friendly note attached, inviting them to reach out and possibly to come over for tea! this gives people options for how much they want to engage - they could make plans with us, send a friendly text, or just pretend they never received it, depending on their preference. to make it less intimidating, they also get to see a friendly face on the card, and can choose how to respond in the peace of their homes, instead of getting a sudden knock on the door

These are the key pieces of finding people with shared community intentions:

1. Find ways to reach out that don’t imply obligations or expectations, just offers.

2. Give people multiple ways or levels to engage with you socially — this also lets you gauge how interested they are in sharing this community orientation

3. Start with some common topic or interest. If you’re neighbors, it could be plants or pets or weather.

4. Start small and scale outwards. If you just make two or three connections, and the next time they each bring a friend, you have a group going already!

personal & work updates

if you missed last week’s newsletter, we now have paid subscription options! these really help support my work & make this possible for me — thank you so much to everyone who joined.

art print giveaway coming soon for our paid subscribers :)

we also grew this newsletter community by 33 new people in january — hi, new people!

oh, and you can now follow this newsletter on substack! i’m @jasperlydon on there. check it out there if you’d like to get smaller update notes, read this in an app format, and join a group chat forum.

last weekend marked the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. we’re halfway to spring. stay warm out there <3

much love,

jasper