If You Want a Village, You Have to be a Villager
“If you want a village, you have to be a villager.”
This statement has ignited online discourse amongst Gen Z, discussing questions about what we owe each other and the general isolation many are feeling. The sentiment that Gen Z is lonely isn’t just a feeling, the data supports it. It then follows that Gen Z is seeking answers for that loneliness, believing that cultivating a metaphorical village consisting of friends, family, neighbors, and more is the solution. Building, maintaining, and fostering your village’s growth by being a contributing villager would certainly help you feel connected, fulfilled, and important to your community. Still, doing so is no easy task and takes great effort. Additionally, there are various forces that exist which make it even more difficult. How do we effectively build our villages? What can we do as individuals to cultivate our relationships, turning them into a village, and what systemic problems make building our villages harder, leading to the lack of community we feel today?
Building Your Village
Many of us want to be a part of a community, to feel cared for and looked after, and to have people we can rely on. In order to get there we have to be good villagers ourselves. On TikTok, the discussions around this topic are diverse and thought-provoking. Videos range from individual actions we can take to whole mindset shifts we must make. According to TikTok creator Rachel Lovely, creating your village can look like picking up a friend from the airport, sharing baking ingredients with a neighbor, or letting someone in your community borrow sporting equipment. Another creator named Haley Jo says it can be helping a sick friend, sharing memberships or tools, or showing up to events. That is helping someone else's village.
These are done without expecting anything in return and without keeping score; you do these things because they make someone’s life easier. Friendships and relationships are ongoing processes, they do not stay at a given point forever. Thus, you must continue to foster them. It doesn’t matter if you’ve watered a plant a week ago, it still needs to be watered again. While relationships are not tit-for-tat, it is important to reciprocate actions done for you back to others; a relationship of only receiving will not last long or deepen. At the same time, you must be willing to ask and receive help yourself, to be vulnerable with your village. The first step in creating an effective village is recognizing that you need other people. A mindset of being able to do everything yourself and not relying on anyone else is antithetical to building a village.
Gen Z has a complex relationship with self-care and therapy. They are largely respectful of other’s boundaries or of decisions of friends to stay in. However, the proliferation of therapy-speak has had negative consequences and blurred the lines between self-care and narcissism. Boundaries may be weaponized against others, or made so rigid they close themselves off from those around them. Sometimes you’ll have to overcome a little social anxiety to show up for your friends. Inconvenience and annoyance are potential costs for community, and loneliness will be the price you pay for a life of convenience. Having friends means doing things you sometimes don’t feel like doing. Don’t let that stop you from building your village. According to a user on X named Coco, some people believe that anything that drains you is not meant for you. However, friends and community won’t always give you energy, and that’s okay.
In addition to the material actions we can take to build a village, there must also be changes we make to our outlook when it comes to being of service to others. First, we must acknowledge that the systems we live under promote hyperindividualism and independence. To combat that, reject the temptation to be conspiratorial and assume people will take advantage of us if we are a great villager. In fact, unconditionally being a good villager can help break the negative feedback loop of our system which incentivizes selfish behavior and can lead to others following in your footsteps.
Gen Z is born and raised on the internet. However, that is not where the village is. It isn’t all within the four walls of your home either. The village is happening outside. Touching grass is essential; we must experience the things happening in our communities and with our friends. Having a village means showing up physically for people in the real world.
Lonely By Design
Gen Z’s yearning for what a “village” represents is a result of the material conditions they have experienced throughout their lives. While shifts in personal mindset can help foster a sense of community, the conditions that encourage individualism remain ever-present. Through neoliberal culture and policy, the commodification of love under capitalism, and the alienation of working life, American society has been structured in a way that produces loneliness by design.
The neoliberal policies of the last 40 years have defunded social institutions like community centers and schools, eliminating after-school programs. Cuts to public health institutions have removed places where loneliness and other health issues could have been treated.
Briefly zooming out from loneliness specifically, how many other mental health issues could we solve for millions of people if they didn’t have to navigate the bureaucratic means-tested program maze and we instead distributed food freely? How many health issues could be prevented if we used homes that sit empty to house people instead of holding onto them until they turn a profit? How many would have their anxiety lessened if they didn’t have to rely on an old car that keeps breaking down and they instead had access to a robust, well-funded transit network? According to Project MUSE, Neoliberal policy has systematically eliminated spaces where people used to be able to meet others and socialize. Additionally, this implementation has omitted policies that would improve people’s wellbeing and, in turn, their mental health.
The policy has to be justified somehow. With something so ostensibly bad for the general population, we have to be convinced that what our government is doing is actually correct. This is the role of neoliberal culture and rhetoric. It is a culture which values self-reliance and rugged individualism. One which blames the downtrodden for their problems and has a disdain for the poor and unfortunate. Proponents of neoliberalism, often billionaires in an effort to justify their unfathomable wealth, repeat the lie of meritocracy. Despite the fact that we can accurately predict a baby’s future salary with just the zip code of where they were born, their race, and their gender.
This conditioning may help explain why some members of Gen Z, a generation that broadly supports a wide range of social causes, can come to believe on an individual level that they owe nothing to anyone, a mindset that can directly contribute to social isolation.
The culture and policies of neoliberal capitalism have no doubt been a key driver in our current commodification of love. Love is a warm embrace: a hug or a kiss. It is a reminder that we aren’t alone; yet, it has become harder to find. Due to policies which have eliminated third spaces through defunding public institutions, combined with the chronically online culture Gen Z has been raised under, the primary space Gen Z looks for love is on for-profit dating apps. These apps are incentivized to keep their customers engaged, swiping forever, instead of helping you find someone that makes you delete the app. According to Hims, among those of Gen-Z finding partners, 82% are doing so in person. The disappearance of public spaces, driven by austerity policies, will only make it harder for Gen Z to find companionship.
Isolation of Modern Labor
Alienation in our working lives plays a vital role in producing this feeling of isolation. For many workers, they have little to no connection to the end product of their work. In the service industry, workers who are otherwise complex and emotional beings are reduced to someone meant only to serve or do things for others. You are almost less of a person. You are constantly dehumanized. This is why many workers relate to feeling like a cog in a machine. Additionally, coworkers are competition, making it difficult to build relationships of real depth despite spending the vast majority of your time in a week with them. Add that with bosses' inherent opposing interests to their employees, and work becomes a place we show up to make sure we can put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads, with little room for human connection.
Real life is, of course, not this black and white. Many have jobs that they enjoy which bring them fulfillment. We can make friends at our jobs and our boss could be a great person. But the built in competitive element of labor under capitalism puts a strain on these relationships; that is the problem and what leads to alienation. The way our economy is organized runs against our natural drive to socialize. While not making it impossible, this manner of production exacerbates the loneliness crisis.
When society is organized around maximizing profits instead of toward maximizing people’s well-being, mental health will inevitably suffer. The concoction of capitalism materially isolating us from work, nature, each other, and ourselves with the neoliberal emphasis on being alone in our personal responsibilities and their policies that leave us solitary, creates a recipe for the loneliness that Gen Z is working to break away from.
Beyond Individualism
Taking initiative through individual action to build your “village” is a critical shield against succumbing to the material conditions that push us toward isolation. Maintaining your health, fostering fulfilling social relationships, and being politically active in your local community are actions that, when combined, create a bulwark against the potential nihilism that can creep in and prevent us from building a village at all. We must do our part in cultivating a communal mindset among the people we are close to or interact with regularly. It is positive if more people support ideas like Medicare for All or believe that school children should receive free meals. But that matters little if neoliberal policymakers are incentivized to adhere to the whims of the private insurance industry or refuse to fund social programs. They do this while spreading a message that tells us we should not be asking for anything in the first place.
As long as the structure of our society is determined by profit-maximizing with a culture of hyperindividualism, many will be alienated from their environment and relationships. These material conditions that bring about the loneliness and isolation Gen Z is fighting against will persist in perpetuity leaving many unable to build their village.
In the words of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for Gen Z, it may be time to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”