Toward togetherness
The last five years have seen a growing movement toward community—people from all walks of life coming together in search of belonging, connection, and happiness.
And they’re finding it. We’re finding it—together. When you look at any community centric movement, be it a run club, a community garden or wellness club, there’s this palpable hum. Even looking from the outside you can feel the aliveness coursing through the individuals and the whole—one that reflects both a sense of inspiration, and a collective exhale. It’s as if we’re discovering in each other what we’ve long struggled to create alone, realising that maybe this was never meant to be an individual pursuit.
And in that realisation, we’re finding ease.
In many ways this shouldn’t surprise us. We’ve come from tribes and fires and those ancient and biological tendencies remain deeply ingrained—we yearn for togetherness. We want to stand hand-in-hand, know our neighbours and engage in spacious, meaningful conversations. In the long history of human kind it’s only recently that the pursuit of happiness, and wellbeing, and wealth, have become individual endeavours. We now find ourselves living the fragmentation of that way of being—a society that is more tired, disconnected, and uninspired than ever before, despite being better resourced than any of our predecessors.
How did we get here? Is this the best we’ve got? Surely there’s a better way?
There is, and we’re stumbling our way there by simply paying closer attention to that innate reaching for togetherness.
However impressive our evolution and insatiable appetite for progress, the answer to our epidemic of burnout, fatigue and loneliness isn’t in the remarkably imaginative mind of some Silicone Valley prodigy—it’s in our roots, in our history.
This experience might feel widespread, but it’s actually unique to parts of the western world. And we don’t have to look far to find evidence supporting a new (old) way of being.
Take Finland, Denmark, and Norway—consistently ranked as the happiest countries in the world by the World Happiness Report. Many people have tried to decipher what gives these countries perpetual bragging rights at the top of the happiness tables, and the one factor that consistently stands out is their commitment to community.
In Denmark, they call this samfundssind—loosely translated as a sense of community-mindedness. It closely resembles ubuntu—the popularised African philosophy emphasising interconnectedness, often expressed as ‘I am because we are’. In Pali, the ancient language of Theravāda Buddhism, there’s muditā—it’s closest English translation being sympathetic joy, ‘in your joy, I find my own’.
Look deep enough into many indigenous or historical cultures, and you’ll find similar concepts. While the language and expression may differ, the underlying message is the same—togetherness.
Even modern science backs this up: community and relationships are repeatedly shown to be at the heart of longevity and happiness.
So, what do we do?
We simply start with what we can, and gradually expand from there.
The opportunity is in practicing the future we hope to one day exist in—in practicing togetherness in the seemingly trivial moments of our day. The grandest of steps toward this might be reinstating meals as a sacred moment of connection, while the smallest may be an endearing hello or smile as we pass someone on our morning walk. Perhaps the hardest of steps are being present enough to listen more than we talk, sitting in circles more than hierarchies and finding ways to move out of our own mind and into the shoes of another.
If enough of us actively practice the future we hope to exist in, we might just find ourselves there. As Angela Davis said ‘you have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.’
Words by Jessie Bice.