The problem of belonging

I am not sure if this is a part of our generation, or our phase of our generation's life, but I think we have an interesting problem of belonging. We struggle to make connections with our direct community (that is, those linked to us through spacial relations - live close by, work with us, so on).

For example, sara and I typically go to one church where we don't know anyone and no one knows us. At the start some people came up and met us, asked for our numbers, and said we should have dinner together an what not. At first this sounded great - they were nice and maybe we could be friends. Turns out this didn't happen and I think they generally were nice people, but they were looking to create a welcoming church and not looking to make friends. After all, I am sure they already had some. Somewhere.

In addition to this we go (kind of) to this home bible study that is from a different church. There we don't really fit in too well with the people, but thought they must be cool because the church is interested in doing cool things (like be active in their community). Here, too, we seem to be unable to make connections.

All of this being said, we are almost completely unattached to the things that we are a 'part' of. We are freeloaders of the things they have to offer. We use their chairs for church, we use their cool/warm building as we listen to them talk/sing during the services - we sap vitality by not being actively engaged members. Our mere inactive presence makes, however small the amount, their general vitality decrease.

Three interesting things likely play into this. One, older generations tend to have a smaller radius of interaction. That is, they tend to shop closer to their home, have friends closer to their home, go to church closer to their home, and so on. Sometimes this difference is a little bit less pronounced in suburban places because everyone is a bit less concentrated in what they do. But, all in all, we tend to look less around us for the things we need. Second, we are much more likely to have multi-layered relationships to things. The first thing that I think of is church. It used to be that you went to one church, were committed to that church, and were active in that church. It is a bit more common now to go to different churches for different things and to be generally less involved in all of them. Naturally this leads to a decrease in general community and connectedness.

Third is the rule of homophily. People tend to seek out and relate to people similar to their self. When thrust into a situation where there are fewer people who are like you, you will likely interact and relate to them less. Maybe this also plays into why crazy people like us go to different church things with different churches and are generally still not involved. An interacting issue that plays into this also is the evolution of communication. It used to be that if you wanted any kind of interaction you would have to accept an increased number of deviations from your ideal 'type' of person to talk to (again, we like those like us). But now with cell phones, video chat, email, text messaging, facebook, and so on, we are able to cling to more homophilous relationships - even when those relationships are not ideal as far as spacial considerations go. We don't know our neighbors, but we sure do enjoy facebook-stalking people we have not talked to in years (some people probably do this more than others, but you know what I am saying).

All of this being said, many of us have a problem of belonging. It seems like I have heard more of my friends talk about not knowing many people or not having friends more lately and it just got me to thinking a bit. I hope that we all can become more 'embedded' in our communities (in a spacial sense), but I am a bit skeptical that this will ever happen to the extent that our parents have experienced. Or maybe some of our parents don't have it either and we just complain more. Who knows, but belonging seems to be so much harder work now than it used to be...

And nice work if you made it this far. :)