Where Can You Build Up Your Neighborhood?

The small sociability that supports big asks

I’m at Notre Dame this week for the True Genius conference on The Mission of Women in Church and Culture. If you’re attending, and you’re an Other Feminisms reader, say hi! I’ll have one early proof copy of The Dignity of Dependence that I’ll be raffling off for an attendee. And… very soon, I’ll have one for a drawing for Other Feminisms readers far and wide. For everyone else, there’s October.

A third place should be within scooter distance

Just before midnight, I got a text that the mom who watches my three-year-old two times a week had a kid throwing up. I was stuck—I didn’t want the stomach bug exposure, but I had a big meeting right when half-day preschool was letting out.

I’m lucky (and a little strategic) in my community. I was able to ask another mom in the class if she could take my daughter home with her for a lunch playdate and I’d come by afterwards. It’s not the first time she’s said yes. I still haven’t done any favor as large for her.

I moved to my current neighborhood because it is, very strongly, a community. And it comes through strongly as we hit the spring weather and the parks fill up with packs of scootering kids. Our neighborhood has a lot of third places, places that are neither work or home, and which have (in Ray Oldenburg’s formulation) these traits (among others)

• Open and inviting (you can drop in without an invitation)

• Features regulars (you expect to be recognized/see someone you know)

• Convivial, frequent laughter (though with so many young kids, also crying)

On our way to the park, we often swing by R____’s house to see if they’re out and want to join us. My cargo trike makes it easy to see and be seen, and idle next to a house to chat without a cloud of exhaust.

Many small, casual moments make it easier for me to make some big asks when I am in straits. And that makes the whole neighborhood freer, since we can borrow each other’s slack, when needed.

But a lot of the third places have not bounced back post-pandemic. Early this year, Derek Thompson had an arresting anecdote to kick off his big Atlantic figure on American loneliness.

As we ate our meal, I watched half a dozen people enter the restaurant without sitting down to eat. Each one pushed open the door, walked to the counter, picked up a bag from the bar, and left. In the delicate choreography between kitchen and customer, not a word was exchanged. The space once reserved for that most garrulous social encounter, the bar hangout, had been reconfigured into a silent depot for customers to grab food to eat at home.

Until the pandemic, the bar was bustling and popular with regulars. “It’s just a few seats, but it was a pretty happening place,” Rae Mosher, the restaurant’s general manager, told me. “I can’t tell you how sad I’ve been about it,” she went on. “I know it hinders communications between customers and staff to have to-go bags taking up the whole bar. But there’s nowhere else for the food to go.” She put up a sign: BAR SEATING CLOSED.

For older people, there’s a sense of something lost, that you’re not quite sure how to reconstruct. For younger people, who grew into independence as the pandemic and the internet made their world narrower, there’s less of a sense of possibility that things could be different/better.

And, the less we have IRL relationships, the more vulnerable we are to the strange attractors of AI chatbots. As noted in this NYT story on chatbot pseudo-romance:

It was not Ayrin’s only relationship that was primarily text-based. A year before downloading Leo, she had moved from Texas to a country many time zones away to go to nursing school. Because of the time difference, she mostly communicated with the people she left behind through texts and Instagram posts

Leave aside the many other problems with turning to a bot for romantic thrills or the conversations you would otherwise have with a friend. A bot can’t take your kids to the playground when you’re sick!

Sooner or later, everyone has the kinds of needs that require a friend who can offer physical presence and accompaniment. Permission to ask comes from many small moments of conviviality and trust.

In my second book, Building the Benedict Option, my focus was on what people could do to build up the thickness of their community… over the timescale of the next two weeks to two months.

I’ve always kept the time window tight, because I want to focus on what you can do now, where you are, not what might be possible in some hypothetical future (when the kids are bigger, when work settles down, etc).

It means my own plans flex and change. We host fewer big events (though we still do 2-3 play readings and one big RPG day a year) and I’m trying more to have someone over for dinner at least once every two week (with the option of paper plates, if it’s a tough week).

The two big questions that animate the book are:

What do you do alone, that you could do together?

What do you do in private, that you could do in public?

And I’ll add:

Is there a third place (presently or pre-pandemic) that you frequent? What makes it convivial?

What’s the biggest ask you’ve made of / received from someone who began as an acquaintance? How did you come to trust each other?