Alone, Together: Our unraveling social ties and loss of community in the digital world

Being lonely in a crowd is a feeling that most of us have felt at one point or another. It’s hard to find your place in the world, and we all go through periods where we just don’t feel like we belong. I’ve gone through some intense periods like that in my life, luckily, eventually I found my people and my niche. That sense of isolation hasn’t totally gone away, though, it appears to have become the default setting for our shared lives. Whenever I enter a new space, there’s a palpable fear of not popping someone else’s bubble. It’s like we’re all terrified of imposing our need for connection on those around us. My own neuroses are a likely culprit in this, but I also think this is something we all notice. What we’re feeling is the loss of community. 

I felt the first pangs of this loss growing up between “MTV still had good shows” Millennialhood and “Sus as an adverb” Gen Zdom. All around us, you could see the social ties being undone. Social media, which was once a novel way to communicate, started to fracture us into various consumer segments. We became individuals interacting with a platform, networking with one another, instead of connecting. The same thing happened in our neighborhoods, where we watched the activities, events, and connections that once bonded us together evaporate. Anything that didn’t produce capital was bulldozed away. We’d still see each other online and off, but we were no longer connected. Nothing was overarching for us to belong to. All I wanted was to be a part of something bigger, but I didn’t have the resources to join an increasingly disconnected pay-to-play world. Some kids could find a semblance of belonging, but for many others, myself included, the writing was on the wall.

Without any strong ties to community, many others and I escaped into the early attention economy, a place we’re all too familiar with now. We subscribe, follow, and comment, but we never truly belong to anything. I think this is especially true for Gen Alpha, who inherited this new way of life from birth. If you ask them what a community is, they’re likely to say some niche subreddit or YouTube channel. I don’t know if any of them would think of a neighborhood, city, or even just a group of friends. To them, a community is simply a network of people where you can see each other’s activity, which is how tech companies have illy defined the word over the past decade. Real connection is much more than just seeing what each other is doing, it’s about real connection and collaboration. There’s no shared belonging or meaning-making in the comment section of a Twitch channel, just disparate messages meant to exist on their own, floating into the ether. 

Floating in the ether is a far too common feeling nowadays. One of the best examples of how cut off we’ve become is gig work. Gig workers are always there, just a tap away, but never truly belong to any company or organization. They’re independent contractors working for an amorphous blob of capital. There are no employee benefits, nor are there social ones. It’s hard to grab a drink or build social ties with a co-worker if you have no idea who they are. It’s not just how we work, but also how we live, that breaks down our ability to connect. Whether it’s music streaming, fitness apps, online dating, or even fantasy football, what were once communal experiences are now individual ones. The promise of personalization and instant access has siloed us. We barely even watch the same shows anymore. It’s why we all wait so patiently for something like The White Lotus to come along and give us a reason to connect with one another. Most of the time, it’s us doing our own thing anonymously alongside everyone else. This is what it’s like to be in constant contact with the world but never a part of it. 

Our friendships even have a tinge of this odd social dynamic, where no matter how much access we have to each other, we’re still prone to think of ourselves as individuals. We all have our unique attention bubble to navigate which creates this perceived distance between us and those we care about. It’s depressing to think about, but,it’s almost like we’re gig workers, reduced to icons on each other's phones, competing against all of the apps. Tight-knit friend groups, epitomized by shows like Friends are increasingly a thing of the past. I get that Friends was an exaggeration and no group of people could afford or want to spend as much time together as they did, but it did serve as this platonic ideal. Imagine how it would feel to have that safety net of community and belonging whenever you needed it. Friendship today feels much less seamless. We’re still there for each other, but just not at the same time, or in the same place.

That distance from each other is at odds with our history as humans, where we were inextricably linked to the people we worked, socialized, and lived with. Communities were the bedrock of our lives. In fact, they were the only way to survive. Together we built cultures, made up of language, art, rituals, and everything else that requires us to truly connect. From those cultures, we went on to construct cities filled with neighborhoods, social clubs, sports teams, music venues, and coffee houses. Across time and space, we’ve seen a huge variety of different types of groups that were greater than the sum of their parts. Even when we began to replicate these groups online in the late 90s and 00s, community flourished. For the first time, people could connect across thousands of miles, seeking out the spaces where they felt a sense of belonging. Despite not having a physical presence, there was still something tangible about those early online communities. They resembled physical communities in that there was deep collaboration and connection among members. 

Our new “communities” don’t require any collaboration or connection. All we have are shadows of each other, notifications that someone said or did something. This lack of real communal interaction lends itself to the polarization and extremism our society is buckling under. I’m sure Trump supporters believe they’re part of a real community, but are they really connecting with one another? Or are they just feeding off a shared platform where they can see others who act like them? Think about the manosphere. Young men have lost their social ties and struggle to form real relationships. Instead, they spend their time online, where they learn what it means to act like a man from toxic con artists whom they’ll never meet. There’s no community building, it’s just individuals associating with one another to reinforce their own shitty worldviews and behaviors. That’s the paradox of social networking, the bigger the communities are, the smaller our world gets. Our echo chambers aren’t only online. If you step into any coffee shop, you’ll see people egregiously detailing their dating lives through FaceTime as if they’re the only ones there. At live events, there’s an increasing number of assholes who feel no shame in muscleing their way past you in their attempt to create their own private show. We see examples across our lives where people may share the same physical space as us, but don’t share the same reality. 

Even when we had a shared reality, though, belonging was not a given for everyone. People on the right often use the loss of community argument as a dog whistle. They like to think of community as some exclusive club and are terrified they’ll have to share their mediocre unseasoned lives with people who don’t look like them. Community is not a homogeneous group based on arbitrary characteristics. I mean that’s basically how social media works, look at where that’s got us. So when I talk about belonging, it’s something different. It’s not about how much we produce, how outraged we are, or even how similar we are to each other. Belonging is being truly connected to the people we share life with, where that connection creates something more than the individual, even if that something is just a conversation that leaves everyone feeling better than they did alone. 

So, in the interest of creating connection vs. isolation, here’s where I stop going full Marc Maron about how bad things are, and try to find a glimmer of hope in our extremely poorly written Black Mirror episode that is 2025. I was at a local show here in Seattle the other week and saw exactly what it looks like when we pierce the bubble. As much as I love live music, at times it can feel like just another extension of our siloed consumption, where everyone is there just to get their personal fix of music and leave. This show was different, it was clear that the goal wasn’t just pure profit, it was a shared experience. The host would include members of the crowd whenever they had a chance, and did their best to create a united identity for people at that concert. In between sets, you’d see various people chatting with the artists or connecting with the crowd around them. Almost no one had their phones out either, we all just wanted to be a part of the moment and the space. For the first time in a long time, it felt like I was in the same reality as everyone around me, where we truly saw and heard each other. I can’t front and act like everyone came together and sang Kumbaya, but for those few hours we were a community creating something bigger together. 

Experiences like that concert are why I fell in love with live music in the first place. More than that, that’s why I became enamored with the magic that is living in cities. Cities aren’t perfect, but the whole point of them is the people. Sure, there are economic opportunities, but the cultural opportunities are why we stay. When you have so many people living in close proximity, gathering is bound to happen. Community is bound to happen. We find the people and spaces that make us feel part of something more. Before moving to a major city, this was always something I struggled with. Since leaving my hometown, it’s been night and day as I’ve connected with people over everything from music to political theory to some random book I read 10 years ago. I think some of my best writing has come from conversations across my community and the experiences that living in a city gives you. Some of this magic is disappearing as cities face the consequences of late-stage capitalism and a culturally bankrupt presidential regime, but that means we have to try a bit harder at connecting with one another. 

Whether you live in a city or not, we all have options to bring people together, connect, and form community. Historically, these were things like book clubs, community centers, civic organizations, and other social groups. In today’s world, that might look different, but we can still find intentional third places, start projects like community gardens, art collectives, and neighborhood rituals. It doesn’t have to be some grand gesture. The smallest acts of being in the world with people like a patio concert, going to a neighborhood restaurant, or even just hosting a game night, can make you feel like you belong. What’s important is intentionally connecting in meaningful ways where you form something stronger than a fleeting association. At the end of the day, that’s what culture is. 

The project of this blog is about finding our humanity amongst all the rapid change and chaos taking place. There’s almost nothing more human than the power of our communities. We have a lot going against, we all have limitations in how much we can do and offer one another, but the only way we’re going to get through this time is together. Together is how we find a little bit of meaning and joy in the mess. That’s what I needed as a lost kid, trying to find my way, and I think it’s something we all need now. No community is perfect and belonging will look different for everyone, but if you just take the time to break out of the bubble, I’m sure you’ll find your place.