I Spent Six Months Building Community (Without Social Media) and Learned Three Major Lessons.

I won't bury the lede - building community is at odds with modern life. I don’t mean in the sense that many of us are working multiple jobs, with long commutes, for little pay, raising children without much support, without even the prospect of retirement to comfort us - all of that matters too. I mean in the sense that our beliefs about how we and others should be in and move through this world are not conducive to building community. 

Community is how humans survived the past 300,000 years and how we have come to inhabit nearly every corner of the earth. 

Yet it’s only taken 75 years for Americans to lose it. 

Many of us know little about the people who live next door to us. We don’t attend church, belong to civic groups nor social organizations, nor do we volunteer. 

As Marc Dunkleman notes in his book “The Vanishing Neighbor”, Americans today mainly keep in touch with their closest friends and family members, and have very little interaction or relationship with those with whom they are friendly but not intimate. 

My desire to build community this year was driven by the lack of sanity in the world. Economic precarity backlit by the wealth hoarding of oligarchs, civil strife amidst the rise of fascism in the US, and now possibly a war. I knew that the only way to survive wasn’t going to be by hunkering down with my household to weather the storm, but rather by extending out into the world - taking care of others and allowing others to care for me. 

Here’s a list of five things I did over the past six months to cultivate these relationships and three ways I have found that this endeavor is at odds with modern life. 

How I Built Community:

1. Sought out a spiritual community

While I didn’t want to fall into a spiritual cult like the one described in this post, I wanted to find a community of people with whom I share a worldview and core beliefs - and that for me, as I’ve discussed previously, is Tibetan Buddhism. I attended sitting meditation at several local Tibetan Buddhist centers in my city before settling on the one I’ve been attending weekly for the past four or five months. 

The folks there are warm and inviting, and put together various social gatherings and events for anyone who wishes to join. 

Most Americans do not have a spiritual community and intentionally forgo organized religion. This contributes to our collective loneliness, not because of the beliefs, but because now we are missing out on the group cohesion that comes from seeing the same people every week and engaging in shared activities. 

2. Invested time getting to know neighbors

Every day after work, my partner and I go on a walk in our neighborhood. Especially in the spring and summer, this nightly ritual has introduced us to many of our neighbors, who are watering their gardens, walking their dogs, or on their porches enjoying the evening. 

We take every chance available to stop and chit chat,  to get to know the folks living near us. We chat about the weather, ask them about their dogs, comment on their gardens. On Christmas we baked cookies and dropped them off at neighbors’ houses. 

This has garnered us blossoming relationships with a couple people in the neighborhood, softened the hardened exterior of the gentleman with the teardrop tattoo, and earned at least the goodwill of the rest. 

While my partner and I have lived in this neighborhood for three years, in the eyes of New Mexicans, many of whom are direct descendants of the Spanish conquest and/or the indigenous peoples of these lands, our time in this neighborhood is but a blink of an eye. Our presence may seem like the water of an acequia that passes through the neighborhood to irrigate other lands. In a week, new water will rush down the acequia, replacing previous week’s water. They’re nice enough, so we don’t really mind.

3. Said “yes” more often than I said “no”

I am quite introverted. I find too much social interaction tiring and need a lot of alone time to recharge. I knew that I needed to push myself if I wanted to have a community. I also knew from returning to the office after the blissful work-from-home set up of the pandemic that I can build up social stamina like a runner in marathon training. 

I made it a point to attend events and gatherings I didn’t really want to, and often found that I often  enjoyed myself. 

I tagged along to  political demonstrations with my labor organizer neighbor, I went to the adult skate night with a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, I attended a movie night at a the meditation center. When the invites were first extended, my inner voice said “no” followed by several excuses - I don’t want to stay up too late, I should spend that time cleaning my house, I don’t want to get arrested for protesting. 

Instead, I had fun skating, got to know a neighbor better, met other similarly minded people, and watched a good film. Instead of the tiredness from social burnout, I left the events happy, contented, at peace - my social battery a little more expansive than it was before. 

4. Shared resources and engaged in reciprocity

I made an intentional effort to share the resources I would have normally hoarded for myself. I am not a greedy person, but I certainly suffer from the quotidian fear of scarcity instilled by late stage capitalism and the American cult of the individual. As such, I would often find ways to save excess resources, typically food,  rather than redistributing it among friends and neighbors. 

So in my quest, I decided to be more generous. If a recipe produced a larger meal than my household could reasonably eat, I’d take some to the neighbor who has trouble cooking due to a medical condition. If my herb garden grew out of control, I would share the bounty with the friend who loves cooking with fresh herbs instead of trying to preserve the harvest. I brought dishes to potlucks, and threw a few dollars towards common causes. I tried to be more generous with my time - I’d help elderly neighbors herd ornery chickens back into coops and corral small dogs back into houses at dusk, thwarting coyotes’ plans for an easy snack.

I did these things without the expectation of receiving anything in return, but often the good karma would still boomerang back to me. And even without the dozen fresh eggs, I found it uniquely rewarding to give with an open heart and without expectation. 

5. Relaxed regimented life routines 

My desire to build community quickly came up against my numerous strict lifestyle routines. I take a lot of comfort from these routines and can often feel out of whack when I’m not adhering to them. My time was budgeted and regimented, and I had to let go of that in order to make room for the organic shapes of community interaction. 

I often planned for my after-work walks to take about an hour to allow for optimal time to cook dinner, water the garden, and do a night time routine, so I can get eight hours of sleep before getting up at 5:30AM for a morning workout. However, stopping to talk to a neighbor added 30 more minutes to the walk, which trickled down the rest of my evening and added up to going to bed late. Staying to talk with fellow meditators after the Sunday sitting meant less time for me to do my weekly cleaning and meal prep lunches for the week. 

However, I had to allow these social interactions to “ruin” my schedule because I knew running off after every event, or cutting short conversations was not how I’d build the community I was after. 

Outside of building a community, I long for a slower pace of life and that requires letting go of a strictly scheduled day-to-day life. At the start of 2025, I was already off social media. I slowly extracted myself from the infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds that served me self improvement and optimization content in order to be more present and intentional in creating the life I authentically wanted to live - not one that was fed to me. 

It also got easier with time. Ultimately, what I gained from spending that time with others was more important than a perfect weekly workout routine, ideal sleep score, or spotless home. 

The Lessons

LESSON 1: Community building is at odds with self-improvement culture

Social media, self-help books, and podcasts exhort us to optimize our sleep, food intake, personal hygiene, exercise, mindset, wardrobe, and productivity all in the pursuit of….? 

We don’t just get ready for bed, we engage in a 30-minute routine that involves journaling, creating a bespoke beverage mixed with obscure fruit juices, and a ten-step skincare routine that culminates every night with curlers in our hair and tape over our mouths. 

We don’t just workout, we’re supposed to have a seven-day-a-week split that includes separate pilates and gym memberships. We run pick up running, and have to buy special shoes, shorts, sunglasses, vests, powders, and gels. If you don’t drink your protein shake you’ll never lose fat; if you don’t use BCAA powder your recovery will be subpar; if you don’t take creatine you’ll never see gains. 

Every month a news article, influencer, or alternative health website declares some food item the superfood of the moment. Your failure to obtain and consume this food will result in premature aging, lack of muscle mass, bad sleep, brain fog, decreased libido, dull skin, headaches, bad digestion. 

We don’t just have a job, we have multiple streams of income from several side hustles that are somehow also money pits. We pay fees to freelancing websites, buy software to optimize productivity, buy into MLM pyramid schemes. We purchase online courses to learn how to make online courses to encourage other people to create online courses as The Path to financial freedom. 

These endeavours  are largely incompatible with the building and maintaining community. They all take inordinate amounts of time and energy, and explicitly encourage us to forgo a social life in order to achieve whatever dream they’re selling. 

We are encouraged to be intensive, excessive, and obsessive in a way that precludes the organic human interaction at the very root of community and community building. 

Sorry, can’t stop to chat. If I don’t get home in the next ten minutes I won't have enough time to apply sea moss gel to my undereyes. 

LESSON 2: Tolerance

Building community has taught me a big lesson about tolerating others. Often there will be people in your community who are not your favorite person, or who have traits that irritate you. They’re not bad enough for you to obviously avoid them - they are just…kind of annoying.

While it is acceptable to be intolerant of those who have hateful, fascistic beliefs, there exists in our world a pervasive, generic intolerance towards others. 

There’s a trend in self help and social media psychology of  advising you to cut off people you perceive to have wronged you or have different lifestyles, or political views than you. This may be a toxic family member (which is fair) but also extends into truly isolating territory, where we are advised to cut off people in our lives for much smaller infractions. If someone hurts your feelings, cut them off. If someone is too “needy”, cut them off. If they complain too much during your coffee date, cut them off. If someone stepped over your boundary, cut them off. 

This is only isolating us further. Humans are inherently flawed; everyone is going to make mistakes. That doesn’t mean we should allow abuse, but it does mean giving others grace for their imperfections. You can maintain social connections to those who are not fully self-actualized, perfect, transcended beings - very few of us are. 

LESSON 3: Inconvenience is part of the deal 

I was frequently challenged by the amount of time I needed to spend on cultivating relationships, friendships, and community connections. It felt like requests from my community always came at the worst moments, and events were never at times I thought compatible with my routines or schedule. 

The requests to herd chickens and collect small dogs always come at 8 o’clock at night, when I’m inevitably winding down for the evening. However, I knew my neighbors needed help and in my quest to be a good neighbor, I slapped on some sandals and tramped out into the dusky night.

I had to let go of my ideas about how my day should go and instead accept it how it is going. 

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In an age where basic social services and safety nets are being ripped down, goods and services are more expensive and out of reach than ever, and certain factions seek to keep us atomized, separated, and lacking solidarity, building community feels like both insurance and an act of resistance.