Find your people

Community as survival skill

One of the many heart wrenching things about being laid off is losing the companionship of the people at work. Even the ones you didn’t really like, or that one with the irritating laugh were part of your work life and you will miss them when you’re gone.

Ezra Klein has a podcast this week on loneliness. We are becoming lonelier and more isolated, especially younger people. We don’t connect much with others who are not in our family unit or at our workplace. We wear earphones which cut us off from many chance encounters. We eschew the messiness of building community. We watch shows and movies about people who work together, or travel together or build up connections in different ways. But we don’t do it much ourselves.

And it hurts us. Loneliness is as dangerous as smoking to your health, as an oft quoted older study tells us. We are hard wired to be in community, it’s an ancient biological imperative that we ignore at our peril.

Recently, I talked about keeping your professional go bag ready; have your resume up to date, keep in touch with your network and keep looking for work.

Here’s another important preventive action. Build community. Be intentional about being in community. For one thing, if you have communities outside of work who support you and make you feel connected, you will have support outside of your workplace should you ever change or lose your job. For another, it will improve your quality of life emotionally and maybe even physically.

After my son died, I became quite isolated. I thought of my grief like some horrible body odor that would repel people. So, I stayed alone in a tight circle of work, family, partner.

A bad break up made me realize I was very isolated. I decided to intentionally build community.

I don’t think of myself as a joiner, but I have become part of two new communities in the last few years. They are very enriching. In fact, I’m writing this in Bellevue, looking out at Lake Washington, because I have a community that has space for me to write, and I find that working on the book (the one I am supposed to be working on now instead of this substack) is much easier when I am around people with whom I am in community.

How to find and build a community.

1.     Commit to it. It can be hard to do, and take perseverance. Be intentional.  Figure out ways to convince yourself not to give up.

2.     Find shared interests. Start with things you really like to do and then find other people who like to do the same things. It can be playing Dungeons and Dragons, singing in a choir, mountain climbing, volunteering, political or social activism. If you have a faith tradition, that can be a good place to find community. If there is a recreational activity that you are passionate about find others who fish or ride bikes or hike or teach dogs to run obstacle courses.

3.     Try. It can take a while to click with a community or group. Try a few activities, go more than once. See #1. Maybe your favorite hobby isn’t conducive to group activities. Pick another activity that is, even if it’s not top of your list.

4.     Be aware of the opportunities to learn. Community can challenge us to accept, forgive, and tolerate in ways that we might not need to in the rest of our lives. Focus on giving back, getting involved in leadership or some service to the group. Have realistic expectations of the community, the people in it and yourself. In my experience, groups that have a purpose or mission are a more fertile ground for community than those that don’t.

5.     Be on the lookout for new friends. You will be likelier to find them in these shared interest groups. Yes, it can be hard to meet new people and befriend them as adults. But try. See if that woman who has the same type of dog you do wants to go for a walk at a dog park. Invite another member of the sailing group out for a sail.

We spend so much time thinking about how to improve our careers, our financial security, our physical health and wellness. What if we treated our human need to be in community and connection with others with the same level of intention and importance?