community building is uncomfortable and inconvenient

a petition to be nosier and also have more trivia nights

It is a Friday night and I don’t have plans. It feels wrong to sit on my sofa and watch my seventh episode of New Amsterdam in a row but my living room is too quiet without it. I watch my eighth episode. Saturday and Sunday are looking painfully empty too and it is raining outside, heavy and hypnotic. Lightning flashes outside my living room and makes me ache so badly for the monsoon rains from home that I turn all the lights off to watch it. I want to tell someone about it and I automatically pick up my phone to text someone before it hits me that no one is here – my roommate is in Victoria, another friend is in London, a third is on a date. I have other friends, but how many people do I have to text to run to their window to look at the lightning on a Friday night in Vancouver? Something about it feels frivolous and vulnerable in a way I want to protect.

I pour myself a glass of wine, light a candle, and call it a self-care night instead. It is a moment of personal growth that I can spend time with myself in a peaceful and introspective way, I write in my journal. Loneliness is so romantic when the air smells like roses and there is a mask on my face and my limbs are warm and loose. 

This lasts for maybe two minutes before I am on my phone and scrolling on TikTok. Those sped-up videos of oil spreading across the ocean must look just like the inside of my brain right now. Immediately, incessant chatter fills my head with more white noise than the rain or the TV show, a collective chorus of people echoing the same words back to each other. Tell me, what era is it? Is it giving? What is in the room with us? I mean it sincerely too. They tell me that they are bed rotting but bed-rotting is self care and I nod along from my bed. I am in my Charlie and the Chocolate Factory grandpa era. Did you cancel all your plans this week? That’s how you find yourself and set your boundaries, I saw it in this article (a TikTok). It’s rejection therapy (everything is a therapy or theory or syndrome now and I’m not convinced anybody knows what they’re talking about but what do I know either). Also, a guy asked his friends to help him move and they all said no, and the comments said he has bad friends but he is not listening. At least my friends helped me move. Someone in the industry has a tip for me: your co-workers are not your friends. They are your peers. They say something we don’t talk about enough is how asking people to go to drinks after work promotes alcoholism and you shouldn’t go because you are not getting paid after 5 pm. I try and decide if this is an opinion I want to adopt. I don’t, but I like the video anyway. 

When I turn my phone off, the silence is there again and my mask has long since cracked dry on my face. I never told anyone about the lightning after all. 

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how to build community, especially in a city like Vancouver with a reputation for being deeply anti-social, especially in the winters. Three people from my daily rotation of friends left the city a few months ago, I moved from being on campus to living Downtown, and I started a job at a place where people have children my age. Change doesn’t feel like a thing I initiated and sought, but more like a violent storm that suddenly sweeps me away and erodes steady common ground. The world is a teeming, coagulated mass of people out on a far shore with social circles that go out for brunch every weekend, hike every summer, and go to Christmas Markets every winter in a way that I cannot access. The earth is too loose to put roots into and all I can do is watch my circle shrink like high tide coming onto the tiniest shore. They are so far and I am tired. The water creeps higher and I edge away.

In other words, it is very uncomfortable and deeply inconvenient. 

Both of those feel like feelings that should be easily fixable, a problem of the past. We are living in an age where the internet and our phones are handed to us with the golden promise of convenience and comfort — you can have an easier life, you will waste less time on things, you can meet the whole world in minutes with the right app, the right content, the right engagement. Community is right around the corner (metaphorically only, realistically it is at the tip of your fingers). Sounds perfect, right? 

But why isn’t it working? Everyone I follow is funny the way I am funny but liking their comments doesn’t feel nearly the same as making a joke that makes the whole room laugh. Reading online discourse about the article I loved on parallel play doesn’t feel as satisfying as telling my friend about it and adopting the phrase into our lexicon¹. As much as it feels like there is an online community, when there is free entry at the Art Gallery on the first Friday of the month, I can’t pull someone out of my phone to come with me. The wifi cuts out, the phone dies, and I don’t have the safety net to avoid interaction. I am uncomfortable. 

The problem with the golden promise is that it is premised on the false assumption that inconvenience and discomfort are inherently negative and need to be fixed. 

Because who wants to be uncomfortable if there is a way around it? It’s awful to walk into a room and not know anybody; going on my phone instead and looking busy lets me pretend that I am not talking to anyone by choice. There are at least 20 minutes of awkward small talk if I go to a friend’s games night where I won’t know everybody; it is easier to cancel over text and stay home than deal with the possibility that I will go and no one will like me. It is mortifying to consider asking out someone that I see every week at the coffee shop; it is far easier to swipe on Tinder and create a pseudo-intimacy with a stranger where rejection won’t hurt much, if at all. 

But is there anything meaningful and long-lasting that is achieved purely through convenience? 

In our pursuit to avoid anything uncomfortable, we are retreating further and further into ourselves where the only things entirely safe are ourselves, a bed, and a phone. 

@CJ on TikTok

And when the loneliness feels vast, when change feels constant, there is no real community to fall back on. The golden promise is hollow and empty and, honestly, was designed to make you feel this way. 

To condense an incredibly vast topic: capitalism frames community as a commodity where this loneliness is fixable by spending more money – buy yourself some expensive self-care at Sephora because you’re treating yourself, go to a bar and spend $40 because there’s nowhere else to met people, download these new apps because that’s the best place to make friends. The reality is that commercialised self-care makes you lonelier and wants you to buy more self-care to feel better (Vox), third spaces (spaces outside your home and work/school where you can build community) are intentionally destroyed so you are forced to spend money at bars/restaurants to meet people² (PubMed), and dating apps are declining in popularity so friendship apps are the new cash cows (Financial Times).

If you want a real community, you can’t buy your way to it or find it the easy way on your phone. The truth of the matter is that community building is inconvenient and uncomfortable. There is no shortcut around it. In seeking to perpetually distance ourselves from any hurt, as our phone / capitalism / commercialised self-care subconsciously pushes us to do, we are only attracting things incapable of hurting us – that is, it is something you can stand to lose, you don’t care enough to fight for, and will absolutely not hold you down if change and loneliness threaten to sweep you away. 

We place ourselves in this paradox of craving deep and meaningful relationships that have the weight of a 10-year friendship without being willing to do any of the work that gets us there. In unsurprising news, the intimacy and comfort of a 10-year-friendship take 10 years to build. And it usually starts with fighting through some awkwardness and initiating small talk, that boring and repetitive kind — the what’s your name, where do you study / work, where are you from — and exposing yourself to the possibility of hurt and rejection over and over again. It is an echo of the same conversation you’ve had a hundred times before. What is a hundred and one? 

Sometimes it doesn’t work out — I ask the person next to me for their name and they don’t hear it and (god forbid) I have to ask twice. Sometimes they are simply boring and after the event ends, we never see each other again. But sometimes it does work out, and the next thing I know (by which I mean we make small talk over and over until it transforms to getting lunch after and texting life updates in between), I am at their house party getting my tarot cards read and eating the vegetarian food they made sure was there for me and drinking the wine their friend got. My roommate meets theirs, we text each other when concert tickets for our favourite artists come out, we drive 3 hours in the middle of the night to see the meteor shower. Sometimes it leads to something in between — I talk to my co-workers about the weather, make the same stale jokes about Mondays and Fridays, I ask them about their kids. But before you know it, (by which I mean after sitting in awkward conversation and allowing it to grow into more until it becomes a palpable connection), there’s community.

Regardless of whether it does work out or not, that is not the point of talking to the people existing beside you. For one, socialising is a skill that needs practice, it is a muscle that atrophies with disuse. Making small talk to the first stranger is infinitely harder than doing it to the fifteenth. For the other, naming the people around you and knowing the stories of strangers makes the world feel less like a homogenous, unreachable mass but rather one that becomes more accessible with each conversation. It is knowing the names and faces of your neighbours, the people you take the bus with every day, the barista that makes your coffee each morning. Maybe all you get is a polite nod in the lift or maybe you get something more. Either way, with each person you connect with is one more root digging in, holding it all together. Water ebbs, the shore expands, and you are holding so many hands.

Community begets community. Going to my roommate’s engineering work event (I must’ve said my name and ‘no, not an engineer haha!’ about seventeen times) ended with me putting a lei on her boss, getting gossip that I still get updates on today, and joining their soccer rec league a year later. Asking someone I thought was cool if they’d like to get a hangout someday (scary, had to proofread the text several times lest I sounded needy) led to us taking classes together and making friends with some of the coolest people I’ve met at university. I played 9-person Catan with a few of them yesterday. Someone I knew only peripherally asked my friends if I wanted to go for trivia night and now we’re trying to make that a Monday night fixture. I dream of walking into any establishment and being seen as a regular, even more so if it is for trivia (and then I know the names of the staff there and look, there’s more community).

Be nosy! Gasp when you hear people in the bathroom ranting about their exes and ask for more details. The women’s bathroom at an establishment with alcohol has the best stories (I can’t promise the same for the men’s bathroom though). Compliment the outfit of the person in the lift with you. Go read in a park, at the same time on the same day over and over until the faces of the others there also become familiar. Pet the dogs in your building (cuteness and owner preference permitting). Find all the trivia nights in the city and go to all of them (just kidding, but I hear Good Co. on Mondays and Fringe on Tuedays is good). 

I haven’t perfected it either. Sometimes it is hard and I am tired. I think that is okay, though, as long as I don’t make that my rule but rather the exception to it.

At the end of the day, the goal is still to do hard and uncomfortable things sometimes for people, at no benefit to yourself, simply to connect with others and to show you care. If you want to put it in financial terms, it is an investment that always comes back to you in one way or another. Exercise the socialising muscle because the worst thing it can do is atrophy and die. Put roots down until change and loneliness don’t feel strong enough to be able to overwhelm you. Sit with discomfort and resist convenience. Build community. 

1. Shoutout to Charlene for spreading the word with me but it’s from this Atlantic article. Since it’s blocked by a paywall, the gist is that adult friendships are ‘catch-up’ friendships which are socially draining and a self-perpetuating cycle since you wait longer to see them after and then all you do is catch up. Instead, practice friendships the way you did as kids - exist around each other while doing your own activities (parallel play). Do whatever the adult version of playing with dolls is.

2. Watched this video on the Vancouver Sea Wall and found out that the reason why it is essentially all just a walking path and nothing more pro-community is because 1) real estate sells and money talks, so it is all high-rises and 2) once people realised it was an issue, West Enders were too used to treating it like their private backyard and have staunchly protested and blocked any attempts since to build communal spaces.