How Authentic Community will save us from our Loneliness

Loneliness is killing us, and only Authentic Community will save us.
With more and more data coming out regarding the profound consequences of loneliness, it’s no surprise that it is now being considered an epidemic. Not only is it immensely emotionally painful to feel alone, it is literally killing us. According to the US Surgeon General, loneliness is associated with an increased risk of premature death (comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day) and significantly increased risks (up to 30%) of diseases such as heart disease and stroke.The repercussions even extend past the individual to societal issues like addiction, violence, and abuse.

So what do we do?

It’s easy to just tell people to get out more and have more social interaction. But when we try, sometimes we are left feeling even more isolated. How common is it to be surrounded by people, yet feel utterly alone? What we actually need is Authentic Community. It is an essential path back to connection and solving our rampant loneliness.

We Need Community. We are social creatures.

That means we are biologically wired to develop and live in community. Evolutionarily, if we didn’t have community, we wouldn’t be able to survive. Community, and the connection that comes with it, are fundamental human needs, just like food, water, and shelter. One could argue connection is even more important than these basic needs because we need to rely on others to obtain them. For that reason, our nervous system has evolved to require connection, and when it doesn’t receive it, we become sick. While connection can occur outside of a community, such as a close friend or a family member, these sources (while still essential) are insufficient to meet all of our complex connection needs. To be fulfilled, feel like we belong, and just physically and mentally develop properly, we need community. Both connection and community are non-negotiable. However, our modern-day “communities” have failed us in fulfilling this connection role.

Modern-Day “Communities”

There are many reasons why our modern-day communities are completely missing the mark:
structured around similar activities instead of similar values, infrequent or insufficient gatherings, and filled with toxic social practices like gossip and cliques. The main reason they’re massively dropping the ball though, is that the structure of these communities encourages fitting in by sacrificing authentic awareness and expression. Put simply, having authentic awareness is to be connected with your own needs, values, desires, and boundaries. Authentic expression is communicating and expressing them. It’s also necessary that in our authentic expression, we are acknowledged, understood, valued, and loved by our community for it. Unfortunately, the opposite often occurs. Our communities frequently dismiss, reject, and shame our authentic expression. To be rejected by a community is extremely painful and even registers as dangerous to our nervous systems, so our biological tendency is to repress our own authentic expression. When this happens, we knowingly or unknowingly manufacture “social masks” in order to win back the approval of the community.

A social mask is an adaptation we develop in order to fit in or belong. When we wear them, we live incongruently with ourselves. But even if this self-constructed mask is “accepted”, we aren’t actually the ones belonging. Deep down, we still suffer the pain of isolation. This is why we need to hold higher standards for our communities. We need Authentic Community.

What is Authentic Community?
Authentic community allows for in-depth and nourishing human connection, while in line with nature and the Earth. For connection to be nourishing, we need the help of Authentic Community to provide a structure in which it naturally feels safe enough to remove our masks together and reconnect with our vulnerability and authentic awareness/expression. In a sense, this removal of masks leaves us naked and we have to bare both our beauty and our blemishes. But this is what makes us human. Authentic community creates space for the raw expression of our humanness. This includes our joy, love, generosity, laughter, support, celebration, and compassion. It also includes all of our rage, shame, jealousy, confusion, anxiety, stress, and grief. It’s all welcome. When we are stripped down to our humanness in community, this is what connection really is: humans being human with other humans. This is how we can truly heal our collective loneliness.

Earth Connection

Yet, there’s one more mask we need to remove in order to fully heal it.The mask is our species’ rejection and separation from nature. Authentic communities support and encourage our basic Earth connection needs. They encourage us to put our feet in the dirt, soak in the sun, and breathe in the fresh air, all while in connection with other people doing the same. Just like we need to feel like we belong with people, we need to feel like we belong with the Earth. Not only is it connecting, it is healing for the soul. This is a hard one though. As a species, we have associated our “progression” with the amount we distance and disconnect ourselves from nature.

In the name of progress, we have cut off our feet from the Earth by covering the ground with asphalt and concrete and covering the bottom of our feet with rubber and plastic shoe soles. We work in high-rise buildings and live in apartments or houses where we stay indoors all day to “protect” ourselves from the elements. We spend most of our recreational, professional, and commercial time in a digital world on a screen. The majority of the time we spend with nature is using the materials we destroy it for. Know that this is not a rejection of modernity. So much of our modern advances are tremendous progress. But no amount of progress is worth losing our relationship with nature and the Earth.

The True Role of Community
Yes, it is true we suffer from loneliness because we are disconnected from others. But this disconnect is more of a symptom than a cause. We are disconnected because we have disowned and rejected the parts of our humanity that inherently connect us. We have disowned and shamed the raw human experience/expression and our primordial place in nature. The role of community is not to connect us. By virtue of being an interconnected species, we are already connected. The true role of Authentic Community is to reflect a mirror on our inherent connectedness that makes it impossible to ever truly be alone. When we embrace community and look clearly in this mirror, we can return to the profound belongingness that is the answer to our loneliness.

How Authentic Community will save us from our Loneliness

Ontological Design, a (r)evolutionary approach to life