How Much Community Do We Actually Need?

Forging meaningful connections is one of life’s great joys, but the capacity to enjoy being alone is also an expression of psychological maturity

“The current emphasis upon intimate personal relationships as the touchstone of health and happiness is a comparatively recent phenomenon,” the psychiatrist Anthony Storr wrote in his text, Solitude: A Return to the Self.

This aspect of our culture hasn’t changed all that much since Storr wrote that 35 years ago, in 1988. If anything, the phenomenon is even more pronounced than it was then. And the reason this makes our life difficult, Storr argues, is because a lot of our relationships with one another are routinely fraught, unpredictable and unstable.

But how much community and connection do we actually need, and does the extent of that need change over the course of our lives? Storr’s research and clinical work led him to conclude that, as we age, our interest in other human beings declines somewhat. “We tend to turn to more impersonal interests,” he said in an interview, “and this shows in the great creators, the great composers, they become less concerned with communication and more interested in communion with their own soul.”

Storr’s examples range from the historical to the modern. The times change, the centuries go by, but this aspect of the human condition — of our personal lived experience — seems to hold steady. As we get older, we seem to need each other just a little bit less.

The importance of safeguarding our solitude?

It’s not that we’d be better off by ourselves all of the time. We are social beings — on this point, anthropologists and psychiatrists wholeheartedly concur — and we don’t do all that well in absolute isolation. We all require the companionship of others.

But people vary very much in exactly how much companionship they need. Some people prefer spending more time on their own than they do with other people. What energizes one person will quickly deplete another.

Edward Gibbon, the English historian and politician and author of the six-volumed The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), famously said solitude is the school of genius.

It’s staggering, in fact, just how many philosophers — to take but one example of genius — were loners. People who lived alone, or who didn’t have close relationships with other people over any extended period of time. Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, the list goes on and on. So if, like me, you are an introvert and body swerve more social gatherings than those you do actually attend, at least we find ourselves in good company!

But isn’t it interesting that solitude is routinely dismissed in our society as the pleasure pursuit of the loner? There is a sometimes remorseless pressure to socialize — in the run-up to Christmas and other holidays, we’re about to see that play out with a particularly frenetic energy — but without cultivating the skill to enjoy our own company, can we ever find inner peace or feel truly at ease with ourselves on our own terms?

Alone time brings with it the opportunity for self-discovery. Without at least some solitude, argued Donald Winnicott in his seminal article The Capacity to be Alone (1958), all we have is “a false life built on external stimuli.”

The fragility of personal relationships and community

Yet despite this history of seeking out the companionship of other people, it is routinely said we are in the grip of a loneliness epidemic. Which is strange, because it should be easier than ever to forge connections. We are a mobile society, and we can choose our own communities like never before.

Loneliness, however, is a revealing diagnosis, not least because it emphasizes our culture’s focus on the holy grail of personal relationships.

Relationships, it sometimes seems, fill a more existential void. The Industrial Revolution and then the Digital Revolution have fragmented our lives in the most extraordinary and fascinating ways. We are more geographically disparate than ever before. Ever more of us live in large cities, surrounded by people who are strangers. Remote working makes office camaraderie a lot more difficult. And there is a strong cultural expectation that we will keep ourselves busy, but that same busyness makes it harder to catch up with people without pre-booking months in advance. Taken together, modern industrial societies can feel oddly lacking in structural integrity. It’s not always easy to carve out meaning within them.

But to concentrate so exclusively on personal relationships, Storr contends, is to put more weight on them than they can bear: They are “a hub around which a person’s life revolves, not necessarily the hub.”

Community, but only on our own terms?

Love and community and companionship aren’t the only path to salvation, which is just as well, because creating and sustaining meaningful connections with other people is extremely difficult indeed.

That was E.M. Forster’s conclusion. “Only connect!” — the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End, that glorious study of liberal-humanist connection — was both a plea and a cry of despair. We crave connection, and how interesting the world might be if there were more of it, but there are all these barriers to its achievement, and we’re not always very accomplished at going about it.

Finding community in this, the age of the individual, is perhaps especially difficult. The author and commentator Mary Harrington uses the phrase “maximally connected, but also maximally free,” and it so wonderfully captures the inherent contradiction of how many of us would love life to be. We all want community, but sometimes it feels like we want it only on our own terms. “Today everything is ‘open’ — or at least, it’s online in the public domain,” Harrington writes. “You’d think that would make it easier to find like-minded souls, which is true — but those friendships are opt-in, … which means they’re also opt-out again.”

Maybe we don’t want community — in the traditional sense of the word — as much as we sometimes say we do. Perhaps what we really want is a sense of being seen.

A sense of belonging, but also a sense of purpose

The paradox of being a writer is that you have to love spending lots of time alone, but you also have to be intensely interested in other people.

It seems counterintuitive, but in order to write about something, sometimes you need to remove yourself from it entirely. Gore Vidal did his best writing about America from his Ravello mansion on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. Thoreau famously retreated to a woodland cabin to write about the frailties of human connection. Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights (1847) in the midst of the wild landscape of the Haworth moors.

So solitude has a good intellectual pedigree, and in modern-day self-help, its virtues are championed as a balm against the tumult of the times, a self-restoration mechanism, putting ourselves back in touch with ourselves.

There is a terror about connection, too. People can be difficult to read. There are all these rules of engagement, and people are quick to take offence, these days perhaps especially so.

It is so very tempting, sometimes, just to retreat entirely. It is such an understandable, and deeply human, impulse. I feel it, too, but I do try to fight it. Finding meaningful connections is a tall order. But the knack of the thing, surely, is remembering how relationships help provide us with a sense of function and of place. As important as connection on its own terms is, another role of “community” is to provide a sense of purpose. We all need to feel needed.

Thus construed, relationships act as points of reference to help make sense of our lived experience, and to contribute to our sense of self. “We are embedded in a structure,” Storr concluded, “of which unique relationships are the supporting pillars.”

Niall Stewart is the author of The Beautiful Anatomy of Despair (2022)