villager

I’ve seen various forms of this phrase floating around my feed lately in response to world events: “we were never designed to hold the weight of the world.”

The logic follows that, because humans used to operate in tight-knit groups, our brains are exclusively wired to focus on a small, intimate circle of people. Our village. Advocates of this villager defense will point to psychological terminology like information overload and compassion fatigue to demonstrate that caring for too-many others puts us in a cognitive deficit. In addition, the "identifiable victim effect” suggests that we struggle with stories about large, faceless groups and are more likely to feel deeply for a story about one single person.

Cool. Sure. But if, in theory, we supposedly have more capacity to care for those that share our corner stores and doctor’s offices because we’ve conserved it, we’re really not nailing it. As columnist Cassie McClure says, “everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager.”

An extension of this worldview is that we hold an “us versus them” frame deep in our subconscious about everyone outside those proximal to us and that’s how it should be. Overarchingly, the assumption is that our primitive programming is so acutely entrenched that it can’t be overcome. But according to neuroscientist David Eagleman’s research, our brain is livewired, meaning it’s a dynamic organ that’s constantly evolving in response to the world it interacts with. You needn’t look further than your own personal history for proof that your brain’s capacity to change is boundless. This villager defense overlooks the fact that when we want to, we can evolve and innovate. Over time— from telescopes to vaccines, the printing press to the internet — human invention changed the landscape of the world and we self-organized into societies that bolstered these new inventions because it seemed to benefit us.

There’s a cognitive dissonance at work, then, when we say we can evolve but only in *this* way, and not when it comes to building broader circles of care. We’re being undersold the scientifically proven, foundational truth about our interdependence: that it gives us meaning and a sense of purpose. Getting plugged into relationships makes us the best of who we are. On the flip side a recent study found that loneliness has been estimated to shorten a person’s life span by as many as 15 years. Like language, we have the infrastructure for it because it is useful to us, but it needs to be fostered. And we don’t do near enough to foster it because we don’t believe that we should. Why? Because no one can put a price tag on it and so, its largely absent from our algorithm.

Let me tell you about American sociologist Eric Kleinenberg. In his research into the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave – which led to 739 heat-related deaths in five days - Kleinenberg found that in neighbourhoods with strong social networks, far fewer people died. Fewer people died because people checked on each other. Community saved lives.

Being part of a village requires skills: ones we haven’t been taught the necessity and benefit of and therefore are grossly underdeveloped. Here’s a pretty easy entry point to be a part of your village: spend more time talking people. Listen to their experience. Like the queer tween Allen that you’ve seen at the coffee shop. Maybe then you’ll learn about the harassment he’s facing at school. Or your colleague Bryan who experiences significant barriers navigating uptown due to the limits of our municipal infrastructure.  Or your neighbor Elise, a single mother who’s devastated by the federal budget cuts that have severed her access to local (and essential) autism support services for her daughter, May.

When we willingly engage in this kind of care, we connect to a web of life that’s invisible until we activate it: then, it is undeniable. The connections between issues that otherwise seemed disconnected and far away are suddenly immediate and personal. And only when we engage in this kind of care do we complicate our definitions of what the world is like at a local level and recalibrate the categories we’ve arranged it by. By direct experience alone, we can see that our ideas about backyards and borders are but holograms; relics of our primitive, fear-based software that can be unlearned only by our willingness to experience life with others in it. Through caring for our village, we become citizens of the world. As writer Mishel Noor says:

“’It doesn’t affect me’ is not a statement of fact [but] disconnection – and disconnection, left untreated, compounds to apathy. Everything is connected… the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the mass atrocities in Congo… these are not distant tragedies. They are shaping the world your [children] will inherit. The policy that comes from this conflict shapes the economy, that shapes the neighbourhood, that shapes the classroom, that shapes the child.”

In a warming world run by a global elite that refuses to face its toxic relationship with toxic depleting resources, we are the collateral damage. We each need to build infrastructure so that if power lines go down, or the air conditioning/heat is unavailable, or if there is a water shortage (because these are new realities we need to face are highly possible), we’ve got each other’s backs. Not when disaster strikes, but before: so the networks are strong, viable, and visible.

After you’re done that first step, of listening to your neighbors, check out Activate Your Neighborhood, a practical guide for helping “reimagine, rethink and repurpose” to encourage social connections. Community is how we survive the unknown fate of our planet. Building it is the thing we can do when we feel helpless and overwhelmed because it will help us feel the opposite.

That, my friends, is really truly what we’re wired for.