Quotes About Community

To end loneliness, you need other people—plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you. You have to be in it together—and "it" can be anything that you both think has meaning and value.

The difference between being online and being physically among people, I saw in that moment, is a bit like the difference between pornography and sex: it addresses a basic itch, but it's never satisfying.

How do we start to rebuild a society where we don't feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?

Every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.

When they added up the figures, John and other scientists found that being disconnected from the people around you had the same effect on your health as being obese—which was, until then, considered the biggest health crisis the developed world faced.

Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.

Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions.

Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about "social recovery.

We are living, she has come to believe, in a culture where people are not "getting the connections that they need in order to be healthy human beings," and that is why we can't put down our smartphones, or bear to log off. We tell ourselves that we live so much of our lives in cyberspace because when we are there, we are connected—we are plugged into a swirling party with billions of people.

This is what I would want to tell my teenage self. You have to turn now to all the other wounded people around you, and find a way to connect with them, and build a home with these people, together - a place where you are bonded to one another and find meaning in your lives together. We have been tribeless and disconnected for so long now. It's time for us all to come home.

There's nothing naive about believing that concerted democratic campaigning can change the world. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said: "It's the only thing that ever has.

Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions. But here's the truth: this despair isn't just self-defeating; I think it's actually empirically wrong. I reminded myself - forces as powerful as the tech companies have been defeated many times in human history, and it always happens in the same way. It is when ordinary people form movements and demand something better, and they don't give up until they have achieved it.

you don't need millions of people. You need a small group of people that get [what] the problems [are], and know about creative confrontation—to create drama around it, to begin the consciousness-raising…. You capture people's attention, and then enough people feel that it's a vital issue that they want to give their time and their energy [to], and that there's a clear direction.

Loneliness, he concluded, is causing a significant amount of the depression and anxiety in our society.

in a culture where people are not "getting the connections that they need in order to be healthy human beings," and that is why we can't put down our smartphones, or bear to log off.

A compassionate approach leads to less addiction.

In a world that thinks there's no such thing as society, the idea that our depression and anxiety have social causes will seem incomprehensible. It's like talking in ancient Aramaic to a twenty-first-century kid.

have become the first humans to ever dismantle our tribes. As a result, we have been left alone on a savanna we do not understand, puzzled by our own sadness.

We have been tribeless and disconnected for so long now. It's time for us all to come home.

We are not imprisoned in the values that have been making us feel so lousy for so long. By coming together with what really matters, we can begin to dig a tunnel back to meaningful values.

A one-way relationship can't cure loneliness. Only two-way (or more) relationships can do that.

On Lenore's street when she was a kid, everyone played softball and policed the rules themselves. Today, they go to organized activities where the adults intervene all the time to tell them what the rules are. Free play has been turned into supervised play, and so—like processed food—it has been drained of most of its value.

This is a common human response to the circumstances in which we all live. This is not something that separates you from the world. It's something, actually, you share with countless others." We need to see "this is not just my personal problem," he said, but "a shared problem—and attributable to the kind of society we live in.

this change has caused another transformation—in how people see the police. "I don't think [people in poor neighborhoods] see the police now as enemies.