Where do you go looking for community when you’ve outgrown your echo chamber?

We’ve shrunk “community” into small, comfortable, curated circles. And in doing so, we’ve lost the ability to feel responsibility, guilt, or empathy at scale.

Drinks last night ended on a shared note that both my friend and I have, in some ways, outgrown our echo chambers.

And I don’t mean our “village”. Whether you have one, raise one, are trying to be a better villager yourself, or have even retired the innate need for a village, I imagine most of us still know what it is to feel we’ve failed the people around us in some way.

Some people are hyper-individualistic with a contained sense of failure, and for some, it spills more readily. Whatever our spectrum of emotions may be, why does it feel like we’ve lost the ability to feel responsibility at scale?

My friend from last night told me they felt it when they came across Raji didi on Instagram, a househelp to self-proclaimed “top engineers of Bangalore,” giving healthy eating tips while reading off a script prepared by her “madam.”

Now there are already arguments in the comments about whether any of the money from those videos actually goes to Raji didi, or whether the couple who run the account in fact want Raji didi’s popularity to funnel into their other businesses. Those are separate questions, best left to those already asking them.

The point is this: my friend, too, has a “didi” who has wanted to make cooking videos for months. And for reasons, however legitimate, they haven’t been able to help her build something like a Raji didi or a Manik da on Instagram. And they feel responsible for not using their own access and social mobility to create something more for someone who exists within their orbit.

And the same sense of responsibility shows up for me, too, in different forms. Hence, this Substack.

There’s a kind of constant, high-grade guilt that comes from realising, at any given moment, that someone else is having a much harder time than you. It’s almost impossible not to feel it, especially now. And while I’m not looking to be absolved of that guilt, it does make me question the limits of shared responsibility.

For instance, recently, when an old friend from my time in London asked me whether I long to go back or feel settled here now, I took time out to sit with that question. In the end, I told them that while I am supremely fond of my life and severely dependent on the people and creatures in it, I yearn to be back in classrooms again.

And that, after being accepted by my choice universities with my research idea two academic years in a row, only to be rejected at the PhD funding stage, I’ve learned that the world and its institutions, as they are currently structured, do not care to pay for my intrigue.

It has sharpened “personal is political” for me. Because however upset an academic bottleneck at 27 makes me, I am lucky that’s all the material impact the state of the world has on my life. And that there’s no real compulsion to think about the world immediately outside of my own if I don’t want to. Which is a fact I haven’t learned to sit still with.

Think about it: had we not been so self-limiting in how we define our “village,” if we didn’t restrict it to our 3 a.m. callers and the people we play pickleball with, maybe it would be easier to understand why collectivisation once came more naturally than it does now.

We’ve made our communities smaller and more curated. Our bubbles, as sturdy as they’ve always been, we’ve let expand just enough to include a few more people beyond ourselves.

And since there’s no real, humane way to stop feeling responsible for others, we just sit with a kind of ambient guilt that we don’t know how to metabolise or don’t think to action.

But neither has community historically been the same as a club, nor has it ever been culturally related to a clique.

In fact, I imagine ‘community’ to include everyone around me. The people who make my day exponentially easier, and those who sometimes make it harder. And I say this as someone who is perpetually over-fkn-whelmed.

I read a line recently that stayed with me:
“We owe it to the spaces that we are part of to not exist in a state of perpetual extraction.”

And it reminded me of something Tricia Jose wrote in their Substack:

“Because community at scale reshapes neighbourhoods, and even entire cities—beautiful for those who can afford to be there, flat in its homogeneity. Everyone wearing the same Patagonia vest, ordering the same matcha, yes-anding the same take. Meanwhile, those who don’t meet the bar suffer in isolation in the shadows. It can be hard to tell where belonging ends and conformity begins because we as humans inherently yearn to belong. But we must also ask who gets to belong? And why?”