The Loneliest Crowd

I am writing in my living room. My housemates criss-cross the floor, with coriander flopping from the crook of their elbows, shouting some important orders from the kitchen. Our house is full of vibrancy and laughter as we prepare the space for the incoming dinner party guests.  

As I sit across from my friends, I am aware of how many dinners I substituted the golden glow of candles and homemade vegan tacos for a youtube video, propped up against a salt shaker. At this point it’s made it’s way into the script of the YouTubers I watch, who offhandedly mention they know their audience is eating their lunch.  The comments are then flooded by surprised people, feeling called out as they also slurp up noodles.

People are trying to procure the same feeling as a family dinner, by watching Rachel and Ross fight over losing a monkey. Are we yearning for the log seat campfire days, roasting rodents on a spit? Centuries of celebrating our continued survival with the tribe?

Or is this all just a problem with chronically online weebs who don't touch grass? Why don’t we all just go outside and find the bonfire we so truly crave?

We try. The truth is, the campfires are disappearing. 

Meeting neighbours becomes increasingly difficult when the porches of your home are covered in anti-homelessness spikes. It takes a certain obvious level of inhumanity for even BoJo to tweet, calling the infrastructure of your Southwark block of flats ‘terrible’. You can't bump into your next best friend in the sweet-tomed aisles of the public library, if the online Britannica is the closest people get to a book nowadays. People are reading Ao3 in the dark instead of sitting in the round at a book club. Even when one is out and about, exploring the small corners the cities haven’t yet bulldozed for more parking spaces, people don't talk. Everyone has noise cancelling headphones on, listening to their self-improvement podcasts. 

Third spaces have been dwindling. 

This is bolstered, perhaps, by the rise in individuality culture. This kind of self-first thinking, so evidenced in the new Louis Theroux documentary on the ‘Manosphere’. These prominent creators blame parents for the rhetoric being fed to children by their own content. This is mirrored in the opinion that has become so prominent online, where not cutting someone off is a crime against your own self-care and shows an embarrassing lack of self worth. Nobody wants to take responsibility for anything or anyone but themselves. 

People not only don't feel like they need anyone else anymore, but they also don't have anywhere to go to feel different. 

I have felt so much of my life slip through my fingers, stained blue from phone light. Friends have come to me complaining of a deep, complex loneliness. The whole world seems obsessed with the male loneliness epidemic, I’m sure I don't have to go on. 

So how do you fight against the hostile architecture of the world we live in, and curate communities again?

Even if they are harder to find and less commonly attended nowadays, there is still food around the fire. 

Beneath the work humdrum of Leeds, there are little magical pockets. Like flowers through the cracks in the pavement, Leeds Writers Meetup has been an escape of true community. Each Wednesday evening the Crowd of Favours pub grows loud with the chatter of like-minded strangers. With no prior understanding, the silence, broken sporadically by keyboard typing, becomes the low hum of conversation - all at the same time. You meet people of all ages, professions and walks of life, words on the page turn to words in the air. One kind of writing into another. We go there to write, and we stay for the people. 

Each week I am reminded that community is burgeoning all around us, if you know where to look. I urge anyone to seek out whoever gets together in your corner of the world to do whatever your favourite activity is. It is almost an act of resistance. Against a way of life that is intent on only making us lonelier. Even if it is harder than it should be. Before it slips away.

Words by Hannah Hollenbery, she/her