building community

Last week, a 74-year-old man died alone in a Rotterdam apartment block. His body wasn’t discovered for three weeks — not because he lived in some remote area, but in a building with thirty neighbors. The story struck a raw nerve. We live closer together than ever before, yet we know each other less and less. Somewhere in this tension between proximity and alienation lies an urgent question: what happened to our sense of community? And what can we learn from a fraternity that has spent centuries experimenting with building meaningful bonds between strangers? The Vanishing Village Square Modern society is changing at breakneck speed. Studies consistently show that nearly half the population in developed Western nations reports feeling lonely at least some of the time. The numbers are highest among young adults and the elderly. These aren’t statistics about people living in isolated rural areas — they describe residents of cities and towns, surrounded by thousands of others. The traditional village square, where people naturally ran into each other, has been replaced by digital spaces where algorithms determine what we see and who we interact with. The chance encounter at the bakery, the chat over the garden fence, the […]