The Problem as We See It

Over the last half-century, the fabric of everyday community has thinned dramatically: the big things that once offered shared identity and purpose, like organized religion and the sense of a common national project, and the smaller ones, like the clubs, unions, lodges and neighbourhoods that held people’s lives together. In an honest effort to make institutions more truthful, more inclusive and less coercive, we’ve also lost the sturdy foundations of belonging and support they once offered. Much of that work was necessary, but too often nothing of real substance has replaced them.

Screens and algorithms now soak up the hours people used to spend with each other. They imitate connection just well enough to keep us scrolling, and the companies behind them make more money the longer they can keep us at home. Every year more of life migrates onto devices, and the real thing keeps slipping away.

Across Canadian cities, the cost of a home has outrun wages for two decades, and rent eats a share of income that would have been unthinkable to our parents. People living in small apartments have nowhere to host a dinner or gather a dozen friends for a holiday. The front porches, dining rooms, backyards and spare bedrooms where community used to form have been priced out of many people’s lives, and what’s left to spend on each other after housing is shrinking too.

Cafes, pubs, libraries, places of worship, community halls and campsites, where people used to gather without a plan, are thinning out. Some have closed, others have grown too expensive to linger in, and some survive only as facsimiles on a screen. What’s left tends to need careful planning, or you buy something and leave. Not places to just be, to run into people, and to belong.

Costs climb, inequality rises, the climate is changing, democratic institutions feel under threat, and technology is changing rapidly. Whether by design or by drift, the pressures on ordinary lives look likely to intensify before they ease. That’s by no means the end of the story, but it is the world we’ll be living in for some time, and it is far easier to face with people around you.

Not always there for the big moments, or when life falls apart. And the bonds can fade when health, age or money make it hard to keep coming: an injury that ends the weekly game, or a layoff that puts the fees out of reach.

In Vancouver, the cost of a home puts it out of reach for many, and there are only so many communities to go around. Often it means a long waitlist, or building something from scratch.

Most ask more than an ordinary life can give, and without sound structure underneath they tend to come apart. The worst harden around a charismatic leader who ends up controlling the money, the rules, and eventually the people.

Church-shaped community without the church, and they drew real crowds. But many asked so little of anyone that they stayed audiences rather than communities, and quietly faded.