A video of a young boy playing basketball in his driveway with a UPS driver is making the rounds on social media. For nearly 90 seconds, the UPS driver and the boy go shot-for-shot before the driver continues his route. The joy between the two is impossible to miss. And in a rare moment of overwhelming positivity on social media, the comments for the video are overflowing with appreciation for the driver bringing a moment of joy into the boy’s day.
Scattered across social media are similar videos of neighbors in varied communities around the country showing various acts of kindness. Some of the more notable examples include an older gentleman bringing a coffee to a younger neighbor before the younger man heads off to work to a teenage boy running to help a new mother carry both her baby and groceries from her car to her front door.
Watching any of these moments of kindness and connectivity, it’s hard not to smile. But moments like these should not be exceptional and draw such acclaim; they should be the norm.
Being community-focused, knowing one’s neighbors, and being helpful to others should be instinctual and a common part of our daily lives rather than occasional and worthy of praise. While it is undoubtedly not the case that we have to be best friends with our neighbors or have them over daily for coffee or meals, we as a nation need to make a better effort to know our neighbors and connect with our communities; a facet of life which is missing from our daily lives nowadays.
It is worth remembering that civic-mindedness and the connection to others have historically been part of our nation’s core identity. A central point in Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” is the very fact that the United States had a unique tradition of local support structures and social capital where individuals come together to address community needs and foster a sense of shared responsibility: “America has a long and rich tradition of generosity that begins with simple acts of neighbor helping neighbor.”
Contrary to most of Europe, Tocqueville was surprised by the breadth and depth of these localized connections, which he saw as a key building block of democratic society, and wisely recognized that these connections promoted not only a sense of belonging but civic responsibility and the ability to address common challenges collectively as well.
With the advent of numerous changes to American life over the past decades, our connections have attenuated and Americans are facing crippling loneliness and barely know their neighbors.
There are many potential causes and factors in promoting this change that observers and academics alike have pointed to that may have accelerated this powerful decline in our nation’s social fabric.
From post-war sprawl and the decline of urban cores to our economic shift to a service-based knowledge economy to the rise of post-war housing and commercial planning designed to isolate and segregate Americans, these spatial and economic changes have dramatically altered how most Americans spent their time and engage with others.
Add to the mix the rise of car culture, homogenization of our landscapes away from shared spaces and public amenities, the end of free range children, and social media creating echo chambers and social bubbles, many Americans have lost and truly forgotten the proud tradition of being in a localized community where they play a role in its success and daily function.
While certainly not planned to unwind the bonds of civic life, given these seismic changes to American life, it is no accident that Americans do know one another, have little trust in each other and our many institutions, are deeply lonely and disconnected from others, and certainly don’t know their neighbors.
The U.S. Surgeon General has described the levels of American loneliness today as an epidemic.
Data from Harvard’s Making Caring Common Project in 2024 reveals the depth of this loneliness and disconnect and shows that two-thirds (67%) of Americans do not feel part of meaningful groups, and 61 percent report that they do not have enough close friends or family. Close to two-thirds of respondents (65%) reported feeling fundamentally disconnected from others or the world, and 63 percent reported that their place in the world does not feel important or relevant.
On the idea of neighborhood relationships, specifically, the numbers of quite disheartening. A 2024 Nextdoor-Harris Poll uncovered that 1 in 3 people in the U.S. (34%) state feeling lonely or disconnected from their community. And, sadly, the data also show that while four in five Americans know at least one person in their neighborhood, half (50%) know only two people or fewer, and a fifth (19%) say they “don’t know anyone.”
Put differently, 1 in 5 Americans adults say they don’t know anyone or have any friends in their neighborhood. 20 percent of Americans know no one in their local community and that number increases among younger generations: almost a third of Gen Z Americans (30%), for instance, report not knowing anyone in their neighborhood; this is not good for their social lives or a community’s civic health.
Unsurprisingly, the Harris Poll also found that 71% of adults say they want to meet more people in their neighborhood, and 50% say they wish they had a closer relationship with their neighbors. However, respondents say that it is challenging to create new relationships with their neighbors. About 47% of adults report that it is difficult to make new connections in their neighborhood and local community, and younger generations- those most connected to social media – are more likely to struggle making connections with their neighbors.
While our spatial arrangements and technology-centric world are designed to keep us cocooned and disconnected from each other, we can and must take steps to mitigate our social isolation and dislocation for others along with our loneliness and re-establish communal norms of support and connection. Relationships take work, and civil society does not just emerge; it must develop and be cultivated.
It can be taught to younger generations and it must be nurtured, modeled, and supported; community must become a priority once again for our nation.
Given so many strong, positive reactions to seeing neighbors interact with one another on social media, Americans should learn from those videos and try connecting and engaged once again with their neighbors. This is not some great secret. Creating connections means looking up from one’s phone and recognizing that we all want to have relationships with others to varying degrees and this often simply requires that someone take the initiative and reach out.
So, invite a neighbor over for a meal or a drink; put your phone down, listen and engage with someone in your community; help them or the neighborhood with some form of service or volunteer work, and be authentic.
Host a picnic or BBQ or try closing the down the street for a block party. Things may go poorly at first; human, casual social contact is not as easy or familiar for many as it once was, but we need to start somewhere and a small interaction can very well lead to deep and meaningful friendships or at least positive neighborly relationships. But that collective initiative is critical now and far too uncommon.
As the Surgeon General correctly argues, “The keys to human connection are simple, but extraordinarily powerful,” so let’s take the first step and have stronger, more social and more connected communities so that our children don’t think a video of neighbors sharing coffee is so unique that it deserves widespread praise.