Living Alone, Together.

Living Alone, Together.

I live in a nice neighbourhood, with nice people but I’m not as close to my neighbours now as I remember being as a child.

Whenever I see them and we offer up our hellos, as I walk away, I always stop to consider how funny it is to be living so close to someone while knowing so little about who they are.

I remember one of my professors describing it as, “living alone together.” How you know your neighbours, but don’t really know your neighbours. We’re alone but are still loosely held together by geographic proximity and shallow niceties.

We’re theoretically part of the same community, but the landscape feels more familiar than the faces; the sound of the birds is more recognizable than the sound of a neighbour’s voice.  Cities and suburbs aren’t as intimate as I imagine older communities must have been.

With time, human interaction seems to be falling out of style. And though Canada is a nation that does well materially — I feel a collective spiritual and emotional bankruptcy gripping the culture. It has us by the throat, but it’s been this way for so long that it almost feels normal.

Sometimes I feel like we’re being trained to spend more time theorizing about the world than actually living in it and that worries me because it’s harder to hold empathy for people who seem more like concepts than flesh and blood.

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