We Were Meant to Live Together: Reclaiming Community in a World That’s Forgotten How

For most of human history, people didn’t live or survive alone. We didn’t try to do everything by ourselves or see needing others as weakness. We lived in families, tribes, villages, towns, and cities. Our ancestors raised children together, shared food and labor, held grief and joy in common. They even collected their bodily waste in shared pots to produce ammonia for dyeing cloth. Survival was a communal effort, not a personal achievement.
 

Somewhere along the way, we replaced this lived truth with a myth. The myth of independence. The ideal of the stoic, self-sufficient person. We’ve glorified going it alone, even as that way of living breaks our bodies, our spirits, and our communities.
 

Today, it’s possible to go weeks, months, or years without truly knowing the people around us. We can work, shop, learn, worship, and eat without speaking to anyone who lives within a hundred miles. Technology makes life efficient, but it also isolates us. We are more connected than ever, and more alone than we’ve ever been. We scroll past one another, react with emojis instead of conversation, and often don’t even know our neighbors’ names. Our houses have grown closer together but we might as well be living in our own space ships divided by millions of miles. This isn’t just sad. It’s dangerous.
 

The ideal of Pa Ingalls immortalized in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books has become a central myth of American identity, even though it was never real. It was created to support Manifest Destiny and the wealthy interests behind it. Frontier settlers weren’t lone heroes taming the wilderness. They were tools of expansion, often sent to displace Indigenous communities and open land for exploitation. They didn't go it alone. They were subsidized by the government.
 

The long result of this myth of hyper-individualism is not just a cultural problem but a spiritual one. It has fractured our sense of shared human responsibility, turned faith into something private and transactional, and trained us to believe our suffering is more or more important than the suffering of others. That lie is killing us.
 

The sacred has never lived in isolation. In Indigenous and African traditions, spirit is rooted in relationships with the land, the ancestors, the plants, the animals, and with each other. Black theology teaches that salvation is communal, found in struggle, liberation, joy, hope, and shared care. Even in the early Jesus movement, faith meant living in community. Jesus intentionally walked the world with others, ate with the marginalized, healed in public, and practiced mutual care. Too many modern faith spaces have flipped that model, reducing belief to private salvation and personal success. "I AM SAVED!"  and "I GET TO GO TO HEAVEN!"as if that negates the need to ever do anything more here on earth.

But the deeper truth remains if we look for it. In Christian scripture, the first person raised from the dead after Jesus wasn’t a prophet or priest but Dorcas, a woman who made clothes for widows and fed orphans. The community couldn’t bear to lose her and begged she be restored. She mattered because she served, because she loved. And that’s where holiness lives, not in the words but in showing up, mending what’s torn, caring for the ones the world forgot, and centering love and communal joy as the work happens.
 

We weren’t made to do this alone. Trying to meet all our needs by ourselves isn’t just exhausting but impossible. No amount of self-care can fully replace the healing of being cared for by others. Sometimes the best medicine is someone making you tea when you’re too tired to move, or wrapping you in love when you have hit a wall.
 

So what would it look like to turn back toward each other?

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Maybe it starts small. Maybe it is planting a garden with a neighbor, organizing a childcare swap, calling a friend who’s been quiet. Maybe it grows into something bigger, reimagining economies around mutual aid, housing around shared ownership, faith communities around actual belonging, or building something to serve a yet un-served need.
 

Because when we build lives that are truly shared, we don’t just survive. We thrive.
 

Indigenous communities, African villages, Jewish shtetls, Buddhist sanghas, and so many others have known this truth. They weren’t perfect, but they were rooted in relationship, in mutual care, in knowing that when we do for others, we do also for ourselves.
 

This is radical interdependence. It is washing feet and breaking bread and lifting each other up. It is resurrection that restores entire communities, not just individuals. Today, too many are ready to watch their neighbors’ houses burn, literally and/or figuratively, and rthen espond with thoughts and prayers while letting corporations decide the worth of what was lost. We have replaced barn-raisings with insurance claims and replaced community care with algorithms that allow others to profit from our pain.
 

This is not a future we should accept.
 

Real change will not come from billionaires or from Mars. It will come from people. From porches and potlucks. From rebuilding trust and creating rituals that remind us we belong to each other. From the sacred work of showing up and staying. It will come from me. It will come from you.
 

Resistance is not only about standing against what harms. It is about building what heals after you stand. The resurgence of racism, nationalism, and the erosion of rights is real, but so is our capacity to reject the limitations they tell us we must fit inside and to rebuild. So let's tell the stories that knit us together. Let's return to a world that reminds us all that we are not alone.
 

The change we seek begins within us, but it cannot end there. We find our strength in community, in chosen family, in the shared breath of becoming. That is where belonging lives. That is where transformation begins.

That is communal care and that is the heart of our circles.