Stable Communities in which the Terrible Disease of Loneliness can be Cured

Sunday, October 6

Today’s excerpt is from an episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast from author John Green:

Someone once told me that Indianapolis is among the nation’s leading test markets for new restaurant chains, because the city is so thoroughly average. Indeed, it ranks among the top so-called “microcosm cities,” because Indianapolis is more averagely American than almost any other place. We are spectacular in our ordinariness. The city’s nicknames include “Naptown,” because it’s boring, and “India-no-place.”

When we first moved here, I would often write in the mornings at my neighborhood Starbucks, at the corner of 86th and Ditch, and I would marvel at the fact that all four corners of that intersection contain strip malls. It was all so horrifying to me—even though I lived less than a half-mile from that Starbucks, I had to drive because there were no sidewalks. All the land had been given over to cars, to sprawl, to the flat-roofed soullessness of the American minimall.

I was disgusted by it. Living in a tiny apartment in New York City where we could never quite eradicate the mice, I had romanticized home ownership. But now that we actually had a house, I hated it.

…

Late in that first Indianapolis year, Sarah and I became friends with our neighbors Marina and Chris Waters. Chris was a former Peace Corps volunteer, and Marina was a human rights lawyer. And like us, they’d just gotten married, and like us, they were living in their first home.

But unlike us, Chris and Marina really loved Indianapolis. 

We’d often go to lunch together at Smee’s, a little family-owned restaurant in one of the 86th and Ditch minimalls, and I would complain about the lawncare and the lack of sidewalks, and I remember once Chris said to me, “You know this is one of the most economically and racially diverse zip codes in the United States.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “It is. You can google it.”

I did google it, and he was right. The median home price near 86th and Ditch is $200,000, but there are million dollar houses and $800 a month apartments. At that corner, there are Thai and Chinese and Greek and Mexican restaurants, all independently owned. There’s a bookstore, a fair-trade gift shop, two pharmacies, a bank, a Salvation Army, and a liquor store named after the constitutional amendment that repealed prohibition. Sit outside of Smee’s for an afternoon and you’ll hear English and Spanish, Karin and Burmese, Russian and Italian. The problem was never 86th and Ditch, which turns out to be a great American intersection. The problem was me. And after Chris called my assumptions into question, I began to think differently about the city. I began to see it as a place where big moments in human lives take place. The climactic scenes in my two most recent novels, The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down, both take place at the corner of 86th and Ditch. And I think what people like about those books is Indianapolis.
 
As with all the best sci fi writers, Kurt Vonnegut was really good at seeing into the future. Way back in 1974, he wrote, “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” 

That seems to me an even more important, and more daring, endeavor than it was forty years ago. And when people ask me why I live in Indianapolis when I could live anywhere, that’s what I want to tell them. I am trying to create a stable community in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured, and you gotta do that somewhere. When I am sick with the disease of loneliness, good weather and shimmering skyscrapers do me no good whatsoever, as a writer or as a person. I must be home to do the work I need to do. And yes, home is that house where you no longer live. Home is before, and you live in after. But home is also what you are building and maintaining today, and I feel rather lucky in the end to be making my home just off of Ditch Road.

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I really like this essay, and I think it mostly speaks for itself. But maybe I’ll try drawing out two things from it.

The first is a lesson — a lot of the most lovable things in our life are right under our noses, and we may even realize the value in them. Fresh eyes — the beginner’s mind as it’s known in Zen — can help break us out of this, as was the case for Green with the city of Indianapolis.

The second is a question: how do we operationalize creating a stable community in which the terrible disease of lonlinesss can be cured? What does this look like in practice, day-to-day?

I suspect the biggest change is being more proactive about community building — expecting less to be invited to events, to join existing instutitions, to wander into stable friend groups — and instead looking to host events, build institutions, and develop new friend groups. Hence the word creating.