Committing to Each Other

Why lack of dedication feels like a constant burden in community building.

Since moving back to the city last year, we’ve been looking for people. Not acquaintances or the neighbours you wave to when you take out the garbage, but people who actually want to build community together. While I know that community technically exists everywhere - in the people you see and interact with each day - what we’ve been looking for is something deeper. I mean a kind of community built on strong commitment to friends and chosen family, the kind that doesn’t always exist in surface-level relationships. The kind where people invest time and care in one another so that life doesn’t have to be so hard.

We’ve been searching for a group of people willing to dedicate time and attention to each other, not out of duty but out of recognition that everything gets easier when we do. To share childcare, meals, errands, stories, the dull parts and the celebratory ones, to distribute the weight of everyday life. It’s a hard thing to look for. Because technically, yes, “community” already exists wherever people are: there are neighbours, clubs, classes, workplaces, groups, congregations. But much of what we call community now functions like infrastructure without any depth; institutional gatherings that keep us close in proximity, but not truly connected.

It’s remarkable how thoroughly capitalism has learned to sell the experience of connection back to us. Gyms, yoga studios, parenting groups, cooking classes - all ways to meet people, but completely transactional. We pay our fee, show up for the hour, and then leave. We chat and smile and sometimes even develop friendships, but the underlying message remains that belonging is a service, not a shared practice.

Workplaces and schools work similarly. They provide the structure of commitment (schedules, shared projects, a reason to see one another regularly) but the relationships themselves are focused on productivity, not mutual care. Outside of those spaces, we collapse back into the nuclear family, or worse, into isolation. The pandemic intensified this, but it didn’t create it. It simply made visible what was already true: that much of our social life had been outsourced to institutions that offer proximity without commitment.

Colonial capitalism has spent centuries teaching us that freedom is built through independence. It has done this by physically enclosing land and labour, but also the spaces of shared life like public squares, extended families, commons of care. What used to be collective has become private, professionalized, or for sale. Under late capitalism, exhaustion and anxiety are treated as personal failures rather than structural realities and then solutions like therapy or “self-care” are sold back to us with a price tag. Mark Fisher described this as the “privatisation of stress”. We’re expected to manage these so-called solutions on our own rather than by changing the systems that produce them. And, of course, when everyone is busy surviving, there’s little energy left to sustain others.

Is this why people appear to refuse connection? Is it not disinterest (which is always where I go first) but depletion? I feel like the question has been circling me for the last 5 years.

The story goes like this: time and emotional energy are already consumed by work, housing costs, child care, and the constant vigilance that is required when you live life in the cracks. Commitment to community becomes an unaffordable luxury good. In this way, it’s not a personal failing that folks can’t commit to community; it’s that they can’t because the system has taught us to believe that interdependence is a risk and self-sufficiency is a virtue.

And to be fair, it’s not that people lack commitment altogether. We’re deeply committed, just to the wrong things. We’re committed to our jobs, to keeping up appearances, to the self-optimization cycles of better habits and higher productivity. We’re committed to mortgages, subscriptions, and the fragile ecosystems of convenience that allow us to manage day-to-day existence without depending too much on one another.

These are the commitments capitalism rewards: efficiency, control, independence. What it punishes are the commitments that can’t be monetized: slowness, care work, empathy. The result is a kind of commitment inversion: the more energy we pour into sustaining ourselves individually within a capitalist framework, the less capacity we have to sustain one another collectively.

While Covid made this conflict visible, it wasn’t the root cause. The isolation that hit so hard during lockdowns didn’t come out of nowhere; it was more like a mirror held up to what was already there. Many of us were already living lives that were thin on connection but it took being physically cut off from one another to really feel how deep that disconnection ran.

For a moment, though, we remembered how to care during those early days of Covid, right? Neighbours dropped groceries on porches. Strangers sewed masks. Mutual-aid networks sprang up overnight. There was a glimpse of what it felt like to be part of something collective again.

When “normal life” resumed, that feeling of connection unraveled under the old pressures of work and school and life and exhaustion. The networks of mutual support that appeared were powerful but impossible to sustain inside an economic system that doesn’t give a shit about care or slowness or rest.

Now we’re left in the aftermath, where the isolation feels heavier because we’ve seen both sides of it - what connection can feel like, and how quickly it disappears. What looks like a lack of commitment is often the grief and stress from being constantly run down. It also feels like there’s also a kind of learned suspicion now. Many of us instinctively pull back from commitments because we can’t bear another obligation that might overextend ourselves. We just have no spoons left.

The irony is that the very commitments that could relieve exhaustion like shared meals, collective care, and cooperative living are the ones exhaustion makes impossible. We retreat into solitude because we can’t imagine mustering the work for interdependence. This is the emotional economy of late capitalism: we are all exhausted, we all want connection, but we are all unable to do the required labour for fear that it will cost too much.

If there’s a way out, I truly think it must start small. Commitment doesn’t have to look like founding a commune or organizing a co-op. It can be as simple as an agreement to keep showing up to share food, to walk together, to help each other fix what’s broken. Ivan Illich says that the opposite of school is not un-schooling, but “learning webs” - informal networks of mutual learning. Maybe the opposite of capitalism’s atomized individual looks more like a web of ongoing, low-stakes commitments that simply help us to survive. Size isn’t what’s important. It’s the decision to commit to your friends, family, and neighbours instead of capitalist productivity.

Recently, my partner started volunteering with a group serving food for hungry folks downtown. It isn’t an established non-profit, though they get some security and support from one. It’s a group of friends who’ve decided that feeding hungry people is important enough to build their lives around. They show up week after week: collecting food donations, prepping on Friday nights, cooking on Sunday mornings, and then setting up on a street corner to serve anyone who needs a meal. Most weeks they feed 70-100 people, many unhoused. Over time they’ve built a community of folks who care for one another, who remember each other’s names, who have each other’s backs.

Some of this crew has started coming to our monthly potlucks. After months of trying some consistency in attendance and watching people drift away, these folks just… showed up. And keep showing up. After a long day of feeding others, they come to decompress, be fed themselves, and enjoy the company of friends at the end of a long day. It took me a while to realize why their presence felt so grounding: these are people who understand what it means to commit to community. They already live that rhythm; the habit of showing up for each other, no matter what.

Community doesn’t begin with shared values or perfect alignment. It begins with this notion of commitment and the stubborn decision to keep turning up, to bear witness to each other’s lives. In a culture that glorifies flexibility and personal freedom, dedication is fucking hard. But the commitment to devote our time and energy towards something that sustains rather than extracts feels really radical in this moment in time.

The people my partner cooks with aren’t solving capitalism or loneliness, but they’re refusing the logic that says everyone should fend for themselves. Their kind of commitment isn’t glamorous, but it does feel contagious. It reminds me that belonging isn’t something you find; it’s something we build together.