Never Retire: Sense Of Community

Six days until we experience leaving America for Spain

Over the last year—and, especially, the last few months—I have received quite a few messages from people who have moved or are planning to move abroad.

It has been great to hear from others with words of encouragement and offers of assistance. My wife and I will have the opportunity to meet with many of the people who have made contact after we arrive in Spain.

And this doesn’t even count the fellow writers and creators we have come to know since we decided to move to Spain. Not to mention the ones we read, watch and think we would like to meet.

It seems as if there’s a real sense of community that we are only beginning to feel around moving abroad. At a less specific, but equally as meaningful scale, I feel something similar among subscribers to my newsletter. We relate to one another—and sometimes bond—around the idea of doing cool shit in life.

The Never Retire umbrella really synthesizes the idea of not standing still, of always challenging yourself—often out of good situations—particularly at points in life where societal convention would have you settle or otherwise take things down a notch. We often fail to properly mix slowing down and enjoying life with remaining engaged and vibrant.

These two emerging feelings of sense of community connect one of the most formative times of my life to the present. Just as we discussed strange coincidences in yesterday’s newsletter installment, it’s nice to see an academic concept that got me so excited as a college student come back and make itself relevant on the ground as I approach 50.

Today, we discuss sense of community—a psychological construct of interest to urban planners—and how people often chase and sometimes try to force it throughout their lives. While you might be able to create the conditions that foster a sense of community—knowingly or unknowingly—it usually just happens when you least expect it. Or—more precisely—when you take a chance and go after something that you think can enhance your quality of life. Of course, this springs from my American perspective. For many reasons, sense of community appears to be part of other cultures, for reasons we’ll explore today.

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As a college student, I became obsessed with doing research. It’s a bug I think quite a few students catch. It prompted me to do my own independent research, send articles to academic journals and even get a couple published.

Getting published is an accomplishment I’m proud of. In fact, as I attempt to pare all of my belongings down to a travel backpack, a duffle bag and—maybe—a tiny bit of space in one of my wife’s suitcases, two of the items making the cut are the journal editions my research appeared in. You can see one of them inside a bag I have already tentatively started packing. Tentatively, because I will unpack and pack it again for efficiency’s sake and to—likely—eliminate another item or two.

I have referenced the articles I published several times. Because I’m proud of them!

You can access the full text of the one that’s relevant today here.

Taking the psychological concept of sense of community and applying it to urban planning. Not necessarily novel. Not the most rigorous research. I stood in the middle of several public spaces and used a number system to “randomly” ask people to fill out my survey! But it got published and still gets cited by scholars around the world today.

Because sense of community has always fascinated academics. On an academic level, yes. But also on a personal level. Because sense of community is elusive in our society and around the world. To some degree—whether we know it or not—we’re all trying to find it.

You can make strong connections, build bonds and get attached to individuals—even multiple individuals in, say, a social circle—but this doesn’t mean there’s a sense of community.

The origins of sense of community date back to 1974 and a psychologist named Seymour Sarason.

From my paper—

Sense of community is a psychological construct of interest to urban researchers. Sarason (1974) brought the concept to the forefront of community psychology, defining sense of community as “the sense that one was part of a readily available, mutually supportive network of relationships upon which one could depend” (p. 1). Years later, McMillan and Chavis (1986) systematized the construct, and to date their multidimensional model of sense of community is widely employed as the theoretical basis for empirical work on sense of community in community psychology and related disciplines.

Indeed, McMillan and Chavis took the concept to the next level in what became a super influential paper in community psychology. One that has a clear connection to our physical and social environments, at least in the eyes of urban planners and sociologists.

Let’s take the key part of a variation of that 1986 paper and intersperse thoughts relevant to our going concerns—

We propose four criteria for a definition and theory of sense of community. First, the definition needs to be explicit and clear; second, it should be concrete, its parts identifiable; third, it needs to represent the warmth and intimacy implicit in the term; and, finally, it needs to provide a dynamic description of the development and maintenance of the experience. We will attempt to meet these standards.

Our proposed definition has four elements. The first element is membership. Membership is the feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness.

We’re all looking to belong. To something.

Sense of belonging is distinct from sense of community. This is a pretty good definition among quite a few attempts to define sense of belonging: “Sense of belonging is defined as the experience of personal involvement in a system or environment so that persons feel themselves to be an integral part of that system or environment.”

When you belong, you have the sense that you play a role in whatever group, system or environment you belong to. You can feel a sense of belonging in any number of settings, but not necessarily experience sense of community. I belong to a group of people moving to Europe, but I am only in the beginning stages of experiencing a sense of community. It remains to be seen if and how things develop further.

One thing is clear: Sense of community is too complex to be forced. You see people try to force it all of the time. It can be cringe-worthy. There’s a fine line between being enthusiastic and too eager. Between painting a picture of what you want and bulldozing your way around to make it happen and letting life happen in what is often a long and winding process.

The second element is influence, a sense of mattering, of making a difference to a group and of the group mattering to its members.

This helps explain people reaching out. Reaching out is a behavior. We don’t think twice about it. We want to be good and helpful people. We like to share what we know. So we make contact with others—independent of any academic concept (!)—to do just that. However, in the process we’re illustrating how McMillan and Chavis conceptualized sense of community.

The third element is reinforcement: integration and fulfillment of needs. This is the feeling that members’ needs will be met by the resources received through their membership in the group.

You become part of a group for a purpose. You belong. You take what you need. Hopefully, you’re able to give something back to other group members. Now or in the future. Along the way, you socially interact (a behavior) and establish social connections (pretty much a consequence of your behavior). This makes us feel good. Some say participating in these social environments can help us live longer, healthier lives.

The last element is shared emotional connection, the commitment and belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together, and similar experiences. This is the feeling one sees in farmers’ faces as they talk about their home place, their land, and their families; it is the sense of family that Jews feel when they read The Source by James Michener (1965). In a sentence, the definition we propose is as follows: Sense of community is a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together (McMillan, 1976).

Now, the rubber meets the road.

This is part of a message I received on LinkedIn from a woman, who moved to Spain from San Francisco with her husband just over a year ago—

If there's any assistance at all we can provide, please don't hesitate to reach out. In the meantime, be well and good luck as you get through your final days. They may be a bit hellish, but you'll love it on the other side.

Right now, my wife and I are going through what this woman and her husband went through. Or something similar, logistically and emotionally. The planning. The execution. The nerves. The anxiety. Collectively, the excitement around doing this!

“On the other side,” the four of us will have shared experiences and a shared emotional connection. Take a bunch of people going through this type of process independent of one another. Get subsets of these groups in touch with one another. And—sooner or later—you have a non-physical (maybe loose, maybe not) sense of community that often forms online and maybe becomes a thing in “real life.”

My apologies for going somewhat academic on you. But I find all of this interesting and topical.

When my daughter was in middle and high school, she spent a lot of time online. In different forums built around various gaming and other fandoms. At times, this was concerning. However, I should have known that—all along—she was building a sense of community with others that would help support her through her teen years into adulthood.

She met her first and second roommates online. Today, they remain two of her best friends.

This video—(which I think I started at the point where she basically starts talking about sense of community)—does a nice job of getting at what we’re discussing, as it pertains to sense of community being part of (or more part of) a culture.

Now, she’s not quite talking about the full realization of sense of community as McMillan and Chavis described it. However, she is talking about the existence of conditions—in this case, sociocultural conditions and attitudes—that can lead to sense of community.

I studied the elements of the built environment can help create conditions for sense of community. Less driving. More walking. Better public space. Increased opportunities for informal social interaction. An increased probability that two people whose paths would have never crossed meet and realize they have shared experiences. And so on.

Of course, this can happen in settings that are not urban. City life just so happens to be my passion and focus.

Then, there’s the cultural aspect. Something I can’t wait to experience—(or, who knows, not experience)—in real life in Spain. If you keep watching the YouTube video, she gets into how social interactions are just different in Spain. The way people handle themselves socially appears to be close to, if not the opposite of how people handle themselves in America, in many ways. If this is all true, it makes sense why so many people move to Spain—and places like it—and simply can’t imagine living in the United States again.

It’s all definitely verifiable, as evidenced in the aforementioned accounts of people realizing how low quality of life can be in the United States. I’m looking forward to experiencing all of this firsthand and reporting back. I’m well aware of my need to balance experiencing and letting all of the above happen with the reality that I am hyper aware of these sociocultural conditions because I have always studied and written about them.

I’ll do my best. And I hope my outlook—which combines everyday living with closer inspection—will help me provide a unique view of settling in a new country and culture from one that takes a lot of well-deserved shit.

We officially start the process in just six days!

Never Retire: One Week Until We Leave America