The Vanishing Virtue of Knowing Your Neighbors

Just before Christmas, my mother walked into my home with a concerned look. “The package with all the Christmas presents is gone.” She sighed. “I don’t know if it was stolen or if the plow knocked it off the mail boxes and buried it under the snow bank, but the post office says it was delivered but it’s just not there.” I was determined to find the missing package and save Christmas. After throwing our shovel into my car, I drove to the trio of mailboxes we share with our two neighbors where the road forks between our houses. My father met me there as I pulled up, his boots crunching in the snow, sizing up the snowbank mound like a determined prospector assessing an old mine. The plow’s handiwork was obvious. A towering, jagged wall of compacted snow loomed beside the road, its edges crusted with ice from the thaw-freeze cycle of early winter. My father stood for a moment, hands on his hips, surveying the mound. “If it’s here,” he said, “it’s deep.” I began digging behind the mailboxes and he looked skeptical. “Someone probably just grabbed it by mistake. I’m going to check if its one of the neighbors’ houses. If it’s in that snowbank, we’re not going to find it until May!” He then walked up the small hill, through the neighbor’s yard, knocked twice, let himself in, and found the missing package immediately in a pile by the door. After we had received our heroes’ welcome back at home, it occurred to me that what had transpired is increasingly rare in the Western world. We do not know our neighbors like we did a century ago, let alone feel comfortable enough to let ourselves into their homes unannounced. We have lost something profound: the trust and familiarity that once bound communities together. The simple act of walking into a neighbor’s house, unannounced but welcome, speaks to a level of connection that is now the exception rather than the rule. In our increasingly individualistic, atomized, and transient modern world, knowing your neighbors has become a relic of a bygone era, replaced by fences, locked doors, and polite but distant waves. This erosion of neighborly bonds comes at a cost, leaving us more isolated, paranoid, and less resilient in hard times that are becoming increasingly common.

Alfred Cornelius Howland, Friendly Neighbors, ca. 1909

A friend of mine remarked recently that she simply never sees candy dishes anymore. It’s true. When was the last time you saw a full candy dish just sitting on someone’s table awaiting friends and neighbors to drop in? It was not uncommon once to keep some food that we would recognize as a charcuterie board now on hand “just in case company comes by” but dropping in itself has become an increasingly rare event, replaced instead with futile attempts to schedule deliberate visits with friends who have become chronically busy. Invitations are so often turned down—if answered at all—and the dinner party, the block barbecue, the simple invitation for coffee are dying at the strangling hands of full calendars. There is a sad shift in our culture where hosting may have once been seen as a generous gift you would happily give to your neighbors, but is now a performative chore or obligation for which we simply do not have time. Hosting has been eclipsed by a culture of convenience and speed, where even meals are designed to be utilitarian, solitary, quick affairs to fulfil a biological need. For what have we traded the art of hosting? Many people will reflexively tell you television, video games, and social media. Although these may be true, hosting—and neighborliness in general—has been truly replaced by a sense of paranoia. We see a breakdown of trust within our neighborhoods. Look no further than the NextDoor app to find countless reports from users of strange people in their neighborhoods clearly intent on thievery and worse. More often then not these presumed package thieves, murderous vagrants, and suspiciously slow drivers are the people who have been living nearby the digital neighborhood watchman for decades. We so often hear people claim “my home is my castle” while forgetting that a castle is ultimately a military fortification.

How did we even get here, to this fallen state of darkened homes, paranoia, and loneliness? We’re so quick to blame social media, screens, and COVID, but the truth is this problem has been festering for a much longer time. First, look to the oldest part of your town and ask yourself what you notice. If your town is like mine, the oldest houses were built before the advent of the automobile and built much closer together than those built after the early 1900s. The density certainly helped familiarity, but one could easily point to giant apartment buildings where, despite living on top of one another, the people still do not know their neighbors. The automobile did not just allow us to be further from one another, it allowed more independence. The people who lived in the old, relatively densely populated village knew each other in part because they needed each other. Today, I can hop in my car and get whatever I need if I run out of something or a minor emergency befalls my household. 120 years ago, I would have had to ask my neighbor. The telephone compounded this problem further, reducing the need for face-to-face communication for quick gossip too paltry for the effort of a letter but necessary for human interaction all the same. It also cannot be ignored that more households than not have had two breadwinners since after World War II and the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s; simply put, it is difficult to host when you and your spouse both come home from work exhausted, when one of you hasn’t been home all day with time to prepare. All these factors collided with our modern digital and technological ills to create the perfect storm for loneliness and isolation. Why do we not know our neighbors as well as we did a century ago? We do not need to, we are too tired, and it is simply easier to hide behind our screens.

So, how do we reclaim what has been lost? It starts with a simple step: