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The Not So Revolutionary Idea of Finding Your People
Community is vital. Can we survive the incoming mass loneliness?
Scorching 23 degrees Celsius. Only in Australia, I tell you. Autumn is arriving and, still buzzing in the air — with words such as UV and cancer, and the sounds of spray sun protection — there’s the survival of summer. The docks at Melbourne are usually deserted despite the many societal and economic efforts that the state of Victoria has put into it. It’s a beautiful area, with good views, restaurants, and the sound of dragon boaters training in the harbour, yet virtually deserted most days of the year. Today, a walking mass of people, phones out, and quirky hats on, walks as a unified cybernetic crowd. One minute in, I can put my hand on fire (anything metal at the moment) that a Pokémon Go event is happening.
As a reminder of more academic times, the highest grade I achieved during my master’s was for a teamwork project on Consumer Attitudes and Behaviours, where we researched, wrote about, and experimented with Pokémon Go. Nowadays, I play Pokémon TCG Pocket because my partner and some friends do — though I have little intrinsic motivation to do so.
The video game that spawned a universe of cute, derpy monsters was born in Japan just a couple of years after I was born in Italy. I’d like to claim this makes Pokémon and me young, but like a fine wine, we’ve gone vintage.
Social psychology, my former field of study, is relatively young — especially compared to psychology as a whole. The social sciences are so recent that many of their ‘classic’ figures are still alive. Pavlov, Piaget, and Bandura have passed, but Robert Putnam remains, the undisputed “science daddy” of clubs and community.
It’s fitting to place Putnam among psychology’s greats, even though he’s a political scientist — because understanding human behavior demands a multidisciplinary approach. And, as we now play alone on our devices, in the 90s, people were Bowling Alone. Creating a disconnect in the heart of what made humans happy, productive, and empathic: community.
