It Takes a Village

Happy Sunday, my friend,

I caught up with someone on Friday. He's a little further down the road than I am, kids of his own, past the part I'm only starting. I'd been filling him in on life on my side, and he didn't reach for anything clever. He'd done the whole thing, zero to one as he put it, and the one thing he felt he had to pass on was this. Remember, it takes a village. Don't try to do it all on your own.

I've heard the line my whole life, but it landed differently coming from him, on a Friday, with a month like the one we'd just had nearly behind us.

I've been sitting with the word community for a while now, which, for me, keeps translating into the older word, village. When I try to define it, I land somewhere near a group of people quietly looking out for one another, with no scoreboard running underneath. Just people who, on some real level, have each other's backs.

When I hold my own life up against that, it's there, but it isn't in full effect. It's dispersed, a little fragmented, spread across cities. I've had a version of this conversation with a bunch of you, the half-joking one where, ‘if a few of us just lived on the same street, life would be pretty sweet.’ That alone might be enough. It wouldn't take much. Maybe it's a pipe dream. Maybe it happens. Who knows.

Some of why community gets rare just falls out of how these years are built. Some of you have followed work and opportunity to a new city, then another. The calendar fills with careers and commitments. Making friends as an adult turns out to be genuinely hard. Families are scattered and complicated in a hundred ordinary ways. But some of it is also a quiet opting out. On most evenings, the easier thing is my own couch, my own screen, my own small orbit. Nobody took the village from me on those nights. I was just tired, needed to decompress, with no gas left in the tank for anyone else.

This month has been a shift, which is probably why it's on my mind. We're back in Canada, staying with my parents, and the house has been full. Friends come through. People take turns holding the baby without being asked. It has felt more like a village than our life in LA, where friends are more dispersed, we lean on a nanny a few hours a day, and most of it is just my wife and me. We have more of a village here. We fly back to LA tomorrow.

On some level, we're social animals, all of us reaching for some form of community, whatever shape it takes for you. (David Brooks' The Social Animal is a wonderful read on this.) And when the real thing isn't close at hand, the modern reflex is to reach for a substitute to fill the gap.

You pay for the help that a village used to provide more easily. Or you attach to whatever circle will have you, maybe not quite your people, but better than the silence. There's nothing wrong with any of it, and plenty of us have no other option. I've talked to some of you juggling multiple nannies to make it work, others reshaping careers to be around the kids more, and everyone adapting to their own circumstances.

Different paths, same thread: you're carrying more of it on your own.

There's no clean answer here. There's a shared struggle. And I've come to doubt that money buys back the actual thing. It buys the childcare. It doesn't buy the neighbor who cares. It buys the concert, but when the lights go off, that crew doesn't come home with you.

For those who feel solved and optimized, on track, there's still something worth a pause. The thing that most reliably predicts how long and how well we live is not the work, the money, or the title. It's the people. We know this, and still almost everything around us is built to track the work, the money, and the title, and next to nothing to track the relationships.

We watch the retirement account to the dollar and never ask what the friendship account is worth. Relationships compound the same way, quietly, over decades, but there's no statement that shows the balance, so we might let it run down. We overfund the thing that can't hold us and underfund the one that will. You can win the game and slowly lose the point.

I'll admit something I'm still working through. Over the last few years, I've found my way back toward spirituality and faith. There's too much there for a Sunday letter, but if I'm honest, I'd bet a lot of what I was reaching for wasn't only belief. It was a village, a sense of belonging. People oriented around values, in the same room. Business school was a version of that, too, a beautiful one, real friendship on borrowed time.

I think we go looking for the village in whatever form we can find that suits us best.

Some of you have trusted me with the darker version of this. "I don't know who would carry my casket." "I don't even have anyone to water my plants." Other times it's quieter, just a sense of being a little off, wanting to feel more at peace. I read those, and I sit with them.

Which brings me to something I've been sitting with about this newsletter. Part of why I write it, if I'm honest, is that same search. I've started to wonder whether there's a version of this that lives off-screen. I don't have the answer yet, so I'd rather think it through with you than guess at it alone.

But I keep landing on one thing, and it runs the opposite way from where I started.

You don't find a village by going looking for one. You find it by being one for someone else first. The neighbor who notices is a role you take up before it's ever a gift you receive.

As my sister-in-law loves to say, ”If you want a village, you have to be willing to be a villager.”

So the question I want to leave you with isn't whether you have a village, or who you'd call if the bottom fell out. It's smaller, and it points outward.

Who could you be that neighbor for this week?

Pick one name and do some small, concrete thing. Send the text and actually make the plan. Drop off the coffee. Be the one who organizes what nobody organizes, with no scoreboard running underneath.

A village was never luck. It's a few people deciding to go first, one act at a time. Get off screens. Start there and see what finds its way back. And let me go first. If there's anything I can help any of you with this week, hit reply and let me know. I mean it.

It's a holiday week on both sides of the border, Canada Day and the Fourth of July just behind us. However you celebrated it, I hope it put a few of the people you love in the same room! That, in the end, is the whole point.

Until next Sunday,
Eric

P.S. That question about whether this lives somewhere off-screen is a real one for me. If an in-person version ever sounds good to you, a dinner, a small gathering, something, let me know what appeals to you. I'm curious what makes sense for this group.

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