“Being neighbourly used to involve bringing cookies to someone going through a hard time. Now it’s averting your eyes and not acknowledging what you heard last night through the wall.”
Marc Dunkelman wrote The Vanishing Neighbour in 2014, and he spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival this year as if his findings are even more relevant today. He was on a panel on social isolation, predicated on the statistic that the US has seen a 20% drop in time spent with other people from 2003-2023 — a rapid and significant decline.
Dunkelman suggests picturing our social relationships like the rings of Saturn. The inner rings are very strong, and the outer rings don’t need to be strong. But the middle rings, where relationships are friendly but not intimate, have basically disappeared. These are the people our parents or grandparents used to chat with at church or the hardware store, at the post office or on the street. Now, in his New York brownstone, he doesn’t know his neighbours’ names and barely grunts hello on the stairs.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Why does this loss matter? Dunkelman argues that those mid-range relationships are where diversity can enter our lives at a level that makes us take notice. Our inner circle tends to be like us, and our outer circle might be very different than us, but we wouldn’t care. It’s in that middle zone where we are confronted with alternative ways of thinking and being in ways that could make a difference to us. Its absence contributes not just to isolation but to homogeneity and thus potentially to polarization.
It’s an observation that has stuck with me since returning from Aspen. I can’t decide if its staying power has more to do with it being fascinating or being true.
In my own experience (n=1, admittedly) my middle rings are actually quite heavily populated. But there is a layer that lives between my work colleagues and neighbourhood friends (middle rings) and my inner circle of family where things feel a bit sparse for me right now. I would also say that the pattern shifts over time. Now that I’m spending less time on the sidelines of soccer fields, my ‘proximity friendships’ need to be nurtured with more intention.
The Saturn image offers a good check on our social health, which we know is bolstered by having a range of relationships. Ties that are weak and strong, conversations that are superficial and deep, contacts that reinforce and challenge our points of view — all contribute to our social wellbeing. (And our social wellbeing is a more dominant contributor to our overall health than we give it credit for). But the accuracy of Dunkelman’s research at the level of one human is not the key point. To the extent that the societal shift he’s describing reduces our exposure to diverse perspectives (exacerbated by social media algorithms that do the same), it’s worthy of our attention. These days, where might diversity find a way in?
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