Why Do We Find Modern Life So Hard? (Part 2: Community)

I think community is what helps us to endure hard things.

A month ago, my friend and mentor Mark Johnson (of The Undaunted Man) and I wrote an article for FAIR titled, "Why Do We Find Modern Life So Hard?" The question we set out to tackle was essentially: measured by things like economic prosperity and life span, we live far easier lives than our ancestors did; so why does life feel so much harder these days? (if you'd like to read it, it's free; though as with all of my multi-part series pieces, Part 2 can also be read as a stand-alone).

I like the essay, but I think we missed an essential component: community.

Why does community (or lack thereof) play such a strong role in whether or not we consider the day-to-day trials of life to be easy or hard to cope with? I think it boils down to the fact that as humans, we're social animals. We're not made to face life or to navigate trials alone.

In a beautiful and exhaustively-researched piece for Vanity Fair, war correspondent Sebastian Junger explains how the bonds of community can help us to overcome traumatic events. He describes an experiment in which a lab rat is traumatized (but not injured) by an attack from a larger rat. Rats that were attacked and then allowed to be with their fellows typically recovered within 48 hours. Rats that were attacked and then kept in isolation had a much harder time. As Junger writes, "The ones that are kept apart from other rats are the only ones that develop long-term traumatic symptoms."

For most of their history, Native Americans fought in deadly close-quarters combat at rates far higher than what most modern soldiers have to endure. In spite of that, the historical record shows very few cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among Native American warriors. As Junger puts it, "Ethnographic studies on hunter-gatherer societies rarely turn up evidence of chronic PTSD among their warriors…and oral histories of Native American warfare consistently fail to mention psychological trauma." He argues that a big part of the cause might be how Native American tribes handled trauma—that is, collectively. Or as he puts it, in early Native American societies, "warfare and society existed in such close proximity that there was effectively no transition from one to the other." As a result, "some Iroquois warriors must have been traumatized by the warfare they were engaged in—much of it was conducted at close quarters with clubs and hatchets—but they didn’t have to contain that trauma within themselves. The entire society was undergoing wartime trauma, so it was a collective experience—and therefore an easier one."

Or to put it another way: the shared experience of facing trauma together can be so powerful that it helped Iroquois warriors to heal from even the psychological wounds inflicted by vicious close-quarters combat. We can see how important community is to dealing with life in the stories of how two different sets of humans responded to tragedy.

World War II was possibly the most devastating event in recent human history. It inflicted conditions that were absolutely brutal. But it was also, somewhat paradoxically, one of the most unifying. In London, for instance, citizens rallied during the Blitz in a way that left everyone, including the British government, stunned. As Junger reports in Tribe, the British government expected a wave of selfish, self-interested hoarders who would flood the shelters and refuse to leave.

"English authorities, for example, predicted that German attacks would produce 35,000 casualties a day in London alone (total civilian casualties for the country were not even twice that). No one knew how a civilian population would react to that kind of trauma, but the Churchill government assumed the worst. So poor was their opinion of the populace—particularly the working-class people of East London—that emergency planners were reluctant to even build public bomb shelters because they worried people would move into them and simply never move out. Economic production would plummet and the shelters themselves, it was feared, would become a breeding ground for political dissent and even Communism."

Instead, Londoners rose to face the Blitz in a spirit of intense community. One woman reported that, “We would really have all gone down onto the beaches with broken bottles…We would have done anything—anything—to stop them [the Germans].”

This spirit of community blunted the psychological impact of one of the most devastating wars in human history. The British government predicted that as many as four million people might suffer psychotic breakdowns during the war. Here's what Junger reports happened instead:

"On and on the horror went, people dying in their homes or neighborhoods while doing the most mundane things. Not only did these experiences fail to produce mass hysteria, they didn’t even trigger much individual psychosis. Before the war, projections for psychiatric breakdown in England ran as high as four million people, but as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals around the country saw admissions go down. Emergency services in London reported an average of only two cases of 'bomb neuroses' a week. Psychiatrists watched in puzzlement as long-standing patients saw their symptoms subside during the period of intense air raids. Voluntary admissions to psychiatric wards noticeably declined, and even epileptics reported having fewer seizures. 'Chronic neurotics of peacetime now drive ambulances,' one doctor remarked. Another ventured to suggest that some people actually did better during wartime."

The bonds of community were actually so powerful that they made people nostalgic for the war later in life. The negatives of violence and brutality were outweighed by the positive of the coming together of everyone into one community that faced the trouble together. Junger again:

"Adversity often leads people to depend more on one another, and that closeness can produce a kind of nostalgia for the hard times that even civilians are susceptible to. After World War II, many Londoners claimed to miss the exciting and perilous days of the Blitz ('I wouldn’t mind having an evening like it, say, once a week—ordinarily there’s no excitement,' one man commented to Mass-Observation about the air raids)...."

Fast forward 80 years. In 2024, most of us face far lesser trials than the Londoners during the Blitz. But, somewhat paradoxically, we're much more bothered by the trials that we do face. Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz tweeted that "we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w[ith] record wealth inequality, no social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world." It's easy to mock Lorenz' tweet as an example of catastrophizing, but a lot of my fellow Millennials think like she does. Why do so many of us, especially young people, see our world as so broken?

I think part of the reason is that when we hear about something going wrong in the world these days, we most often read about it online. We see it on X (formerly Twitter) or read about it in The Washington Post or The Washington Examiner. As a result, we have to deal with it alone.

Most of us don't have a community of in-person people with whom we can process the hard stuff in the world. We're like the rat who was attacked and then put into isolation—even though we haven't been physically hurt, the scars linger. We've lost the essential coping mechanism of community; and as a result, when we see all of the bad things happening in the world, we start to feel like we're dying death by a thousand cuts.

So here's our action item for the week. At my wedding, my pastor shared a Swedish proverb: "Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half sorrow." I think there's something to that. It's easy to look around and think that the ship of our society is sinking—its hull full of leaks, falling slowly beneath the waves. But when we look around and see that there are other people on board—that, moreover, those people also see the leaks and are concerned about them—maybe that can help us to not feel so daunted by it all.

So, this week, if you see a piece of news that frustrates or concerns you or scares you, find someone that you trust IRL and tell them about it. And then let us know if telling the other person helped.