This is not a research piece, this is my unfiltered thoughts. I have two topics on my list for the blog which sort of ties into these thoughts that have been on my mind lately, due to the situation of the world we live in at this moment.

The topics are:

Why do people have less kids?

– Societal structure, loss of community

– Rise of individualism

Singular individualism vs communal individualism

– Being unique for personal benefit

– Being unique as a benefit for the collective

This brought me to think of the saying “it takes a village to raise a child”, but to my recollection I didn´t really have a village. Does the village really exist in this society we have created? To me it feels like most of us are competing to have more or to look better than our neighbour or colleague, we try to out compete by degree, position, titles and money accumulated.

Some do it to the degree that, they keep everything to themselves even if they knew it would improve the lives of friends, family or the broader community. But they hoard it for themselves to “win the competition”. That doesn’t sound like a village to me.

That is singular individualism where being unique or having tools, skills or knowledge and only using it for one’s personal benefit is at the centre. Whereas I think a true village spots the individuals uniqueness and finds ways to make their unique talents shine and benefit the broader community to survival, success, forward movement. Communal individualism is recognizing uniqueness as a benefit for the collective society or community.

It is the tribal understanding of how to make our situation better together and at the heart of that, we should focus on our future. The children! At this present moment, our societies are centred around how adults can generate monetary wealth. In this constellation pregnancy, and family rearing is seen as an annoyance, something that halters the individual in the pursuit of wealth generation, not necessarily for oneself but for the organisation.  

Have we forgotten, why we still exist on earth? Have we forgotten the core of humanity beyond monetary success? Survival of the fittest doesn’t work if you’re the only fit person, then the village or tribe cease to exist.

As I wrote my piece on leadership loneliness, it made me think that, if the price one pays to be successful alone, is to be further removed from the community and reality. It is a price I´d rather not pay, success alone seems empty to me. I think there´s something beautiful in acknowledging our differences in strength, personality, intelligence, interests ect. While also acknowledging the strengths different talents bring, to a community. Succeeding together and bringing everyone’s strengths out is true forward movement collectively, the struggles that may come are not carried alone, but shared together.

I wonder if our sense of physical community is lost? Especially since the covid pandemic, I have noticed that, gathering people to participate in events of any sort voluntarily, even for free, has become difficult. Everyone seems too busy on their own to stop and for once participate not only to learn for themselves, but also to contribute to something or someone else succeeding.

How can we re-build community and the village?