21M from LA here, struggling to find community in his life. To me, community is working with others for the sake of something greater than yourself, a family away from your family. The bond you get through others thats often connected to a physical location, like a church or an animal shelter. I’ve tried to look around for others with this problem, first starting online, but I find it overlaps with having no or few friends in general.
Now, I have a good amount of friends (just guys with the exception of my sister, that’s a whole other thing though), and I find that while it helps me care about their individual needs, I can’t truly care about something greater than myself and them.
The two times I ever felt at home without literally being home were when I was a regular churchgoer and in an art class I took days before covid was a thing, but now that I question religion more and that class is over, I’m at a loss. Even with some efforts to change this (volunteering at the animal shelter, joining a nonprofit arts community), my reasons are solely dominated by self-interest (the desire to play with cats and the desire to get good at drawing) so I never truly take up the cause. What do I do? This doesn’t seem like a good way to live.
1 comment
The two times you felt at home with out literally being at home, where when you were pursuing your happiness. A healthy kind of selfish, because pursuing your happiness did not require stopping someone else from pursuing their happiness.
What makes you feel happy, is going to be familiar for some, and new for others. Some knew for a long time they love cats, and some are just recently finding out they love cats.
You are a evolving human. You will come to know new things that make you feel happy. You will bump into another human who knew for a long time that same thing makes them happy. You will never run out of happiness if you share it with others. That is how you build community in your life. You’ll find humans who increase your happiness by sharing their happiness with you. Keep learning, pursuing, and sharing what brings joy to your heart.
That is what you do.
That is totally a good way to live.