powerlessness
There’s a powerlessness in this hyperglobal world… people staying where they were born much less than before, and instead moving all over. Not being connected to half the city anymore, not multiple generations of the same family living there, shaping the culture there. Some people have big networks in a small enough town and therefore have a sense of owing each other more because there’s a personal relationship involved. I don’t experience that, and many don’t. Never have.
With that type of generational connection to a place and its people, you shopping somewhere isn’t just you being a random customer… you’re their neighbor’s child, or you’re their child’s teacher at school, or your families have been intertwined for decades. So if you have a problem, people will actually help and take it more seriously and go extra for you. No confusing, labyrinthine automated customer support. They’ll escalate for you.
Likewise, you’re incentivized to keep it nice and civil because otherwise, your uncle, who’s best friends with the lady who leads the shop, is gonna speak some sense into you. Maybe you went to school with her son.
Instead, you’re new in a city, family strewn all over the country or globe, know no one, too many people in this huge city. The places you shop at are an empty faceless corporation and employees sadly mean nothing to people because they don’t see them as human… because, among other things, there’s no personal connection. They’re just an other. So they’re having their Karen moments and shoving phones in service workers’ faces to post online.
Not everything about this closeness and deep local family culture is ideal or something to strive for. It can be oppressive to feel obligated to everyone all the time, and what if you don’t fulfill their expectations?
But the aspect of it I miss is the connection, seeing the human behind everything, and mechanisms to keep people in check, to treat the public with respect because your people built and run it. I miss the village (as in: ‘it takes a village’). I hate this, but I guess enough people need to be threatened with personal consequences to not be an ass. Like losing face, or honor, or the people they care about being mad at them. There’s no feeling of guilt for being an ass to a stranger for many. There’s no feeling of shame when vandalizing benches and ripping apart public garbage cans and blowing up a strangers’ mailbox. You don’t know who built that or who this belongs to, so your empathy is non-existent, I guess.
Interconnectedness helps with that, because then, stories travel - and not just you know, but the local bakery, the bus driver, your mailman and your family. You might know the people that built that or own that since you were a toddler.
Again, things about this are absolutely horrible, especially if it’s toxic. Rumours, family fights splitting the city, people feeling like they can never outrun their family’s reputation, everything being decided by connections and who-knows-who… but I am also tired of the hyperindividualism, the disconnection, the freedom from expectations that weirdly makes many people think they don’t owe basic courtesy in public because it won’t come back to bite them in the ass later and they won’t get a stern talking to by their community and family. Chances are their family is kilometers away in another city or even continent and doesn’t know shit about their life. And as someone with no contact to my family aside from my mum occasionally, that’s for the best sometimes, but not always.
I do romanticize this idea of going anywhere in my city and knowing the people who built and run that… like that’s my cousin at the checkout, that’s my uncles car repair shop, the tram driver is my grandpa’s best friend, my other grandpa helped built this or something… I know the older generations of my family grew up like that. It’s so different now. I want to see the fruits of labour of my community. Family, extended family, friends. I want to experience the boost to building a connection to people because they recognize me as someone’s daughter. I wanna feel like there’s a big support network, always someone to turn to, always someone to take a look at something or fix something for a good talk and a sixpack, knowing you’ll return the favor when they need it.