Photo: Stock Exchange / Cooties - the silent killer

Working in a chilly corporate environment, with clear distinctions between the people that mattered and the people that didn’t, I came down with that dreaded child hood disease: the cooties. Having left my husband, whom I once dearly loved and thought would be my life partner, I entered the social scene as a 50-something. It’s not nearly as social as when I was a 30-something.

At work, the young women had their own cliques and the people that mattered had theirs too. My beautiful apartment that I love is in a large building where most of the interaction is in the laundry room. The common area is not designed for the casual conversations in which you get to know others and perhaps form friendships. Except for a few groups, most people just go home and close the door. Even though there are many people my age, making friends here feels like drilling a dry well. A sad, druggie, divorced guy was dead for a week before anyone figured out what the odor was. Does it matter if it was an overdose or a suicide?

The net effect was the feeling that no one in my geographic milieu gave a hoot about me – like solitary confinement while carrying on my every day life. Perhaps at the time I was too needy or too overbearing. I knew things weren’t great but I didn’t realize how fragile I had become until my sister visited for a weekend. When our deep conversation popped the lid off the feelings of isolation and ickiness, the diagnosis was indisputable: the cooties.

Two fundamental changes cured me.  I now work among people that I genuinely like and who like me. The humor is reliable, sharp and politically incorrect. It would be a bad environment for sensitive, easily offended people but it’s a great place if you take your humor with salt.

I overcame the the electromagnetic field that surrounds my couch on Sunday mornings to become a regular at the uber fabulous Lake Street Church of Evanston. Being an active member of an intelligent, conscious, committed community feels like a warm embrace in a world that seems cold and is often affected by unbalanced people.

Without the lubricant of casual interaction and camaraderie, people become socially awkward. It’s one of the downsides of being unemployed, of working from home, of working in an indifferent or hostile environment, or of being a stay at home parent where the primary interaction is only with children. People who live with these situations every day probably feel social rust corroding their psyches. Perhaps people are off kilter, like the Nutty guy on the bus, in part because they don’t have enough interaction with people who actually see and care about them. This painful condition responds well to healthy, casual socializing.

The social and housing paradigms that we are accustomed to does not meet the needs of a society under stress. When we had mostly full employment, the illusion of safety, and before we were as fearful as we have become, it seemed to work adequately for most people. Now that we have extreme stress, compounded by an undercurrent of anxiety, the cracks are obvious. The cure is equally obvious: social environments, including housing, that meet our fundamental need to be cared for, to care about others, and to rub shoulders with them every day.

For more info: New Community Vision is working to inform and educate the public about housing alternatives that are affordable, sustainable and engender a community experience that includes healthy inter-dependence and support. Housing models that meet these criteria include cooperatives, cohousing and shared housing. Please subscribe to this blog and contact us for more information.

Tags: cohousing, community, cooperatives, social isolation