Meditations on Community and Independence

When my aunt turned 27, she moved out of her mother’s house and in with her new husband. When they divorced, her mother said it was a natural consequence of her leaving home. I’ve been reflecting on this generational pattern lately, how my father also shamed me when I first told him I’d be moving to a new city. 

I still struggle with the question of whether it’s unduly selfish of people to explore the world at the expense of familial proximity. In Cuban culture, tradition and the convention of family orientation keep many people (especially women) under the same roofs as their parents. It’s very common to have multiple generations living in the same household. 

In the US, however, there are stark differences in the demographics of people who leave home vs those who stay behind, specifically when it comes to education level. People with higher levels of education tend to leave home at higher rates (Chang, VOX, 2018). Perhaps, learning more about the world makes people want to keep learning. This makes me wonder if exploration is just as human of a trait as sociability is. And those who leave home also tend to report higher career satisfaction (HESA, 2021). Do the benefits of these opportunities outweigh the cons of (physically) leaving family behind?

Growing up, I struggled to find the middle ground between hyper-independent Western culture and the collectivist Latino culture under which I was raised. It always felt like a struggle between belonging within my family and finding space to discover who I was as an individual. I never felt like there was room for both. 

Fittingly, I think the best vehicle I can use to analyze this relationship is just that— vehicles. 

When I was a teenager, I didn’t understand the appeal of public transportation. Subways seemed to lack the very same thing my parent’s house did: privacy. Dirty, overcrowded spaces forcibly shared with other commuters.

In these same years, I began thinking of cars as intimate spaces for private moments, private thoughts, private emotions. I could have a good cry, talk all night with a close friend, explore my sexuality. Cars were vehicles by which you decided your own destination. I thought they were the embodiment of absolute freedom. 

That was until I got my first car in college. At times, my car did feel like a safe space. I’d have full conversations with myself, forgetting other people could see me. But, in our capitalist society, this quickly became corrupted when gas prices and stop-and-go traffic stripped away the freedom of it. It was no longer a personal decision to get in the car and drive. Now, I needed to make money to keep my car in motion. I became reliant on the jobs that allowed me to actually afford what was once a “safe space.” It was no longer a vehicle that got me where I wanted to go. Now, it was a vehicle that got me to and from work. I could see that everyone was reliant on cars; no one could get anywhere without one. In a car-dependent city like Miami, there was no longer any choice in it. I yearned for a subway system. 

That’s the thing about hyper-independence in a capitalist society: you become the perfect consumer. When we share resources, we limit the amount of stuff every individual needs to buy independently. When there are no communal resources like public transit, we have no choice but to buy into oppressive consumer culture.

Ironically, my parents never liked public transportation (they thought it unsafe).

But this takes me back to the struggle I always encountered between community and individualism. Community should, in theory, foster meaningful independence. It should mean everyone extends a hand to those around them— even if inconvenient at times— so that everyone has the support to move more freely. It should mean feeling safe to find uniqueness within yourself or having time to work on personal projects. Without community, independence from others becomes dependence on capitalism. Like how owning a car at first seems more autonomous than sharing a ride, but quickly reveals itself to be an unfortunate result of poor city planning. (Of course, there is often inherent privilege in owning a car. The point I’m trying to make is that, without supplementary communal systems in place, hyper-individualism becomes not a choice but a necessity, and it worsens our quality of life). 

Nonetheless, community begins to feel anti-independent when it starts to resemble codependence. Community becomes the antithesis to independence when it’s rooted in anxiety. In the case of my family, this anxiety usually concerned safety or social norms. But it could also concern control, ownership, or entitlement, as we’ve seen in so many cases of cult worship or extremist political groups. Community isn’t forced intimacy by (ironically) limiting the circumference of the social circle or limiting how far away any one person can venture from it. 

In my childhood, my dad would often repeat the adage, “everything in moderation.” He’d say it usually in relation to food and nutrition, but I think it applies to this paradox of independence, as well. 

If we rely too heavily on artificial displays of community— community that looks more like codependency— then we risk suffocating those we wish to provide a safe space. We risk losing out on independent thoughts and experiences, which could bring us closer to self-actualization and finding deeper meaning in our lives. 

But we’re social animals. The Western world is losing its connectedness the more we turn inward. The idea of not needing others, of not owing anything to anyone, is an illusion. People need people. It’s why we began forming civilizations in the first place. Overreliance on the self not only alienates people, it perpetuates the cycles that keep capitalist dependence in place, thus paradoxically stripping away the same freedoms we sought outside the community in the first place. 

I don’t think real community is codependent or independent. It’s interdependent.

We should be picking up our friends from the airport. We should be cooking meals for each other, splitting groceries, tutoring younger cousins, aiding our elderly neighbors, proofreading each others’ resumes, sharing rides. We should be reaching into our personal niches to help carry each other in whatever ways we can.