“Do you feel like you belong?” and other problematic questions.

I was pleasantly surprised when the Social Connection in America 2025 Survey Report arrived in my inbox a few weeks ago. It’s excellent research grounded in social science with a long-term (25 years!) commitment. Kudos to its researchers and funders.

The report shows how we are deeply isolated, infrequently gather with others, have small social networks, and don’t engage in public life. It’s yet another set of data-points for an all-too-familiar story: the sad state of American social connection and community life.

Yet one finding stood out as an anomaly: 72% say they feel like they “belong in their local community.”1 Whoa.

My first reaction was akin to the report’s: hopeful. Perhaps, below the surface, resides an untapped reservoir of positive feelings towards our local communities that can serve as a wellspring for social renewal.

But something about this question kept bugging me. Why did this statistic feel so incongruous?

Then I realized: the question itself was flawed. Let’s pull apart why.

“Belonging” is a popular concept these days. It feels like just about everybody is undertaking some sort of initiative to promote it, foster it, or operationalize it.

But what does belonging actually mean?

To start, there’s no shortage of people describing belongingness in deeply poetic terms. For example, here’s a sample from Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging:

“[Belonging] is the experience of being at home in the broadest sense of the phrase. It is the opposite of thinking that whenever I am, I would be better off somewhere else. Or that I am still forever wandering, looking for that place where I belong...”

Others define belonging as the perceived “fit” between oneself and a group or place. Sophisticated frameworks, like the Belonging Barometer, attempt to add a higher resolution to the multi-faceted fuzziness of “fit.” This more practical approach to belonging often frames discussions about social identities that are “othered” by a dominate culture, like immigrants or racial minorities. Not feeling like you belong can be a telling indicator of structural racism or bias.

Otherwise, there are really lots of mundane things that can provide feelings of belonging: social groups, physical places, or even experiences. You can feel belonging with a group of friends, a hobby group, or an online group. It’s all fair game for belongingness.

Our drive to belong is deeply seated in our DNA. For hundreds of thousands of years, Homo sapiens roamed wild lands as packs of hairy hunter-gatherers, and our survival depended upon belonging to a social group. This evolutionary wiring explains why loneliness triggers an identical biological response as physical pain.

Consequently, humans are extremely groupish. Social psychologist Henri Tajfel’s pioneering research, for example, found that people will readily adopt group identities and engage in group favoritism, even when the group designation is as arbitrary as a coin flip.

If our group memberships are so fluid and easy to form, then so is our sense of belonging. You can’t be part of a group without, er, belonging to it.

If our group memberships are so fluid and easy to form, then so is our sense of belonging. You can’t be part of a group without, er, belonging to it.

This means there are an infinite number of ways someone may interpret a question about belonging, from the deeply profound to the ephemeral.

Because of this ambiguity, I’ve gravitated towards using the term “rootedness” — specifically, “place-rootedness.”

You can’t feel rooted in place without being embraced by thick webs of social and environmental relationships. A lack of rootedness is a core pathology at the heart of our current social malaise. Adrift, we have become susceptible to the winds of demagoguery and polarization.

Yet “rootedness” is a little too esoteric for a survey question. So let’s turn to an analogous concept: “place-attachment.”

Place attachment is how environmental psychologists describe our emotional relationships to a place. Decades of their research have uncovered how strong place-attachments are integral to our social identities and sense of well-being.

Can we ask people about their place attachments? Yes, we can! In fact, a 2018 Pew Research study found that only 16% of people felt “very attached” to their local community.

Ah, there we go! Now that seems to align with other indicators of our social fragmentation.

What word is worse than “belonging” for its overuse and meaningless? Yeah, you guessed it: community. In today’s parlance, a community could be a subreddit community, a disability community, a community of care, a community of aspiring writers, or a user community. It makes your head spin.

I’ve taken to prefixing “place-based” in front of “community” to indicate communities of geographic proximity, like our neighborhoods. It’s kind of klutzy, but at least it makes a clear distinction.

In theory, the survey question about “local community” is asking about our neighborhood-scale place-based communities.2 But does it? How would you define your “local community”? I ran this thought-experiment vis-à-vis where I live here in Seattle:

• My local community could be just the few blocks around my house.

• It could be my larger neighborhood, Columbia City, centered on a historic business district and encompassing about a square mile.

• Or it could be the entirety of Southeast Seattle, which shares its own unique identity distinct from other city quadrants.

• I could even consider the entire City of Seattle as my local community. Certainly, that’s what’s referred to as “local news” or “local weather.”

It’s all “local.” And that’s a problem. It’s simply too easy to pick any of these amorphous geographic scales and conjure up an equally fluid group that provides feelings of belonging.

Place scale matters. A lot. I firmly believe that the neighborhood (or town) scale is the essential vehicle for social and civic renewal. We are evolutionarily wired to form enduring social relationships and feel agency on the neighborhood scale. Up until a few decades ago, it’s the scale at which we’ve organized ourselves for millennia.

Neighborhoods are also the seedbed of a pluralistic democracy. They create common ground where people of different identity groups can interact and coexist. We need shared neighborhood identities to bridge our differences and cultivate tolerance.

The path towards social renewal requires highlighting and strengthening inclusive neighborhood identities and attachments. We need to shout our neighborhoods and leverage them for bridge building and connection. As David Brooks put it, “The Neighborhood is the Unit of Change.”

We need to shout our neighborhoods and leverage them for bridge building and connection.

But there’s a sticky problem: very few are asking how residents conceive of their neighborhoods, much less measure their sense of identity or attachment to them.

If we are serious about social renewal, community connection measurements need to begin with, “What do you call the place where you live?” and “Where would you draw it’s boundaries?”

With these answers in hand, we can then link insights to action. For example, folks who identify with Neighborhood ‘A’ may have low rates of place-attachment or social connection compared to Neighborhood ‘B.’ Now we are able to strategically support and measure community-building initiatives.

I’ve built out a side-project to address this challenge of neighborhood definition— stay tuned for a future post.

Social renewal will require re-grounding people in thick webs of place-based social connection. This means our measurement tools need to have the fidelity to measure and track changes to people’s place-identities and place-attachments. Vague feelings of “belonging” to ill-defined “local communities” aren’t going to get us there.

Don’t let me give you the wrong impression — it’s amazing that folks are grappling with how to measure the invisible connective tissue of community life. The Social Connection In America report just happened to enter my crosshairs at a moment when I’ve been pondering place-scale and belonging, along with other questions of measurement.

If community engagement is to be leveraged as a force for social renewal, then how do we gauge our success? What are our geographic and psychological units of measurement? And is it possible to create a measurement standard that can spur institutionalization, like measurement standards did for sustainability?

I’ll be tackling these questions in more detail in my next couple of posts. Until next time!

~Eric

PS: I struggled to come up with an illustration for this piece, so I used the image from my family’s New Year’s card featuring some seeds from some of our local, er, regional, tree species. It seemed appropriate enough!

Maybe you’ve already donated to a Minneapolis mutual aid group. But maybe you should pause and rethink that impulse. That is to say: Donate, but look around your own neck of the woods. Your own community might need you to help seed a little resilience—here, now, before a crisis arrives to consume you.

No doubt many of you have been deeply affected by what’s happening in Minnesota. Despite it’s tragedies, I’ve been incredibly inspired by how Minnesota’s healthy community and civic life has enabled their ICE resistance and mutual aid. It’s a real-life proof of concept of how community power is built upon a foundation of social networks and shared identity. This piece by Ana Marie Cox, not only highlights the civic roots of Minnesotans, but encourages us to get to work in our own communities. Let’s go!

But the social problems we face today — while linked to contemporary digital technologies — are deeper and more nuanced than that. They originated from 20th century technological and cultural forces that also brought extraordinary benefits. It is only by looking back at these benefits that we can see today’s social problems clearly: as the result of trade-offs we have, for decades, been willing to make.

A wonderful high-level piece about the long decline of our place-based communities, heavily indebted to Robert Putnam.

We could use better political leadership, of course, but the crucial question facing America is: How can we reverse this pervasive loss of faith in one another, in our future and in our shared ideals? I do not believe that most people can flourish in a meaningless, nihilistic universe. Despite what the cynics say, I still believe we’re driven not only by the selfish motivations but also by the moral ones — the desire to pursue some good, the desire to cooperate, to care for one another and to belong.

David Brooks has undergone quite a journey over the past 20 years: from conservative columnist to champion of community-weaving and humanism. His farewell to the New York Times gets to the heart of our social ails and social solutions.

The Answer is Community continues to fill a unique niche amidst a surging interest in social and civic renewal. It is inspiring minds and changing practice for those engaging with communities. Your support will help me expand my audience, and let me prioritize my writing amongst a host of competing demands for my time.

I’m offering a free T-shirt to anyone who steps up to become a paid subscriber, or gives a subscription as a gift. Featuring my hand drawn “Hello, My Name Is” graphic. It’s your new essential piece of community engagement gear!

Check out the offer, and the T-shirt, in my previous post. Thank you for your support!