What it takes to be part of a village

On a Sunday before Christmas break, I woke up with a predictable headache and nauseous feeling in my stomach. The cause was evident: an empty bottle of wine that was ever so slightly out of my usual budget. Nevertheless, I had plans downstairs for a gingerbread decorating competition, which my housemates and I had been planning for the past month. To my embarrassment, I had even created a Pinterest board for it.

Still, I showed up. Not for my ego, or because there was anything to win, but because relationships are built through a kind of mundane participation that rarely arrives at a convenient time.

‘Inconvenience is the cost of community’ is a phrase that has emerged from social media as a kind of mantra, reminding us of the necessary effort required to maintain friendships. It became commonplace for creators to remind their audiences to show up and stick to those dinner plans made months ago, to drive a friend to the airport at 3AM, and to accompany them to a doctor’s appointment, even on a day off.

What is it about the conditions of human connection that resonate so deeply with people?

The problem is that none of this should feel radical. Being present for the people you care about is hardly a revolutionary thought. Yet, open the comments section of any post advocating active participation in friendships, and you will likely come across accounts fighting back with the idea that no one is owed anything, including friendship. It is also not a discourse that has been untouched in recent years. In 2019, while discussing her novel Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney made the blunt statement that she does not believe in the “everyone should be very self-sufficient” and “you just need yourself to love you” mentality. In fact, she called it a “delusion” to think that it is possible to “just opt out of the rest of humankind.” So why do these posts gain thousands of likes and comments? What is it about the conditions of human connection that resonate so deeply with people?

Maybelle Morgan from Dazed finds reasoning in the counter-saying ‘protect your peace,’ which has become increasingly familiar on social media in recent years. She argues that the “mantra-turned-social-movement” has encouraged people to prioritise setting boundaries and emotional self-preservation. This is not inherently selfish or misguided, by any means. There is a reason we are told on flights to put on our own oxygen masks before helping others. As British psychotherapist Tom Holland-Pearse suggests, constantly neglecting our own needs can lead to burnout, resentment, and emotional depletion, which is hardly fertile ground for healthy relationships.

Yet somewhere along the line, emotional preservation begins to blur into emotional detachment. Boundaries get drawn wherever inconvenience appears. Even the idea of ‘cutting’ someone off is itself a strikingly harsh phrase, suggesting uncompromising severance instead of the awkward task of repairing a friendship. What is frightening, however, is how this language has come to signify emotional maturity. To be able to ‘protect your peace’ positions itself as evidence of growth and strength. Taken to its extreme, this logic allows people to think that the most developed version of the self is the one least dependent on others and least willing to tolerate emotional discomfort. In this way, the phrase has increasingly come to be used to celebrate emotional detachment as a symbol of personal success.

None of this means we should emotionally exhaust ourselves for other people, though

The idea of protecting your peace is particularly attractive to students. Coming to university can feel like the first true leap into maturity. For many students, it is their first time living alone and managing finances, on top of building a whole new social world from scratch. We get the sense that friendships should feel mature too. Being independent for the first time makes it easy to confuse adulthood with total self-sufficiency. Friendship is no longer a site of mutual obligation and reciprocity, but something that asks very little of us.

Settling into university can seem like a difficult enough task as it stands. But if on top of that adulthood is increasingly seen as minimising dependency and maximising personal peace, it is not particularly shocking that young adults are more likely to report feeling lonely often than other generations or that Gen Z has been called the “the loneliest generation”. None of this means we should emotionally exhaust ourselves for other people, though. However, if university is such a daunting experience, why would we not make it easier by showing up for ourselves and others? Before you cancel your plans last minute, maybe consider the value of being surrounded by people who care about you and whether occasional inconvenience is a small price to pay for it.