Community is so much more than friends
The differences between community and friends that I learned the hard way
A year ago, if you’d asked me what “community” meant, I would have pointed to my friends and coworkers. These were the people I trusted, laughed with, leaned on, and made time for. We’d go out for drinks, celebrate birthdays, share stories over dinner, and generally align our lives in overlapping ways to maximize time together. They felt like “my people.”
And they are important. Friends are the ones who answer the phone when you need to vent, who show up when you want company, who lend you this or that, or who you invite to events. They share our most intentional acute moments. But as I came to realize, that isn’t the same as community. Friends are activity partners. Community is our foundation.
Real community is made up of people you may not even consider “friends." In most cases, they're just strangers who happened to share physical space long enough to become acquaintances.
It’s your neighbors who keep an eye on your porch when you’re away. The bartender who knows your usual. The couple you always see walking the same trail at dusk. The retired man who tends roses in his front yard and always waves, even if you don’t know his name.
This kind of community doesn’t announce itself. It grows in the background, quietly binding people together through repetition, proximity, and a shared future.
Shared Space, Shared Stakes
Friends care because they choose you. You share a sense of humor, hobbies, history, and/or outlook that keeps you and them together. Neighbors show up because the situation demands it. When your car battery dies, it’s often the stranger across the street who pulls out jumper cables. There’s something profoundly grounding in this kind of care: you don’t have to “earn” it — you just have to be there.
Neighbors may not choose one another, but they share the same environment and the same risks. When the fire came through, it wasn’t my friends who checked on my house (or us) first — it was someone who lived down the street. In fact, it was a former high school friend of my wife's brother, who had also lived in the neighborhood their entire life. He knew the importance of the neighborhood, even though we had never actually met him. He sent a video to my brother-in-law and told him to forward it to us. He knew he had some duty as a member of the community, even if we never met.
There's an implicit contract whenever a conversation starts with "Nice to meet you, I'm your neighbor." At that point, you know then that you’re in something together.
Shared Future
More important than the implicit contract neighbors enter into, there's the even more implicit future that you are building together.
When you live side by side, you are not just sharing a neighborhood today, you are co-authoring tomorrow. Every tree planted, every fence maintained, every local shop supported is a kind of investment in a shared tomorrow that is better for you and for them. It's the theory behind "shop local" campaigns. You may never name it aloud, but there’s a silent agreement that your lives are being built in parallel, shaping the same landscape in ways that will matter years from now. It's easy to simplify it to something tacky like property values, but it's so much more than that.
Friends can follow you through time but not always through place. Neighbors, however, are companions in a to-be-developed future. That co-presence is what gives a community its depth: it’s not just about surviving the present together, but about inhabiting a future together.
Durational Depth
Friendships thrive on intensity built around deep conversations, common passions, and nights that stretch until dawn. Community thrives on accumulation. The five-second interactions at the mailbox, the nod while walking the dog, the shared commiseration over the terrible state of the sidewalks or streets; the rhythm of seeing the same faces for years builds into one of those photos that is actually made up of thousands of smaller images. These moments seem trivial on their own, but together they weave a sense of belonging.
This applies even to those I would have never considered my community. Like the neighbor who seemed to be running an unlicensed auto shop, with cars continuously coming and going. The annoying guy who would obsessively and obnoxiously blow their leaves with a whiny leaf blower. The young family would host weekly parties with heart-poundingly loud music that would often run into the early morning hours. The hundreds that would flock to the park for a Sunday soccer game which would make traffic and parking impossible. Or that neighbor you'd consider crossing the street to avoid while out for a walk, but don't.
They were all neighbors who, in their own way that I did not appreciate at the time, made the community what it was because they were always there. They added a predictability to life.
Embodiment of Place
Community is not only about people, but about the place you share. It’s the farmer’s market, the foothills you valued dearly, the park you all walk through. Friends can move to different cities and still be friends but neighbors embody the meaning of home. Even if you don't know, or in my case, constantly forget their name, they represent something subtly foundational to life.
I've come to understand that, despite the loss of homes and belongings, the most pernicious theft is that of the community. Overnight, we lost not only our homes but also the corner of the world where neighbors waved hello, where the dog-walkers passed me with the same nod every morning, and where we could safely make small talk knowing that, beyond being occasionally annoying, was forming a bond that may be invoked in the future when you needed something.
The fire forced me into a new kind of exile — not just from a house, but from a community I hadn’t even realized was holding me. Losing my home to fire stripped away the illusion that community was just about the people I chose. What I found instead was that real community is not chosen, but built implicitly over time. It’s the strangers who slowly stop being strangers, the routines that develop, the neighbors who invest in the subtle, perpetual ways that knit lives together.
Friends may come and go. Community remains — and when crisis strikes, it’s the community that catches you. In some ways, this gives me confidence that things will be okay. The more neighbors who commit to coming back, the more sure I am that things will eventually return to normal. But I'm also plagued by the thought of my elderly, less affluent, or just plain tired neighbors involuntarily leaving the community that was taken from them.