The decline in joining clubs and volunteering

HostI was looking at an old map of my neighborhood from the nineteen fifties the other day. Every few blocks there was a lodge, a garden club, or some kind of hall for a group I had never even heard of. Today, those buildings are mostly coffee shops where everyone has headphones on or they have been turned into condos. It feels like that whole way of living, where you just belonged to things by default, is fading away. Why is it so much harder for us to just show up and help out or join a group these days?

GuestIt's a massive shift, and you can see it in the numbers. Over the last few decades, the rate of people joining local groups or giving their time for free has just dropped off a cliff. We used to be a nation of joiners. Whether it was a bowling league or a church group, that was how you spent your Tuesday night. Now, it seems like we have swapped that for what some people call passive belonging. We follow a group online or we subscribe to a newsletter, but we're not actually in the room with other people. One big reason is how our time has changed. It's not just that we're working more hours, though many of us are. It's that our free time is chopped up into these tiny little bits. If you're doing gig work or checking emails at eight at night, you can't really commit to being at a meeting every Tuesday at seven.

HostI hear the time excuse a lot, but I'm not sure I buy it as the only reason. We still find four hours a night to watch shows or scroll through our phones. It seems more like we're choosing to spend our time in ways that don't require us to deal with other people. Maybe we're just tired of the friction that comes with being in a club.

GuestThat's a fair point. There's a real cost to being in a group that we don't like to talk about. You have to deal with the person who talks too much or the way the group decides on things. When you're on your phone, you're the boss. You can leave the second you get bored. In a real life club, you're stuck there until the meeting ends. But there's also a deeper thing happening with where we live. We have built our world around cars and big yards. If you have to drive twenty minutes to get to the community center, you're much less likely to go than if you could just walk down the street. We have traded closeness for space, and that makes the effort of joining feel much heavier.

HostBut even when the groups are right there, like in a big city, people still seem to stay in their shells. I see people complaining they're lonely, yet they won't sign up for the local park cleanup. It's like we have lost the muscle for it. Are we just out of practice?

GuestWe definitely are. There's a kind of skill to being a member of something. It takes a bit of thick skin and a lot of patience. And what's interesting is that when we do join things now, we tend to join groups that are very specific to our own narrow interests. We join a group for people who like a very specific type of dog or a very specific hobby. We used to join groups that were broad, like a local town club, where you would meet people who did all kinds of jobs and had all kinds of views. Now, if the group doesn't perfectly match who we're, we stay away. We have become very picky about who we give our time to.

HostI wonder if the way we think about volunteering has changed too. It used to feel like a duty, something you just did because you lived in a place. Now it feels like a line on a resume or something you do once a year for a feel good moment. Is the idea of long term service just dead?

GuestIt's certainly struggling. A lot of groups are seeing what they call the graying of the volunteer. The people doing the heavy lifting are mostly older. Younger people are more likely to do a one day event, like a fun run or a big cleanup day, but they're wary of taking on a role that lasts all year. Part of that's because life feels more shaky now. If you don't know where you'll be living in two years or if your job might change, you don't want to sign up to lead the local youth group for five years. We're living in a temporary way, so we join in a temporary way.

HostSo if we're not joining these old groups, are we finding anything else to take their place, or are we just becoming more alone?

GuestWe're trying to find new ways, but they're a bit thin. We see a lot of people trying to find community in fitness classes or at the gym. But those are often what I would call a quiet crowd. You're in the same room, you're doing the same thing, but you're not really building a bond. You're just being alone together. The big loss is that when you don't have those old clubs, you lose the safety net. If you lose your job or your house burns down, the old garden club would've been the ones to bring you dinner. A Facebook group might send you a heart icon, but they're not showing up at your door with a casserole.

HostWe're trading the messy reality of a shared hall for the smooth ease of a screen.

GuestThe most striking thing is that once a club closes its doors for the last time, it almost never comes back.

HostThe old map shows us what we have lost, but the empty halls on my street are a reminder that a community only lives if people actually walk through the door.

GuestThat's it.

HostThe neighborhood map might look different now, but the need to be part of something bigger than a screen is still there.