In a few days, I'll board a plane in Queenstown and begin the long journey home to Chicago. By then, I'll have spent nearly five months traveling through Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. I've seen extraordinary places, experienced different ways of living, and enjoyed a degree of freedom that would have been difficult to imagine while sitting through another Monday morning meeting. When people ask about the trip, I'll have plenty to tell them. What I suspect will be harder to explain is why, after spending so much time among people, I feel more detached from society than when I left.
I met people along the way, of course, but never quite found the community I had hoped might emerge from the experience. Much of the social world of long-term travel seems populated by people at opposite ends of adulthood: twenty-somethings searching for direction and retirees collecting experiences after decades of responsibility. I found myself occupying an awkward space between them, old enough to have developed a fairly settled understanding of what I don't want, but still searching for people interested in building something beyond their individual lives. There were enjoyable conversations, shared excursions, and occasional friendships, but few of the relationships that might develop into a sustained sense of belonging.
The experience has left me feeling something like a sovereign observer. I can move between countries, choose how to spend my days, and examine different societies without being particularly accountable to any of them. There is considerable privilege in that position, and I've appreciated it. Yet the longer I've occupied it, the more conscious I've become of the distance between observing a community and participating in one. I have spent months looking at how other people live while remaining largely outside the relationships that make those lives possible.
Perhaps the strangest part is that I don't miss the structure I left behind. Conventional employment provided a certain predictability, a way of drawing inside the lines. I knew where I was supposed to be, what was expected of me, and roughly how each week would unfold. It also supplied a facsimile of community. Coworkers became familiar faces, shared frustrations created a kind of solidarity, and professional relationships offered some sense of participation in a collective undertaking. Much of that disappeared once the employment relationship ended, revealing how conditional those connections had been.
I have no desire to return to that arrangement simply to recover its social benefits. But removing it exposed a problem I hadn't fully appreciated. The institutions we resent can still perform functions we depend upon, and rejecting their authority doesn't automatically create alternatives. Freedom from an institution is a relatively straightforward condition to understand. Building something capable of replacing its social function is considerably more difficult.
In 2000, political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, documenting the decline of American civic participation and the erosion of social capital. His title captured the difference between continuing an activity and participating in the institutions that once organized it. Americans could still bowl while becoming less likely to join leagues. Similar declines appeared across civic associations, religious congregations, and neighborhood organizations. These institutions brought people into recurring contact with others outside their immediate social circles. Over time, familiarity developed into trust, and trust made cooperation possible. Their importance extended beyond companionship. They gave ordinary people ways to organize around shared interests and exercise influence over the conditions of their lives.
I've spent most of my professional life working in recruiting. Geographic mobility was routinely presented as an opportunity. Candidates were encouraged to relocate for better compensation, more prestigious employers, or the chance to work on something interesting. Career advancement increasingly meant treating employment as a series of transactions, moving between organizations as the market assigned different values to your skills. The relationships formed along the way could be genuine, but the organizations themselves rarely made enduring commitments to the people who sustained them.
I watched companies describe their employees as communities while organizing their relationships around business requirements that could change almost overnight. Teams developed routines, shared identities, and loyalties through years of working together. A restructuring could dissolve those arrangements in a single afternoon. The people remained, and some relationships survived, but the institution that brought them together could withdraw its support whenever maintaining it no longer served an economic purpose. Workers were then expected to demonstrate resilience, embrace change, and begin building their professional lives again.
Organizations pursue flexibility to reduce their obligations, while individuals are encouraged to pursue flexibility to remain useful to those organizations. Both are described as adaptations to a changing economy, although the costs fall differently. The company can reorganize its workforce according to financial priorities. The displaced worker must reorganize a life that includes housing, family, relationships, and a sense of belonging. Geographic mobility may improve someone's economic prospects, but every departure also carries social consequences that rarely appear in the calculation.
This preference for the mobile, adaptable individual extends well beyond employment. Consumer culture has spent decades promoting the idea that a good life is one constructed through personal choice. Where we live, what we purchase, how we spend our leisure time, and even the communities we associate with become expressions of individual identity. The ability to leave an unsatisfying arrangement is treated as evidence of freedom. Markets accommodate this outlook readily, offering an expanding collection of goods, services, and experiences through which people can distinguish themselves.
People connected through unions, neighborhood associations, local businesses, and civic institutions possess capacities that isolated consumers do not. They can coordinate demands, pool resources, and challenge decisions affecting their communities. Fragmentation serves concentrated interests by weakening those capacities while increasing dependence on commercial institutions. The erosion of collective life has been advanced through decisions about how work is organized, which institutions receive investment, and whose interests are protected when economic arrangements change. Individual independence has expanded in ways that often leave people with less influence over the systems on which they depend.
Travel made the consequences of these arrangements more visible to me. Across parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and South Africa, I encountered neighborhoods where everyday relationships seemed more deeply embedded in local life. Small businesses served familiar customers, families maintained visible connections across generations, and public spaces supported interactions that required little planning or formal organization. People knew their grocers, butchers, and neighbors. These were ordinary relationships sustained through repetition and proximity, rather than social activities that needed to be arranged separately from daily life.
I was seeing these places as a visitor, which limits what I can claim about the lives of their residents. Still, I was struck by how often places with fewer material advantages appeared to possess forms of social continuity that felt increasingly scarce at home. Their residents might have faced more difficult economic circumstances, but they also seemed more firmly situated within networks of people who recognized one another and expected to encounter one another again.
A neighborhood can become wealthier while losing the businesses, organizations, and public spaces that connected its residents. Economic activity may increase even as more of everyday life becomes privatized. A person can enjoy greater purchasing power, access to more experiences, and more freedom to relocate while having fewer opportunities to participate in decisions affecting the place they live. Our measures of prosperity capture the material improvements while largely overlooking the relationships through which people experience them.
In his 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, economist Albert Hirschman described two fundamental responses to dissatisfaction with an organization. People can exit, withdrawing their participation, or they can exercise voice, attempting to change the conditions they find objectionable. Exit allows an individual to escape a problem. Voice requires engagement with the people and institutions responsible for it. Hirschman recognized that widespread opportunities for exit could weaken voice by removing the people most capable of demanding improvement.
I've spent much of the past year exercising exit. I left an employment arrangement I no longer believed in, gave up the routines that organized my life, and eventually left the country. The experience has been liberating, and I remain convinced that leaving was the right decision. But it has also demonstrated the limitations of a life organized primarily around the ability to depart. I can remove myself from institutions whose priorities I reject, but that withdrawal does little to change them. It also removes me from the relationships through which meaningful influence might otherwise develop.
Hirschman's title has a third term, and it's the one I've been missing. Loyalty, in his account, is what keeps people inside an organization long enough for voice to matter. It raises the cost of leaving, which can make speaking up worthwhile. I spent the past year lowering that cost for myself as far as it would go. That was the point. It also meant that nowhere I went had much reason to hear from me, and I had little reason to say anything.
Run clubs, coworking spaces, online groups, and organized social experiences offer ways to meet people who share our interests. Some develop into lasting relationships and genuine institutions. But a shared activity provides only the beginning of community. Its deeper substance comes from what people are willing to undertake together, including responsibilities that persist after the novelty has faded or participation becomes inconvenient. We've become accustomed to evaluating associations according to what they offer us, and leaving when the arrangement no longer suits our preferences. That logic makes sense in a marketplace, but relationships and communities depend on commitments whose value cannot always be measured through immediate individual benefit.
I suspect this is where much of my generation finds itself. We inherited the language of independence and learned to regard personal freedom as a measure of success. We were encouraged to pursue opportunities wherever they appeared, cultivate individual identities, and remain flexible enough to accommodate an uncertain economic future. Yet many of us seem increasingly dissatisfied with the social arrangements produced by those expectations. We want community without coercion, belonging without conformity, and shared purpose without surrendering the ability to direct our own lives.
Meaningful communities impose demands on their members. They require time, continuity, compromise, and some willingness to place collective interests alongside personal preferences. Those obligations can become oppressive when institutions lack accountability or prevent people from leaving. But their complete absence leaves little through which a group of individuals can become something more enduring.
In Chicago, the city I'm returning to, Saul Alinsky and Joseph Meegan helped establish the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in 1939. The organization brought together churches, unions, businesses, and neighborhood associations in a working-class community shaped by the meatpacking industry. Residents faced serious economic and social problems, and the council gave them a means of coordinating their interests and pursuing changes they were unlikely to achieve individually.
The model was built around existing relationships and institutions, but its significance came from what those relationships allowed people to accomplish together. Participation meant attending meetings, negotiating disagreements, organizing neighbors, and accepting responsibility for outcomes that affected the broader community. People had to remain involved long enough to build influence. The council helped secure public investment and establish programs that improved neighborhood life, demonstrating what organized residents could accomplish through sustained collective action.
That solidarity never extended across the color line. In his 2010 book Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky, Nicholas von Hoffman, who worked as an organizer under Alinsky, describes a neighborhood whose racial exclusion was firmly established when the council formed. Alinsky wanted integration and hoped to bring a few middle-class Black families into Back of the Yards. Meegan rejected the idea, convinced that even discussing integration would threaten the community and the council. Alinsky went along. In von Hoffman's account, his loyalty to the organization outweighed his opposition to segregation.
The history exposes the problem with simply celebrating stronger communities. Loyalty gives people reasons to remain involved, and collective organization gives them the power to pursue shared interests. Neither guarantees that those interests will be just. The same relationships that allow residents to defend their neighborhood against exploitation can also allow them to defend it against people seeking to become their neighbors. A community's capacity for collective action tells us little about whom it considers worthy of inclusion.
Still, there is something fitting about returning to a city with such a history after months spent admiring the social cohesion of communities elsewhere. Chicago still has neighborhood organizations, local institutions, and people working to improve the places they inhabit. The kind of association I've been looking for may be less exotic than the places I've traveled to find it. What participation in those communities would require of me is less clear.
I've grown accustomed to the freedom of having few fixed obligations. I can change my surroundings, pursue new interests, and make decisions without consulting many people beyond myself. Those freedoms have given me an extraordinary experience, but they have also allowed me to remain an observer. Joining a community in any meaningful sense would require accepting some limits on that independence. It would mean showing up repeatedly, developing relationships that survive disagreement, and becoming accountable to people whose priorities may differ from my own.
Perhaps that's the real problem with starting over. We have become remarkably capable of leaving institutions that no longer serve us, but our capacity to construct meaningful alternatives has not developed at the same pace. The freedom to depart has expanded faster than the institutions through which we might choose to belong.
I'll return with a better understanding of what I want to leave behind. The harder question is whether I'm prepared to stay somewhere long enough, and become responsible to enough people, to help build what comes next.