To think people complain about the lack of real connection but don’t want the responsibility of being a villager?

[FluentOpalFox]

Everyone’s talking about how lonely and disconnected the world feels but when it comes to showing up for others, offering support or doing the unglamorous emotional labour of real community, they disappear. People want to receive connection but few want to offer it. AIBU to think that’s the real reason so many of us feel isolated?

Retirement age is so much older than it used to be. Instead of feeling fairly fresh at retirement age people are dragging themselves through to the end and hoping they don't get too ill or worn out.

More two working parent families.

Lone parents being expected to work 30hrs a week once their child is 3yrs old. That's them run ragged too.

Families spread out. I have no one within 100 miles of me. One child with SEN. I have always done parkrun volunteering (as have my dc's) but that's my limit on top of working PT.

There's always going to be exceptions

I never thought the term village involved family

Because it was just me and my mum and dad

So their village was the neighbours and friends and in some cases co-workers (I realise that one is particularly fraught).

However, I have seen similar threads on this subject. They usually go the same way. Many many posters come along and talk about how they hated the village, how they think it was dependent on women not working (not true in the case of my situation and many others, women not working is rare unless wealthy) and they're really glad it doesn't exist anymore

So not only do people not want it, I think they actively dislike the idea. Maybe in case anyone ever asks them to do anything? I find that a bit mad. It's usually pretty obvious who is willing to participate and who is not. But then I don't know what their reason is for hating it so much.

I don't know why the mere idea of this village makes them so angry. I also don't know why they tend to assume that it's based on women not working.

there's also a lot of people who come along and talk about how busy they are and pretend that people in the past weren't busy. Which is mad!

i'm only accustomed to a village going on until around the age of 40. I turned 42 in lockdown and that's pretty much where it all fell apart from my perspective. The local community hall here would say the same thing.

I do agree that volunteering is problematic now with all the bureaucracy - but I don't see why that would stop anyone building some of the connections that have been described here

I'm glad to see that some posters have got a village

It is possible that I've fallen out of favour in because of being single and child free. It's only recently dawned on me that a lot of people will have villages that involve childcare, and I won't have any knowledge of those. I did used to help looking after a friend's daughter - but she got annoyed with me when I asked for help and we're no longer in touch.

Totally agree OP, I have never in my life heard so much of people complaining that "times have changed" and no one cares about anyone now and/or lonely, and when you suggest a meet up or something that requires them making an effort they shoot it down immediately.

Surely it's a trust issue now? People wouldn't trust you to have good intentions nowadays they'd be thinking "what are they doing this for, must have an ulterior motive" or something. There would be a mumsnet post about it for sure 😆

Is that for real?

I used to think I was a cynical person

But quite honest, MN makes me look naive.

The "village to raise a child" is still around in that I know people whose families are very enmeshed with two or three other nearby families with similar age children and do a lot of mutual childcare/sleepovers, shared mass holidays etc.

Most people don't do that as it is a whole lifestyle and can be a bit suffocating, but then they also don't have the same type of immediate support to hand round the corner.

People don't answer the door on here so yeah I think they'd raise an eyebrow if someone was suddenly trying to "help" or "support" them!

There’s no fat left in people’s lives. It’s enough for most to just keep body and soul together.

Church and the Christian faith are on the wane in: other faiths certainly still have strong communities.

Globalisation and better education has allowed people to live abroad. I live thousands of miles away from parents and siblings.

Women being educated has given them choices and many more freedoms. They’re no longer stuck with what they were born into, having to make the best of it.

The village isn’t all that great for many people. It’s unpaid labour with lashing of social pressure and expectation, mostly on women.

Well, it's a lot more organic than that

Though I'm talking to a brick wall here, probably
Not you personally
MN as a whole

I moved house two years ago to a large village/small town where I didn’t know anyone.

i have built a village. It was hard to start with but now I feel like I have one (and I help other people as well).

church was a good starting point.

Your last paragraph strikes me as a huge part of it. I organize volunteers as my job and like to volunteer myself when I have spare time - but it's getting harder and harder to entice people to give their time when it involves getting a DBS check and doing 4 hours of safeguarding training online (which needs to be renewed regularly) before they set foot in the church or village hall.

I also resent spending ages on paperwork when actually I just want to be helping people face to face - so many of my volunteering hours aren't spent doing the actual thing that I'm volunteering for, but doing risk assessments and policy documents.

It drives me mad!

@Octavia64 i'm glad you found one

I have thought about church but the church in my old area that I lived in (I moved three years ago) was very open-minded. The Vicar used to say that he was quite happy for anyone to join and he said "I'm surprised when I meet someone your age who does believe in God". I was in my 30s at the time. I started off helping when they were open to the homeless on freezing cold nights but very quickly became part of the church community.

If I could find a nearby church that had the same approach, I would be okay with that. But they're pretty full on and churchy here. I suppose the church in London had to be more flexible? I don't know.

Yeah to be fair the church where I found my community is not any of the four in my village.

i drive three villages over.

the c of e one in my village is very focused on young people and families and I can see why but I went several times and nobody even remembered me or spoke to me.

they need a greeter really but not my problem

Me too. I agree.

You're right, but I think this is just human nature. In the past, people gave to and received from their communities because there was less choice in the matter. We had more rigid social structures that forced it to some extent. So people didn't necessarily help their neighbours because they actively wanted to, but because there was a strong social pressure to do so. Ultimately this was good for people but I don't think they did it completely voluntarily.

I live in a small, remote community and I see this in action. I moved here as an outsider and gradually more and more has been expected of me by people. It's really hard to opt out of helping at the village fete because you know everyone and everyone knows you: you have to face people and come up with an excuse. They'll come and knock on the door if you avoid them! I really like this and that's why I live here, but it's less effort to live in an anonymous, atomised city.

People want the village when they want help but rarely when they want to help

I’m a villager. I give support and when I need support - which currently is a fair amount - I get it no questions asked. However I (like PP) have a lot of social capital and have banked a lot of goodwill over the years. There isn’t a week where I am not fetching x, bringing y or doing z. And I manage volunteers for a living!

I've really tried to be intentional about supporting my friends and making time for them. Those of us with friends (and I know that's not the case for us all) can at least try to "be the change".

I’m in a place that does look out for each other and has a sense of community. Which is pretty good as it’s in London.

Having said that it’s not stifling or intrusive. Just nice people around.

I think it’s a bit of a vicious circle - people don’t ask for help cos they don’t want to seem needy/a burden so people don’t offer help because they don’t know who to offer it to cos no one is asking

Yanbu, I live in an actual village, and the metaphorical "village" is available but you have to actually be a villager. I'm a school governor, I'm on the PTFA, I volunteer to help at brownies, I pick my friends kids up from school if they are stuck at work or have them over for tea if their parents need it. I pick up prescriptions for my elderly neighbour and show up to the playgroup at the church hall every week with my youngest and make sure anyone new is included etc. Most of these things are a bit of a ballache, but they mean that when I had tonsillitis last week and DH was in sodding Japan I didn't have to leave the house. People picked my kids and took them to school/preschool/ballet/swimming. People dropped food off and checked in on me. We don't have any family support and sometimes I have no idea how we'd get through life if it wasn't for friends.

Another mum who I've literally never seen do anything for anyone else (I fed her cats for her when they went on holiday, still salty that she refused to return the favour 😂) made a comment about how nobody did anything for her when she was ill. There's no point in pointing it out to her but nobody does anything for her because she doesn't do anything for anyone else.

It's definitely harder if you've got really busy working schedules or live somewhere with a more transient population, and of course, not everyone wants a village, and that's fine. But fundamentally, if you want a village, be a villager.

You see my gran was very much a villager, helped out with the local kids did shopping for elderly neighbours , etc. However, like many women of her generation, she either worked part-time or didn’t work at all, therefore had the bandwidth to be a villager. Everyone is so stretched now it’s no surprise that people (and let’s face it we mostly mean women) don’t have the capacity to do this anymore.

I agree about all the beurocracy around volunteering and helping being a real deterrent these days. My mum is 80, and very active in her community. She stopped doing one of her volunteering roles when they decided they needed her fingerprints on file (it wasn't an official type role and she's already DBS checked).

I think you’ve made an astute observation. People are incredibly selfish these days.

YANBU. I'm totally guilty of this. I live in a fairly rural village. It's a lovely place to live. It's friendly in the sense that everyone says hello to each other in passing, and there are between 5 and 10 people I'll chat with more at length when I see them. In theory I like the idea of a real, thriving sense of community in a village, but in reality I get home from work tired and peopled-out and want to chill out with my family. I'd help in an emergency, obviously, but absolutely don't want to be constantly volunteering for stuff.