Just a few years ago, if a single individual mentioned his or her interest in dating or marriage, those within earshot would immediately ask, “Have you tried online dating?” It was as if those magical dating apps were the panacea that could cure even the most unlucky-in-love.
How quickly things change. Those in the millennial and Gen Z age ranges, who once embraced dating apps en masse, now seem to be abandoning them faster than Taco Bell customers are ditching its lettuce-laden dishes. Or at least, some people are looking for alternatives. According to one survey, about 78% of users report dating app burnout.
Evidence of this surfaced in a recent article from the Minnesota Star Tribune, which featured a new singles group formed around service and conservation. The group, Minneapolis Buckthorn Removal Singles Club, began from a desire to eradicate invasive species — both the creeping buckthorn weed and the pernicious dating apps that hinder young adults from meeting in real life and allowing a relationship to grow naturally.
It’s easy to dismiss such a group as cute but crazy. After all, doesn’t one have to be pretty desperate to come out on a weekend morning, stomp around the woods and sweat out a shirt just to meet others who are single and ready to mingle? Regardless, I think these folks are actually on to something valuable — not only for singles, but for our culture as a whole.
Why? Because such an activity is a prime facilitator of community. Community — or the interaction between neighbors, friends and family — is a vanishing element in society, pushed out not only by our reliance on technology, but also by other societal developments such as the COVID shutdowns and increasing political polarization.
There are a number of reasons we as individuals — single or otherwise — need community to properly function and live.
For starters, community provides an escape from the loneliness and isolation with which more than half of Americans struggle — which likely also leads to the mental health issues plaguing 1 in 5 Americans. One can’t help but wonder if we would see some of these mental health issues decline if more Americans were like the buckthorn gang mentioned above, getting out and working alongside their fellow man toward a common good cause.
Second, community forces us to look beyond our own problems. Getting out and being with others naturally leads us to learn about their lives. And as almost no life is untouched by sorrow or difficulties, our interactions with others enable us to both share our own burdens and listen to those that others carry, ostensibly making both lighter and easier to bear. Additionally, the opportunity to hear about the difficulties others are facing enables us to break out of the pity party or victimization mode into which it’s so easy to slip.
Spending time with others also breaks the superficiality that can so easily hinder our interactions with others. The buckthorn crew, for example, is forced to work manually toward a common goal for hours on end, making it far more difficult to resort to phone scrolling or monosyllabic answers. Instead, those laboring side by side must stretch their brains to ask questions, share freely and go into conversation topics that might otherwise be avoided.
This development brings another positive, namely, bringing disagreements or different viewpoints out into the open, forcing discussions on a wide range of issues to take place face to face. And when discussions like these happen in person, we’re more prone to cultivate the civility and politeness which many of us discard when engaging in online debates.
As author Wendell Berry aptly explained in “The Art of the Commonplace,” community is the medium which holds us to a “standard of behavior or responsibility.” It also “aspires toward stability,” striving “to balance change with constancy.”
Take away that community, and we’re left with chaos and contention. Restore that community, and we begin to properly interact and see one another as real people once again, worthy of respect.
We may not all be cut out to fight invasive buckthorn … but every one of us can combat the pernicious contention invading today’s culture by cultivating in-person community with those around us.
This article is republished with permission from the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Annie Holmquist is the culture and opinion editor for 1819 News. Her writing may be found at The Epoch Times, American Essence Magazine, and her Substack, Annie's Attic.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected].
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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