What We Owe Each Other
The decision is yours. It has always been yours.
What Holds Series – Part 7
Everything That Got Us Here
I want to begin by naming what this series has actually been about.
Not connection, exactly — though connection has been the thread running through every post. Not community, though we've moved through military installations and faith congregations and a kitchen in New Delhi and a Florida evacuation and twenty moves across thirty years. Not even belonging, though belonging has been the hunger underneath every story.
What this series has been about is assumption.
The assumption the woman was carrying when she welcomed us and then watched us warily — that generosity has a limit, that another person's flourishing comes at the cost of her own. The assumption the woman with the ellipsis was carrying when she calculated that a military family wasn't worth the effort — that the pool of connection is fixed, and spending from it on someone temporary is a loss. The assumption the people stripping hardware stores bare were carrying — that there is not enough, and the only rational response to scarcity is to get yours before someone else does.
And on the other side: the assumption my neighbor in Hawaii was carrying when she knocked on a door that had been closed too long. The assumption Paul and Rina Flores and Keith and Heidi Bond were carrying when they decided three families should spend every weekend together regardless of membership cards or moving timelines. The assumption Dave and Nathan were carrying when they put Jan first, Nathan's family second, and our home last — in the middle of a hurricane evacuation with a closing window and no margin for error.
Every story in this series has been, at its root, a story about which assumption was running underneath the behavior. Fixed pool or generative one. Zero-sum or expanding. Fear making the call or something else.
The question I've been circling, from the beginning, is what produces the second assumption. What makes a person decide — before the evidence is in, before the crisis, before there's any particular reason to — that choosing toward another person is never a loss?
What the Evidence Suggests
I have been collecting data on this question for thirty years, across enough different communities and cultures and circumstances to have some confidence in what I've found. It is not a comfortable finding, because it doesn't reduce to a policy or a program or a set of best practices. But here it is:
The people who hold things together are not operating from better circumstances. They are operating from a prior decision about what the world is.
Alexis de Tocqueville, writing about American civic life in the nineteenth century, observed something that has stayed with me since I first encountered it: that the habit of caring for common things — of showing up for the neighbor, the community, the stranger under the overpass — is not a natural instinct but a practiced one. It is built, incrementally, through the repeated act of choosing it. The person who stops for the man under the overpass in the middle of an evacuation is usually the person who has been practicing smaller versions of that choice for years. The community that makes room for the transient military family is usually the community that has been building the habit of inclusion long before any particular family arrived.
What Tocqueville understood — and what the research on human flourishing has increasingly confirmed — is that the quality of our shared life is not a byproduct of individual virtue. It is a product of collective habit. Of what we practice together, repeatedly, until it becomes the shape of how we live.
Martin Buber, the philosopher whose work on human encounter has influenced everything from psychology to theology, drew a distinction that I find more clarifying than almost anything else I've read on this subject. He called it the difference between I-Thou and I-It — between encountering another person as a full subject, a world unto themselves, worthy of genuine attention and response — and encountering them as an object, a means to an end, a background detail in your own story. Most of our interactions, he argued, are I-It by default. Not from malice. Just from the efficiency that daily life requires. The I-Thou encounter — the moment of genuine meeting, when another person is fully seen — is rarer and more demanding and more transformative than anything else available to us.
The neighbor who knocked on my door in Hawaii was offering an I-Thou encounter to someone who had become invisible. Manjula, standing in a kitchen in New Delhi, was offering one to a woman who thought she was losing an argument about finances. Dave and Nathan were offering one to Jan, an older secretary with no one to help her, in the middle of a hurricane.
Every story in this series has been a story about someone choosing the harder, rarer, more demanding encounter — and what it produced in the person on the receiving end.
What We've Lost and What It's Costing Us
I don't think any of this is abstract. I think we are living through the consequences of a mass retreat from the I-Thou encounter — a civilizational contraction toward I-It that is visible in our politics, our institutions, our neighborhoods, and our personal lives. The same fear that stripped hardware stores bare in Florida runs, at a larger scale, through our public discourse. The same zero-sum calculation that dismissed military families as not worth the effort operates, at a civilizational scale, in how we think about communities different from our own.
Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist whose research on moral psychology and social fragmentation has shaped how we understand what is happening to us as a society, argues that human beings have a capacity he calls the hive switch — the ability to transcend self-interest and function as part of something larger than ourselves. It is not our default setting. It requires activation. And what activates it, his research suggests, is not ideology or policy but shared experience — the felt sense of being in something together, of mattering to each other in ways that are practical and real.
What has eroded is not our capacity for that experience. What has eroded is the infrastructure of shared life that used to activate it. The institutions, the habits, the practices of showing up — not for people we have chosen but for people we simply find ourselves alongside. When that infrastructure weakens, the hive switch stays off. And a society of individuals with the hive switch permanently off is, as the research consistently shows, worse at almost everything — more anxious, more fragmented, more susceptible to the zero-sum logic that turns neighbors into competitors and strangers into threats.
We are not thriving. And I think the reason is simpler and more demanding than most of our proposed solutions acknowledge: we have stopped practicing the assumption that other people are worth it.
What This Comes Down To
I set out to answer a question at the beginning of this series: what holds?
What holds a person together when the floor gives out. What holds a community together when the conditions that made belonging easy have disappeared. What holds the connections between strangers who have no shared history, no common crisis, no thirty-year marriage to fall back on.
Here is what seven posts of evidence has taught me:
What holds is never the structure. It is always the people inside the structure who decide, before they have a reason to, that the person on the other side of the door is worth knowing. That Jan matters more than our home being first. That the man under the overpass is worth sixty seconds of attention even in the middle of an evacuation. That the military family with the expiration date on their posting is worth the full investment of friendship anyway.
That decision — made quietly, unspectacularly, before the storm arrives — is the load-bearing element of every human community that has ever held.
Which brings me to the question I want to leave with you. Not answer. Leave.
What do you believe we owe each other?
Not as a philosophical abstraction. As a practical, daily, lived commitment. The stranger in the grocery line. The new family at church. The colleague no one has invited to lunch. The man under the overpass.
What do you actually believe you owe them? And does the way you're living reflect that belief?
I have been asking myself those questions for thirty years. I don't have clean answers. What I have is the evidence — accumulated across twenty moves and a dozen communities and a kitchen in New Delhi and a minivan pulling over in a hurricane — that the people who hold things together have usually decided, somewhere prior to the moment of decision, what they believe about who counts.
The decision is yours. It has always been yours.
What do you believe?
Thank you for reading the What Holds series. If something in these posts has stayed with you, I'd love to hear what it was.
