Our Forgotten Craving for Community

A Philosopher's Diagnosis

The British philosopher Alain de Botton has a striking theory about why so many of us feel quietly out of sorts. He argues that for the overwhelming majority of human history - about 99% of it - we lived in tight-knit groups of twenty or thirty people who cooked together, raised children together, looked after each other when sick and watched the sun go down with the same faces every evening. Atomised modern life, by his reckoning, is a recent and largely unnatural state of affairs, and the symptoms we now describe variously as anxiety, loneliness, restlessness, or a low-grade dissatisfaction may have a single underlying cause: we miss our tribe, and most of us don't even know we miss it.

The full essay sits on his website at alaindebotton.com.

Why this matters in a strata context

We're a strata management business, so the argument lands somewhere we have a professional interest in. Strata and community-title schemes are one of the very few places in modern Australian life where total strangers, often differing wildly in age, profession, and politics, are required by law to participate in a shared decision-making body about a shared physical place. It is not exactly the twenty-person tribe de Botton has in mind. But it is much closer than most of what modern urban life offers.

Consider what a strata or community-title group actually is. People share a building or a parcel of land. They have a financial stake in each other's behaviour, a neglected balcony is everyone else's depreciating asset. They meet, however reluctantly, at least once a year to talk about the place they all live. They share lifts, gardens, driveways, fences. When a hot water service fails at 11pm, someone in the building usually knows about it before the body corporate does.

That is not a tribe. But it is also not nothing.

What strata gets right (and where it falls short)

What strata gets right is structural. The legal architecture of a strata corporation is, almost in spite of itself, an architecture of small-group decision-making. Annual general meetings, committee deliberations, by-law debates, even disputes. All of these are practice, in de Botton's sense, in being part of something larger than yourself. People who never agreed to be in a "community" find themselves in one anyway.

Where strata falls short is more interesting. It falls short when meetings become purely transactional, when neighbours interact only through letters of complaint, when the levy notice is the sole annual touchpoint, when the chair runs the AGM like a tax audit and everyone leaves as quickly as possible. The legal scaffolding is in place; the human scaffolding has been allowed to rust.

A practical optimism

We don't think the answer is to retrofit twenty-person communes onto suburban Adelaide. De Botton himself acknowledges that the practical hurdles to communal living are real, and that arguments from evolutionary history have limits. Most of us, after all, do not want to give up dental care or running water in the name of tribal authenticity.

But there is a humbler thought worth holding onto. The strata corporation you happen to belong to - by accident of where you bought a flat or a townhouse - is one of the few legitimate, low-pressure, structurally enforced opportunities you have to know your neighbours. Showing up to a meeting, joining the committee, learning the names of the people two doors down, contributing to a gutter-cleaning roster: these are small things, and individually unimpressive. Collectively, over years, they amount to something that recognisably resembles what de Botton thinks we're missing.

A closing thought

The heart of de Botton's argument is not really that we should all move to a desert compound. It is that we should notice the quiet ache for somewhere to belong. Treat it as a legitimate need rather than a private failing, and act on it where we can. For most readers of this article, the easiest place to start is probably the building they already live in.

If your strata or community-title group has long since slipped into the transactional-meeting, no-one-talks-to-anyone mode, that is a thing we can help you turn around. We' can help run better meetings, set shared objectives and most importantly, get the coffee on. See Meeting Hints and Tips and Corporation Objectives for practical starting points.

Get in touch

Acacia Collective manages strata and community-title groups across South Australia. We have seen, again and again how a body corporate that takes its community-building obligation seriously becomes a noticeably better place to live, more than just a tidier balance sheet.

Call us on 1300 792 255 or email hello@acaciacollective.com.au.

The original essay by Alain de Botton is at alaindebotton.com - we think it's well worth fifteen minutes of your time.