A friend and I were recently talking about how disoriented so many of us feel—and how that is shaping the way we raise our children.
He kept returning to one idea: there was a time when children weren’t raised alone, but within a community.
It stayed with me.
Because I remember that world.
I grew up in Haiti, where community was not something we sought—it was the structure we lived inside.
My first friends were my siblings and cousins. We moved through life together—weekdays, weekends, holidays—rarely apart. Our parents, aunts, and uncles rotated responsibilities without discussion, picking us up from school depending on who was available, dropping us off at my grandmother’s house, which was less a home than it was a center of gravity.
Some afternoons, we ended up at my father’s electronics store, doing homework between rows of television screens, playing hide-and-seek between display shelves. Life unfolded in shared spaces. Nothing felt segmented.
Weekends were for sleepovers, birthday gatherings, long Sunday dinners that stretched into the evening.
And then there were the holidays.
Easter at the beach house. Sleeping outside in tents under a sky thick with stars. Listening to stories around a bonfire. Swimming until our fingers wrinkled. Drinking fresh coconut water straight from the fruit, scraping the soft flesh from the shell.
My family was my safety.
And what I understood, without ever being told, was this: every adult around me held the same authority as my parents. They could guide me, correct me, protect me.
I belonged to something larger than a single household.
Then I moved to the United States.
The rupture was immediate.
My father dropped me off at college in Boston, helped me open my first bank account, and wished me luck. Just like that, I was on my own—in a country I knew mostly through movies and television.
I had to learn how to build a life.
And more quietly, how to redefine what community meant.
It became friends. Then colleagues.
And in between, a kind of emptiness.
I thought about the small things I had lost without realizing their weight. The bakery on the corner where I knew everyone by name and could simply ask for “the usual.” The shoe shiner walking down the street, his bell marking the rhythm of the neighborhood preparing for the week ahead.
The quiet familiarity of being known.
Here, I don’t know most of my neighbors’ names.
And I may never.
Even the way we stay connected has shifted. We follow each other on social media to keep up from a distance. We text instead of calling, choosing convenience over presence.
And yet, somehow, we feel more disconnected than ever.
So where is the anchor?
I’ve asked myself that question more times than I can count.
I found an answer, briefly, in Harlem.
There is history there, yes—but what sustains it is something else. A continuity of people who see one another. I felt it at Abyssinian Baptist Church, at Sylvia’s, at the Apollo Theater. In the corner grocery store. At the laundromat.
“I’ve seen you around,” people would say.
A simple phrase—but what it meant was: you are known. You belong here.
In a city like New York, that kind of recognition feels almost improbable.
And yet, it exists.
Brooklyn gave me glimpses of it too—not as a collective, but through individuals. Strangers offering food, offering help, offering something of themselves without expectation.
Moments that felt, unmistakably, like community.
And still, I don’t believe anything virtual can replace it.
No network, no platform, no curated feed can replicate the feeling of being held in a real, physical community. Of being seen not for what you do, but simply for being there.
But increasingly, connection feels transactional. Tied to work. To ambition. To proximity to opportunity.
Networking has, in many ways, replaced community.
And productivity has consumed the time and space where community once lived.
We are told to be intentional. To create space for what matters.
But I wonder if what we are trying to recreate is something that once existed more naturally—something built into the structure of daily life, not added onto it.
So I find myself asking:
Does community, as we once knew it, still exist?
Or are we being asked to redefine it entirely?
I don’t have the answer yet.
But I know this—
I am looking for an anchor.
For something rooted. Reciprocal. Without agenda.
Isabelle Alerte is the writer behind In Written Word, an editorial site on place, taste, and lived experience. She lives in Miami.
If this stayed with you.
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