How to Build (Online) Community With Intention
Thoughts on how we shape communities and how they shape us.
“It turns out I like working out at home,” my friend, visiting from Tucson, said the other week. Her declaration struck me for a couple reasons. For starters, I am the complete opposite—I am so happy to be back in a gym (and still trying to re-home my expensive pandemic equipment.) Also, she said it like she was totally surprised by this news, like she’d just figured out something fundamental yet profound about herself.
The desire to be a part of communities is on my mind. Another story. A few months ago, a friend shared that he attends mass, and I never knew this about him. He explained how he feels a sense of awe in churches that are hundreds of years old, as if centuries of prayer and supplication could linger in the polished wood of the pews.
We create energy together in communities. Vibes, as we’ve come to call them, each one influencing what we say, how we feel, and even the thoughts we think. Consider a spa, a library, and a dive bar, for example. Each is uniquely sensory. In a spa, you might smell lavender and eucalyptus. You bathe in soft lighting and the sounds of waves or the forest. A library, on the other hand, smells like old books and warm bodies, and often is filled with natural light. You will be left alone there, respectfully. Dive bars, meanwhile, are loud, dark, and smell like vodka and beer, and the music tends to vibrate everything. In a dive bar, you will be treated with near distain as a right of passage. Each environment, in turn, might contribute to thoughts that are more relaxed, engaged, or social.
As I mentioned, this is on my mind because
and I are building a virtual community for coaches, creatives, and entrepreneurs. And what will that be like? How do we curate an online environment of quality and dimension without access to the embodied, sensory elements that make real-life meaningful and distinct? I am biased, but I believe it’s possible.In February 2020, I took successive trips to San Francisco, Baltimore, and Palm Springs for work and pleasure. In Palm Springs I met my friend Wendy, a physician assistant who worked on a liver transplant team in San Francisco for many years, and who now is a professor of medicine.
“Everyone is freaking out over this virus,” I remember saying. We were unloading my car in the parking lot of our condo.
“It’s a big deal,” she said, looking directly at me. “It’s going to be a very big deal.”
It was the first time that a concern for what was about to unfold broke through my casual denial. And yet, we didn’t take the virus too seriously that weekend. It was still early days, and we bopped all over town. (In one crowded bar, we shared a plate of fried calamari with an architect we’d just met.) Fast forward a few weeks and I was sending my university team home to work—something that was not a part of our culture. We quickly set up Slack as a way to connect and communicate, also something that was not a part of our culture, but we wanted to keep our projects on track and demonstrate that we could be productive as a remote unit. Maybe there was an opportunity here, I remember thinking. Just for a few weeks.
Over the course of the next year-plus, Slack became an important leadership tool for me. On Mondays, I would post a message about something I’d been contemplating or reading—a briefer version of how I write here—and I’d invite everyone to share their priorities and what they were working on for the week. It became a pandemic “travelogue” of sorts, something we could benchmark against to measure progress and stay organized.
If a team didn’t have a healthy culture to begin with, I can see how this level of transparency might feel like surveillance. But to us, it was connection and structure. It was a way to make the invisible, visible, and to ensure that no one fell off the map during a very scary time.
Here’s another example of how online communities make meaning. April is National Poetry Month. I’ve never observed it before, but my friend Tony, a poet who I know through graduate school, shared that he was going to write a poem-a-day in recognition, and I decided to join him. On a whim, I extended the offer to friends I know through another Slack writing group—we are all contributors to Why Is This Interesting?—and five others jumped on board.
During this experiment, we’d informally agreed to post our poems daily, the good and bad, to trust each other with our first drafts and rusty attempts. There’s a tenderness and intimacy that develops when you share creative work; it’s a communal journey of the self, a quieting of one’s inner critic, and a choice to be supportive and accountable. In total, I wrote nearly 40 pages of poems in April—the most I’ve written in a decade-plus. It wouldn’t have happened without the community of friends.
As Seth Godin puts it, what we demonstrated is that “we are the kind of people who . . .”. We are the kind of people who write together. Who agree to be accountable to each other. Who trust each other. Who curate feelings of belonging and togetherness online, from California to Massachusetts to Mexico.
Building community online is, of course, old news. We do it all the time, and many online relationships transcend the digital to real life. Conversely, people with whom we have real-life relationships can find a different quality of intimacy when they move online, which is what happened with my team during the pandemic. My coworkers were more introspective, funny, supportive, and visionary on Slack, and so was I. In some ways, we felt closer than ever.
Derek Thompson wrote in “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust” in The Atlantic that many Americans have found no alternatives to building community outside of organized religion—and that the online communities to which we revert (the communities to which we also find ourselves addicted) are disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary. I agree that our world feels rife with loneliness, anxiety, and isolation. And yet, I’ve been a part of, and have helped build, digital communities that are hugely important to me, even beyond those that I’ve mentioned—communities that have allowed me to develop, and rediscover, cherished aspects of myself. They may not be embodied experiences, but they are synchronous, deep, and collective, transcending geographies, lived experiences, and cultures.
and I are building Second Act Community for coaches, creatives, and entrepreneurs. Check us out, and please don’t hesitate to reach out if you want to learn more.