Listening to Episode 271 of the Mockingcast, I heard them reference an article from The Atlantic by Ellen Cushing titled “Americans Need to Party More” (the link is to Yahoo, which has a non-paywall version of the article).
The basic points of the article are:
- Surgeon General warns of a national loneliness epidemic: one in eight Americans reports having no friends.
- Party poopers? Only 4.1% of Americans went to social gatherings in 2023, a 35% drop since 2004.
- We love birthday parties (84%!), but only 59% attended one last year. Who’s going to throw them?
What I loved about the article was the author’s very practical analogy she uses to encourage people to take helpful steps. Her analogy is that you pay your taxes to make sure your community has the resources you need. Here’s what she writes.
Fire trucks, after all, don’t come from nowhere—they come because we pay taxes.
This year, pay your taxes: Resolve to throw two parties—two because two feels manageable, and chain-letter math dictates that if every party has at least 10 guests (anything less is not a party!) and everyone observes host-guest reciprocity (anything else is sociopathic!), then everyone gets 20 party invitations a year—possibly many more.
I think it is good advice. Pay your taxes. If you want community, you need to do actions that are communitarian. We need to put skin in the game.
As a pastor, I have had several discussions with people who said that they didn’t feel connected with their church. Invariably, when I asked how they were involved in their church, for example, did they serve somehow, the answer was “I’m not.” In future conversations, I am going to use the analogy of “paying your taxes” because I think it is very helpful.
