Latest / YINWorldWide / What We Lose When Community Disappears
Transcript
- YIN: Imagine this. Two versions of the same kid, same family, same ability, same problems, same potential. In one version, he walks into a wrestling room where he's young. There's a coach in that room who expects more from him than he expects from himself. There are parents in the stands who start to know his name. There are teammates who notice when he does not show up. He loses, he gets corrected, he gets pushed. He learns that other people are counting on him. And slowly without realizing it, that environment starts to change him. Now imagine the other version of that kid that never walks into that room. Nothing terrible happens. There's no dramatic moment where his life falls apart. He simply never meets those people, never hears those words, never has that particular group of adults paying attention to where his life is headed. Now 20 years later, those two versions of the same people could be living completely different lives, and neither one of them would ever really know why. This is Yin, and these are conversations about discipline, direction, and identity, and how they quietly shape who you become. there was a time when a kid could leave his house on a summer afternoon. His mother didn't know exactly which yard he was going to end up in. She didn't know whose house he might walk into. But she knew the neighborhood. Somebody was sitting on a porch. somebody was outside working on something. Somebody's mother had more kids running to their kitchen than actually belonged to her. And if that kid did something he knew that he should not be doing, there was a pretty good chance his mother was going to hear about it before he got home. If he fell, somebody helped him. If he got hungry, somebody fed him. If he stayed out longer than expected, somebody had probably seen him. He had more adults paying attention to his life than the ones living inside his house. When we talk about community, we usually end up talking about loneliness. But community was bigger than having people to talk to. It was a structure around your life. It meant there were people outside your family who knew you well enough to care what happened to you. And sometimes those people helped shape where your life went. Direction is one of the things I come back to constantly on this show. We talk about choosing a direction, finding one, changing one. But the truth is your direction is being shaped long before you are old enough to understand why. Sometimes in a place you didn't know would matter. For me, wrestling was one of those places. When I think about wrestling now, I do not see just a mat. I see a gym early in the morning. Kids half awake. Parents carrying bags and coolers into a building. I see teammates sitting together, parents sitting on the same bleachers tournament after tournament, a coach kneeling at the edge of the mat. Another parent somewhere behind him yelling like the kid wrestling belonged to them. And then the match ends. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you walk off the mat knowing you didn't give everything you had. And there's nowhere to hide. Your teammates saw it. Your coach saw it. The parents who had watched you all season saw it. Then you come back the next week. The same people are there. And the week after that, at that time, I thought I was learning how to wrestle. And I was. but that room was teaching me other things at the same time. What it felt like to have somebody expect something from me, What it felt like to be responsible to people besides myself. What it felt like to lose and still have to show up again. What it felt like when another adult, who was not my parents, cared enough about what I was becoming to tell me when I was falling short. The guys on the team mattered, but it was not only the team, it was the coaches, it was the parents around us. There were adults there who had no obligation to shape my life, but they did anyway. Not because anyone assigned them that responsibility, but because I was part of something that they were part of as well. And when you're young, you do not understand how significant that is. You're not thinking about direction or identity or which lessons will still be inside you 20 years later. You're trying to make weight. You're trying to win the next match. Trying not to disappoint your coach. But years later, you can look backward and realize while you thought you were participating in a sport, an entire group of people was quietly helping shape the person who would eventually leave it. A kid thinks he's walking into wrestling practice. He had no idea. He may be walking into the place that determines who he'd become. That is the danger of these places disappearing. Because when we lose them, we are not only losing somewhere for people to gather, We are losing environments where people outside your immediate family become invested in the direction of your life. A coach sees a kid beginning to drift before that kid understands he's drifting. A friend's parents hear the way he's talking and pulls him aside. Somebody sees ability in him that he does not know what to do with yet. Sometimes a young person needs to hear something from someone other than their parents. Your father can tell you the same thing 50 times, then your coach says it once, and for some reason you finally hear it. That does not mean your coach matters more. Sometimes human beings just need more than one voice helping them understand themselves. That is why I think the phrase, it takes a village, means more than having extra help watching children. The village helps shape the children. One adult might teach discipline. Another might teach patience. Another might recognize something in you before you recognize it in yourself. will be the person willing to tell you that the direction you're heading in is not good enough. When the village gets smaller, all of that responsibility starts collapsing inward. eventually the village becomes the household. Then we look at the household and wonder why everybody inside it is exhausted. Parents are expected to provide, raise children, teach values, monitor technology, create opportunity, offer emotional support, and somehow notice every problem before it becomes serious. We still say it takes a village, but a lot of people no longer have one. And the loss reaches far beyond children. Think about what happened when something went wrong in a community that worked. A family lost somebody and people came over. Nobody waited for an invitation. Nobody needed the perfect thing to say. They just showed up. A parent was running late and somebody else took the kid home. Someone got sick and people noticed. an older person stopped. Showing up somewhere they normally went, and eventually somebody asked why. The burden of life did not stop being yours, but it did not always belong only to you. Other people carried pieces of it. that is different from simply knowing people. And there were places that made this possible. The gym, the church, the neighborhood field, the rec center, the barber shop. places where the same people kept returning long enough to become familiar with one another's lives. The repetition slowly created responsibility. You start knowing whose child belongs to whom. You start noticing when somebody's behavior changes. who normally sits in that chair. Eventually another person's life becomes familiar enough that when the pattern changes, you feel it. There were people who had been around so long they did not need an explanation every time something happened. They already knew the family. They already knew the history. They already knew which kid needed a little bit more attention. Modern life has given us incredible conveniences. we can work from home, shop without entering a store, have food brought to the door and communicate with almost anybody without sharing physical space with them. A lot of that is genuinely useful. And some people left older communities for very good reasons. Being known can also mean being judged. belonging can become pressure. A place that feels supportive to one person can feel controlling to another. But there is still something hidden inside every place we no longer have to go. The encounter that no longer happens. You can see the 30 minutes you saved. You cannot see the coach that your kid never met. You cannot see the parent who would have become part of your family's life. You cannot see the conversation that might have changed somebody's direction. The absence leaves no receipt. Nobody announced that community was ending. There was no moment where society decided that these places did not matter anymore. They simply became less necessary to everyday life. When something is taken from you, you notice. When you slowly stop needing it, you may not realize what else was attached to it. The restaurant was not just where you ate. The gym was not just where your kid practiced. The church was not just service on Sunday. The barbershop was not just a haircut. The activity gave people a reason to enter the room. The community was everything that happened before they kept coming back. you can build another gym. That does not mean you rebuilt what existed inside the old one. Because the building was never the most valuable part. The valuable part was the people who kept coming back. the older kids the younger ones looked up to. The families who had sat beside each other through wins, losses, injuries, bad seasons, and good ones. That took time. And community takes years to build and almost no time to break apart. A program closes, a family moves, the neighborhood changes, And suddenly people had spent 20 years regularly crossing paths stop seeing one another. Nothing dramatic has happened. That may be what makes it so easy to miss. The people are still alive. The buildings may still be standing. Everybody simply stops being in the same room. and the need that Room was helping carry does not disappear with it. There are just fewer people close enough to see it. You can replace equipment. You can replace a building. you can create another program. But you cannot instantly replace trust. You cannot instantly replace the coach who knows what a kid looks like when he's actually tired and what he looks like when he's making excuses. You cannot instantly replace the person who can say, Your son is with us, and have those words mean something. Those relationships require years of showing up. And once they disappear, the next generation may never know they were supposed to have them. Think about the two versions of the same kid. I was the one who walked into the room. But what if I had not? I don't know the answer. And that is what makes the question so uncomfortable. Nothing terrible would have had to happen. I simply would have never met those people. I cannot separate every lesson I learned there from the person I became afterwards. I cannot tell you which coach's words stayed with me the longest. I cannot tell you which expectation followed me into business. which lesson about losing eventually became a lesson about failure? Which lesson about showing up became part of how I think about discipline? Which person helped shape something in me without either of us realizing that was what was happening. That is not how influence works. It mixes into you. Years later, you think of value as simply yours. You forget that somebody helped put it there. There are people walking around right now whose direction changed because somebody's father coached their team. Because a woman at church kept asking how school was going. Because somebody in the neighborhood refused to watch them throw their life away. Because they walked into one room where people expected more from them than they expected from themselves. And those people may never know how much they mattered. The person they helped may not understand it until decades later. An algorithm can give a kid information. It cannot look him in the eye after he gave up and tell him that this is not who he is. A video can teach discipline. It cannot notice that he stopped showing up. A group chat can keep people in contact. It cannot recreate a room full of adults who have watched the same group of kids grow up for 10 years. I walked into a wrestling room thinking I was going to learn a sport. I walked out carrying parts of people who probably never knew they gave them to me. So I'm gonna leave you with this question. How many lives will go in a different direction because the people who might have helped guide them were never there? This is yin. If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Not everyone, just someone who's ready. You can find Yin Worldwide Podcasts on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. If you want to go deeper, visit our website at libyin.com. Subscribe if you're committed to the work. If not, that's fine too. This isn't for everyone. Remember, move with intention.