“Everybody keeps saying isolation is a mental health issue. It’s a longevity issue.”

—Esther Perel

I spent the final days of my twenties in isolation. In my quiet Brooklyn neighborhood, nature was blooming all around me: a vivid contrast to the debilitating loneliness beginning to set in. On the evening of my 30th birthday, I was walking back to my stoop where my neighbors were gathered sipping wine. Rather than rush inside, I spoke with them for the first time. The contents of our exchange weren’t particularly noteworthy—but beneath the soil of it, something took root. 

It started with seeds: small ones. We left books at one another’s doors. We got to know each other over home cooked meals eaten on the floor. We began watching one another’s animal companions, sharing keys and opening up our kitchens. Our building became a bubble, one that expanded outward in the summer months as we threw parties on the street. My circle of community widened amid the safety of open air. Proximity was deadly, but intimacy was alive. 

As the years passed, our lives grew closer. We went camping and shared around the fire about our mutual love of nature. Leaving the city became an annual ritual, weekends spent in laughter in tears, running naked through fields, howling under the moon, rites of release. I learned about womanhood from a group of women I now consider sisters, who I might never have met had I not chosen to say “hello” on a fragrant spring evening when it felt like everything was dying.

It was then that I learned one of the most important lessons of my life, which Richard Powers once articulated to me so clearly: live where you live. Whether you are reading this in an urban or rural setting, you exist within an ecosystem—one that is alive with other beings who it’s possible for you to exist in relationship with. And it has a ripple effect; now, I greet the neighbors all along my street, in my coffee shop, even those I’m certain don’t always share my views.

Isolation is illusory—and more than that, it’s a deliberate tactic that is being used to divide us. President Trump has taken a page straight out of the autocracy playbook and has turned the American people against each other, just as he is attempting to isolate us on a global scale through tariffs and trade wars. The answer to tactics of division cannot be more division; it has to be banding together, and learning once again, what it means to be good neighbors. And that is something we can all practice at every scale; when macro change is difficult, focus on the micro.

As Esther Perel pointed out to me in our recent conversation for episode one of The Nature Of podcast, many of us feel more alone than ever, despite the fact that technology appears to extend our connections. And while that’s true, it can’t replace intimacy. Humans need eye contact and time spent in community. Loneliness isn’t merely a mental health crisis; it’s an existential one for us. Do we want to exist here isolated from one another and the other beings we share this planet with, shortening our species’ life span? Or do we want to belong here more deeply?

The truth is, I don’t know how I survived in New York City before I became close with my neighbors—before I had people down the hall to turn to in moments of turmoil, people leaving notes in the hallway, sending texts that say: “come to the roof, look at the moon.” But I do know this: Life isn’t meant to be lived alone. And I know that our stories are shaped by small moments which, taken in isolation, might seem inconsequential—the way a seed might seem inconsequential until one day you look around and see it has grown into a tree.