The Need to Belong.

By John Van Dyke

We all want to Belong. That means different things to different age groups.

I have found myself caught between my past and the present. What do I belong to today? Many of my communities, the places I identified with, or did in the past are gone, or mostly irrelevant today. I am a Boomer, and on the bleeding edge of that group.

Belonging is important.

If your awareness, experience and information is based on 8 to 15 years of active life, with, for the sake of discussion, a starting point from age 10, you are very much a creature of now, with no distractions of the past. Todays media platforms are natural, normal. Social networks are how you connect, and where you find community, and your voice, and identify with or form beliefs. You are use to endless streams of content and information coming at you 24/7 in sound bites, text messages, selfies, a sentence or paragraph of information to influence you, and it is all disposable. You live in a virtual world for the most part and your smart phone, your primary device, is your connection to most everything that you value.

Skip a generation or two and belonging is clouded by confusion, conflict, and too much history. Change. In the last ten years, the last 5 years, everything has changed in plain site, real time. It has caused confusion, chaos, and fostered divisiveness. Fear and anger surface because (belonging) communities have been disrupted. Communities from the past. Many of them physical, places, work, towns, dreams and broken promises. Country, and pride in country as a community is fading, it’s too big and no longer accessible for people to participate in. Two events had significant impact on America as a community. 911 changed how we looked at ourselves, in the (white) mirror. (911 may have been the last time America was united as a community) And we went to war on those who didn’t look like us. Citizens United gave corporations personhood. Politicians no longer were obligated to represent the people, openly.

Social platforms entered into every corner of our lives, and technology tracked our every move on a global scale. A whole cast of characters and actors (some bad) created places for those cut adrift to find a place to belong. New virtual communities formed beliefs and values, places to feel safe with like minded curated friends. A place for those who had been disenfranchised by change, technology, and neglect by government and broken promises.

Are we are a country of communities, and no longer a community of country? This is a huge conversation that is being played out before us now.

Understanding the importance of Belonging was an eye opener into what is driving so much today. For me it was a lens through which I can better understand what is happening in our country, and the world for that matter, today. Indeed the need to belong drives everything.

For the last four years I have been filming and recording conversations with people around the country, to better understand who we are today. Recently I attended a virtual event held by the multidisciplinary global creative agency Sid Lee, titled the Belong Effect. It was a summary of a couple years of work interviewing Gen Z and Millennials to discover what, why, and how they are thinking today. An eye opener. And it clearly pointed to the underlying generational differences in values and beliefs and helped me connect the dots on why we are so polarized and divided today.