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It started, as these things often do, with something small. Two children fell out over an online game – the kind where points and digital possessions carry surprising weight. What might once have ended in a quick apology, instead travelled beyond the screen. Heated messages were exchanged between parents. At some point, the conversation stopped being about the children and became something else: an inventory of past favours. Who had hosted more playdates. Who had shown up more. Who had bought more pizza over the years.
And just like that, what emerged wasn’t a resolution but a ledger.
We live in an era saturated with the language of community. “It takes a village”, we say, often and earnestly. We share tips in our local WhatsApp groups and post dreamily about front porches and pot-luck dinners. Yet isn’t much of what we call community just a functional adult playgroup?
These friendships are often born of proximity rather than depth. We meet at the school gate when our kids are aged five. We bond quickly, out of necessity and exhaustion, swapping pick-up favours, playdates and survival tips. There is real warmth in it. But warmth and rootedness aren’t the same thing.
Digital life has given us the habit of curating relationships … as if people were content rather than commitments.
M. Scott Peck, the American psychiatrist who wrote about community with an almost theological seriousness, called what most of us experience “pseudocommunity”: a state of managed niceness, where conflict is smoothed over and difficult things go unsaid. Real community, he argued, requires something harder: staying in discomfort, risking the relationship by saying the true thing and working through friction rather than banking it for later.
I’ve been thinking about that banking. About the way both favours and troubles seem to accumulate and harden, over time, into something that resembles a loan.
When I mentioned this to friends, their stories followed. A birthday invitation not extended, which ended the friendship. A mother quietly removed from the group chat – without a word said to her directly – because she’d questioned the teacher’s gift budget. A father who, when approached about a minor dispute between two boys, responded not with conversation but with an itemised list of past favours, and ended the friendship on the spot. Small ruptures and one pattern emerging: something unsaid, something unresolved, someone gone.
Perhaps this is what happens when we are too stretched to be generous. We are financially thin and emotionally thinner. Digital life has given us the habit of curating relationships – following and unfollowing, muting and archiving – as if people were content rather than commitments. And parenting leaves little slack for the awkwardness of repair.
So we avoid the hard conversations. We smile at the school gates, keep the playdates running and let the unspoken things brew. And then, one day, something small – a sleepover gone sour, a forgotten birthday, a stolen toy – opens the vault. When a falling-out between kids turns serious, the parents rarely stay neutral. Sides form quickly, and whole friendship groups suddenly need to declare allegiance. The ability to discuss our children’s behaviour with any objectivity, to hold space for the possibility that our child might also have played a part, seems to be among the first casualties. We take it personally because, in some way, we’ve made our children an extension of ourselves.
We talk about wanting a village. But villages, historically, were never frictionless.
Perhaps what we’re witnessing is a collective loss of conversational courage. That muscle for sitting with discomfort, for disagreeing without withdrawing. It weakens without use. What’s striking is that our children – the very ones we’re ferrying between these carefully managed friendships – often do this much better than we do. They fall out, call each other names and then find their way back – through some wrestling, a lollipop or a found treasure. They don’t catalogue the offence as evidence of flawed character. They just repair.
The Japanese have a practice called kintsugi: mending broken ceramics with gold lacquer, making the fracture visible rather than hiding it. What if we treated our adult friendships the same way: not pretending nothing cracked, but willing to bring the gold?
We talk about wanting a village. But villages, historically, were never frictionless. They were full of conflict, negotiation and the slow business of making things work. Perhaps what we’re mourning isn’t the loss of community, but our diminishing tolerance for what community actually costs. The village keeps score because we have forgotten that the whole point was to stop counting.
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