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The values of individualism that encourage us to go it alone are in constant tension with the desire for community that many people crave. But when attempting to do things on our own, we may miss out on the joys of coming together.

This season’s finale conversation features writer Mia Birdsong, who highlights the cultural and philosophical roots of Americans’ struggle to build community. In a culture pushing us to put our own oxygen mask on first, Mia argues for the quiet radicalness of asking for help and showing up for others.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid; the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

Be part of How to Talk to People. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip,” “Just Manners”), Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), and Yonder Dale (“Simple Gestures”).

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Julie, do you remember the first time I approached you in the office?

Julie Beck: [Laughter.] Yes.

Rashid: I sent you a message from behind your desk, saying, “Hi, can I come to your desk?”—while…staring at you sitting at your desk.

Beck: From…let’s be clear…less than 10 feet away.

Rashid: Yes.

Beck: I was like, “Yes, you can?” I remember you being really tentative when you kind of crept up, and I was like, “You don’t have to ask permission to come say hi to me.” And then I was wondering if I looked really unapproachable or something. But I was really excited to meet you, because we’d been working together on Zoom for a while, but it was the first time we’d met in person.

Rashid: I promise that is not my usual approach. I think I just forgot how to human a little bit, and what it felt like to work with people in an office. So I think I thought I was being polite, but I maybe just made it a bit weird.

—

Beck: Hi, I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

—

Rashid: When Julie and I first got together to develop the series—after my awkward desk approach [Chuckle]—we talked a lot about how we wanted the show to explore how small, everyday conversations can become the deeper connections that we want more of in our lives.

Knowing how to talk to people isn’t simply for the sake of starting conversation or fighting through the awkwardness of small talk. The point is to ultimately reach a deeper understanding of the people around us.

Beck: What I’ve always wanted, and what I think so many people long for, is this sense that you are part of a rich, interconnected community. That you have an extended network of support and love, full of many different kinds of relationships that serve many different purposes. And the types of conversations we’ve explored in the podcast so far are the stepping stones that lead up to that.

And now, we’ve arrived at our finale episode. And this is a big one. We’re going to talk about how you build a community, and that can be a really complex concept. The barriers that can make that rich sense of community feel hard to find are not just psychological, within our own minds. There are cultural barriers, too.

Mia Birdsong: The American narrative about freedom—which is deeply individualistic—is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself.

Rashid: Reaching out may be exactly what we need to do to find the community support we need.

Birdsong: I’m just like, Ugh, I can’t figure this out, and I’m like, Duh! Like, ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it.

Beck: Mia Birdsong is the author of a book called How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. In our conversation, she explores how the injustices baked into our country’s history have limited people’s ability to connect with one another, and how we understand the definition of community.

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave, right, was considered unfree, was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Rashid: Mia argues that today, too many people equate freedom with independence, and that can lead us to go it alone when we don’t need to.

Birdsong: And I think we’ve been told, right? The people who are strong—the people who are achieving and are successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own. And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering.

Beck: I think we definitely tell ourselves a lot of stories about how other people must have it more together than we do.

Birdsong: And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person.

Rashid: Mia gets into all of it. She shares real advice about how to ask people for support…without feeling bad about it. And how that can actually bring us together.

—

Beck: Mia, there’s been a lot of research on how lonely Americans are, how disconnected people are from their neighbors. And a lot of people feeling like they don’t have anybody to confide in, even. What do you think is behind all that?

Birdsong: There’s a Harvard study; there’s been a couple of Cigna studies. The BBC did a loneliness experiment, which was a global study. And, you know, Americans are lonely. Loneliness has been increasing, and unsurprisingly, the pandemic made it worse. The BBC study was interesting because it found that loneliness is highest among young people, men, and those who are in an individualistic society—a.k.a., America.

Beck: What is the role that you think individualism plays in all this?

Birdsong: When I think about individualism in America, I connect that very strongly to capitalism—how America defines what success looks like and what it means to be a good person.

And part of what capitalism has done is: It has inserted the exchange of money. I didn’t, you know, get together with a bunch of my friends and build my house. I paid for it.

What’s interesting is that among people who don’t have money, don’t have as much access to money, you see a lot more relational childcare. Like, where your neighbor—or your best friend or your sister or your dad—takes care of your kids. And then that social fabric gets built in, because it’s not a transaction. It is what family does.

And then I think the other piece is that the definition of success is so much about the idea that one can be a self-made man, right? Or pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

So there’s this idea that as an individual, you’re going to work hard, and you’re going to make it on your own—which “invisibilizes” all of the help that people do get. Either from the systems that exist and the privileges and advantages you have, depending on your relationship with that system.

So I think about, you know: People who are born wealthy tend to stay wealthy. If you’re white, if you’re male, if you’re able-bodied, if you’re straight, there are all of these advantages that you end up having.

Beck: And there’s a sense, too, like acknowledging any help that you did get makes your success seem less impressive somehow.

Birdsong: And we think that asking for help is a form of weakness. The more attached you are to this version of what it means to be successful and happy and good, the less you are connected to other humans. Because you’re out there trying to make it on your own.

__

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave was considered unfree was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Beck: Wow.

Birdsong: And it added a whole other layer to how I think about the Black experience in America, from being kidnapped and trafficked from home. And if we think about our people as being not just the human beings around us, but also the land we’re from—our ancestors, right?

Through to: An intrinsic part of the way that America practiced slavery was about the threat or experience of being sold away from your family. To the prison-industrial complex, right?

And through all of that, there’s also been Black people’s resistance to it—from people jumping overboard slave ships because they’re like, I’m going home one way or another. Obviously, people running away from plantations.

After Emancipation there’s this archive where you can look at these online. There were all of these advertisements that we placed in newspapers, trying to find loved ones that we hadn’t seen for decades. Sometimes it was one of our children. Sometimes it was a parent. Sometimes it was, you know, a best friend. Sometimes it was a spouse.

They’re beautiful and heartbreaking, ’cause they’re all very short. But they’re people talking about how they’re looking for somebody and they were sold to this person. So their name might have changed. The limit on the kind of information they had about this loved one—but the determination that they had to find them—was just like…rejection of the ways in which slavery was making Black people unfree. It was this insistence, right?

Beck: And the freedom to reconnect.

Birdsong: Totally. And I think about how many Black folks I know who find out, you know, when they’re an adult that Uncle Bobby is not actually their dad’s brother, but is their dad’s best friend from elementary school.

I have a friend who told me about her and her siblings looking at these family photos and realizing they didn’t know who was chosen family and who was blood or legal family. And then also, ultimately, that it didn’t matter.

And all of that stands in such stark contrast to the American narrative about freedom, which is deeply individualistic. Which is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself. Which means that you need to hoard resources, so that you have everything that you need. You get everything through transaction, so that you don’t owe anybody.

It means you don’t ask for help. It means you’re not responsible for or accountable to anybody. The idea of freedom being you can do whatever the hell you want, and nobody can tell you otherwise, right?

And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person. Because we are fundamentally social animals. Like, we need care, right? And this American idea of freedom is so separated from that.

Beck: So when you say the American-dream narrative is antithetical to freedom, what do you specifically mean by the American-dream narrative?

Birdsong: So when I think about the fundamental ideals that were written into the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and who was articulating that...we had white, straight as far as we know, landowning men. Who represented a minority of the American population.

Women were not considered at all—that’s like half right there. No Black people. No poor people. So when I think about that, and I think about what the American dream is—that’s the ideal, right? And that you do that through working hard, not asking for help. And, you know, you’re amassing your kingdom.

Beck: Mm.

Birdsong: That is not being a person. That is not about being in community. It’s not about caring for others. There’s nothing in there about love. It’s such an existentially central part of the human experience—our pursuit of and desire for and need for love.

—

Beck: Can you tell me about a time your community really showed up for you?

Birdsong: Ooh, yes. In July of 2021, I got diagnosed with colon cancer. And Stage 3 colon cancer. And I was going to have to have surgery and ultimately went through three months of really intensive chemotherapy, very aggressive chemo.

Beck: Ugh.

Birdsong: Yeah, it was no fun. But 20 minutes after I got the news, I had a phone call with my friend Aisha. We were working on a project together, and I was all anxious. Not because I had been told I had cancer, but because I didn’t know when I was going to be able to, like, continue the project.

So I totally got on the phone with her, and I was like, “Girl, I’m so sorry. But I just found out I have cancer, and I have to have surgery. So I’m going to have to postpone my work on this project.” She was like, “Mia.” She was like, “Let’s take a breath.”

And in that breath, I moved from kind of hiding from what was scary about this—behind “I have to get this work done”—to being in this place of being able to feel how afraid I was. But also, like, not alone.

Before we got off the phone, she had the meal train set up that would ultimately make sure that my family got fed while I was in the hospital recovering from surgery, and then for the three months that I was going through chemo.

She then circled up with three other friends of ours. And this group of Black women who called themselves “Mia’s Care Squad” then basically coordinated all of the things with the rest of my community—like, my larger community—that I would need.

They made spreadsheets. They had email chains: a squad of people who would run errands for me. They collected everybody’s advice. So I wasn’t getting bombarded with like, you know, all kinds of advice. But I totally wanted advice, because I was like, “I’ve never had cancer before. I want the advice.”

I feel like there was this way in which they tended to my physical well-being—but they also were tending to my spirit and my heart. They created a “joy fund” for me.

Beck: Oh my gosh; what does that mean?

Birdsong: Which was like a pile of money for me to spend only on things that would bring me joy. I bought a lot of art supplies.

When I was having surgery, there was a group of people outside on the hospital lawn singing for me.

The way that this group came together. And I remember having this moment in the beginning of being like, I am absolutely going to tell my community what’s going on with me. I’m not going to be one of those people who secretly goes through chemo. I’m like, Everybody’s going to know. And I am absolutely asking for their help. I do not want to do this thing by myself.

Beck: What did it feel like to hear your friends singing outside your hospital room?

Birdsong: Well, I couldn’t hear them, because I was in the basement of the hospital having my part of my colon taken out. But I knew that they were there. And I remember as I was getting the anesthesia, holding—because I saw them when I was coming into the hospital.

I remember just holding them in my head. And oh, my God. Because, you know, I was terrified. It was so comforting to know that they were out there singing for me.

So I’ve now been cancer-free for more than a year. And when I look back on that experience, I mean: It sucked. It was terrible. Like, cancer sucks, chemo sucks. But there’s a way in which it wove the fabric of community together tighter for them. I mean—we have shared the spreadsheets with so many other people.

And I know that what my community did has been a model for other people who have also gone through cancer or just, you know, something terrible. I feel so grateful that I got to have that level of love and care, and that I didn’t have any shame about receiving it.

—

Beck: I want to talk more about asking for help and offering help, because I feel like that’s very loaded. Why are so many of us hesitant to ask for help?

Birdsong: I think that, one: We often don’t see people asking for help, so we think everybody else is doing it on their own. Which is a lie. Not only is everybody else doing it on their own, but that it’s easy, right? When in fact, all of us are just a hot mess if we’re doing it on our own. We’re suffering.

Beck: It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Birdsong: Totally. So there’s that piece: that we don’t have a lot of good modeling for it. And I think we’ve been told that the people who have their shit together—the people who are strong, who are achieving and successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own.

And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering. When I was in my 20s and 30s, especially: the way that people would say how they got no sleep and were really tired.

Beck: Yes.

Birdsong: As like, something they were proud of.

Beck: “I worked so much. I’m so busy. My calendar is so full. I’m so tired.” Exactly. Like—congratulations?

Birdsong: Yes. Exactly—that thing, right? That is like, I have suffered in order to be productive. I have suffered in order to achieve. So that there is some way in which we have tied together “suffering and pain” with “being a good person and achievement.” I feel I’m at this place where I’m like, No, I want ease. Just because I can do something by myself doesn’t mean that I should.

I absolutely have to remind myself of this. I often find myself struggling—usually it’s something that I’m thinking about, not so much a task I need to do—but I’m just like, Oh, I can’t figure this out. And I’m like, Duh! Ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it. And inevitably—even if it’s just sharing the anxiety or stress or hardness of the thing—I automatically feel better, just because I’m being witnessed.

Beck: Is there a right way to ask for help?

Birdsong: Well, I’ll tell you what works for me. I often find, generally, that casting a wide net is better, right? Especially if it’s hard to ask for help. Asking one person and them saying “no” means you have to go do it again. When I text my neighbors for a lemon, right, I text all of them. I’m not texting them one at a time. I think the other thing is to tell on yourself and to say.

Beck: To tattle on yourself? [Laughter.]

Birdsong: Yes! To be like: I need help with something. I’m finding it really challenging to ask for help. I don’t want to be a burden. I’m going to do it anyway. And then, ideally, you’re able to have conversations with people, and they can reassure you that you’re not a burden.

I don’t know anybody who is constantly asking for help, that other people are like, Oh my God, Like, stop. That’s not my experience. I feel mostly we don’t ask enough. Maybe practice with things that feel like less of a lift—that don’t feel so critical to you, but that feel like they would bring you some ease.

If you know a friend is going to the store, ask them to pick you up some coffee because they’re going to be there anyway. And then you can go by and get the coffee.

Beck: And if they say no to picking up the coffee, that doesn’t destroy my confidence in the same way.

Birdsong: Totally. Maybe I already have coffee, and I’m just going to pretend I need coffee and see what happens.

Beck: What are your thoughts on the right way to offer help? Because a piece of advice that I hear a lot is that you shouldn’t ask “How can I help?” or “What can I do for you?” Because that’s more stress on the person: to then find something for you to do when maybe they’re in crisis or something.

Birdsong: Right, ’cause it’s not specific.

Beck: And then the advice is: “You should just do something without being asked.” But then, what if that’s unwelcome?

Birdsong: Totally. So this is where I’m also like, we need to stop trying to get an A in asking and offering for help.

Beck: I feel very called out by that.

Birdsong: We’re going to mess it up. I know, all of the high achievers are like, I want to get an A in asking and offering help. I think if we really have no idea what we can offer, we can say to people, “I want to offer some help, and I don’t know what would be useful to you.”

Beck: Mm hmm.

Birdsong: “Do you have an idea about something that would be useful, or is there someone who is close to you who does know what might be useful? And can I talk to them?” We don’t want to offer help that is not useful, because it feels risky.

And I think this is where we have to like, tap into what we know about our loved ones and come up with—here are three things that you could offer, right? And offer those and see if they want any of them. Or do a thing and see what happens. And bring them food. The death of a loved one is not going to be made worse by the fact that you gave them bread and they’re gluten free.

Beck: Small potatoes at that point.

Birdsong: Exactly. When I think about something like a joy fund, right? There’s a kind of imagination that was required to come up with that, that I think is harder in times where we’re all grinding with work and shepherding children and commuting and all of that. There was something about the slowing down of the pandemic. And in my mind, that was the slowing down of the wheel of capitalism that gave people room to show up for me in a particular way.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And I’m saying all of that because—especially right now, like we’re not post-pandemic, but we’re capitalism—the wheel of capitalism has started winding along the way that it was before.

And our mental capacity gets sucked up by, you know, both our paid and unpaid labor. And keeping our lives going. So I want us to give ourselves some grace when we find it challenging to make the space that we need for community.

Beck: Right. Because it’s not entirely our doing.

Birdsong: Exactly.

Rashid: Julie, there was an interesting survey on time use showing that by 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends—which doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time to me. And there was an almost 40 percent decline from five years before that. So, it seems like there’s so much we’re pressured to squeeze into a week or a day that four hours per week is all many people can even manage.

Beck: That was even before the pandemic, too. So I can’t imagine it’s gotten better since. But you’re right, Becca, that time is finite, and life is full of demands. Which is breaking news, I know. I mean: It would be nice to see those stats go up. But also, no matter what, it’s never going to be possible to always be a perfect friend or a perfect neighbor.

Mia said, “You need to stop trying to get an A-plus in helping people.” And I felt very personally roasted by that, because sometimes I do think about community-building as…homework? [Laughter.]

Even though I want to focus on relationships more than personal achievement in my life, those values of hard work and perfectionism follow me into my personal life as well—where if I’m not living up to that ideal of creating a perfect utopian community for me and the people I love, then I’m subconsciously giving myself a bad grade. What a nerd!

Rashid: You’re not a nerd…you’re trying to stay on top of it! I now make it a point on Sunday evenings to kind of write out a list of things I want to do in the next few weeks. And then I try to actually set up social time with my group of friends—I actually started a little neighborhood supper club with my friends, where we do themed dinners every month.

I like that it’s created this routine for us—where I know we have this thing we like doing together, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

Beck: I like that you attend to your correspondences on Sunday night. It’s very Pride and Prejudice of you. [Laughter.]

Beck: So Mia, we’ve been talking a lot about how communities show up for each other in a crisis. And I think most people are really ready to show up in a crisis. But how can we have that kind of interdependence when it’s not a crisis?

Birdsong: Right, because all of us are going to experience crisis. That’s just a given. I have met so many older white men who—their wives die, and they’re in this moment of crisis, and they have nobody. They have their therapist, is who they have. They will just start talking to anybody about what’s going on with them, because they are so lonely.

So I think about that as the opposite of what we want.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And part of it, for them, is that they’ve kind of put all of their social connection in the one basket of their wife. And when that person doesn’t exist anymore, they’re just set adrift.

Beck: So community is, by its nature, something that has to be built by multiple people, of course. But if you are feeling a lack of community in your life, what can you as an individual do to kickstart that process?

Birdsong: So, the advice people get is often to join a thing. And I’m like, that sounds lame in some way. But it’s also totally true. Especially as adults, right? We don’t have that built-in, kind of like a school situation—where we’re meeting people who we know we’re building friendships with.

Beck: Right. We have work.

Birdsong: Exactly. Which I feel is not actually where you should be centering your social life. Because despite what your boss might say, your work is not your family. I mean, people obviously build genuine relationships there, but that should not be your most important social interaction.

So I’m like: book clubs. Activism. If you have some kind of faith, a faith community. Because you’re not going to meet people sitting at home, like I’ve tried.

I think the other piece is that sometimes we know people, but we don’t allow ourselves to be known by them. We’re not having the kinds of conversations that allow people to see into the interior of our lives. We’re not really telling them what’s going on with us. We stick to small talk. Right?

It is a recounting of what happened that was interesting in your life. And, you know, you say that you’re “good” as opposed to what you’re struggling with, or how you’re actually feeling. Or something that you’re wrestling with that could even be, you know, an intellectual thing. It doesn’t have to be painful. But we keep things at this surface level, and we don’t allow things to go deep.

Beck: How do you figure out what you want a community to look like in your life and then bring that into the real world? It seems like a very basic question, but it also seems really hard to actually do it.

Birdsong: Yes. And part of it is to get quiet with yourself. Notice the part of you that is longing for something. And I think, to make some room for it, and to notice how you’re thinking about that part. Like, if it makes you anxious, or if you wish it didn’t exist, or if it’s beautiful in some way to you—sit and find that piece of you. And I think you have to ask it, right? What is it that it wants?

You don’t make a strategic plan for building community. So then it’s really about seeing what that leads you to, and seeing who it leads you to.

I think for many of us, it is like—we have people in our lives, but we want to bring them closer in some way. I think that we actually have more knowledge and wisdom about how to build relationships than we give ourselves credit for. And I think primarily what gets in our way is not “Do we know what to do?” but “Are we willing to do it?”

There is no way to be in close relationships without being seen in some way. And I think many of us—I am “many of us”—are terrified of being known. We want people to see the best version of ourself, because we think that’s the version that people will love. That’s the version that people will praise.

That’s the version that people will want to, you know, be around. But nobody is that version of themselves. We are all many things. Sure, we do good and we do well, but we also mess up and are unsure and insecure and have a hard time.

Beck: I feel like what I’m hearing you say is that if there’s a basic action to community-building, it is “not hiding.”

Birdsong: Totally. Yes.

Rashid: You know, one thing I have noticed ever since the pandemic, Julie, is that most of my socializing is now a lot more homebound, which is not a good or bad thing. Yeah, but: I established a lot of new traditions with my community, like cooking dinner at different people’s houses or movie nights, or things in my life that used to be oriented around going out and meeting at bars.

And that still happens, too. But I have established a sort of newness in the rituals I have with my circle of people. What about you? I mean, have you learned anything in the making of this podcast that has changed your approach to your existing relationships, or helped you build new ones?

Beck: I wish I had a big update for you that would illustrate my personal growth. But I don’t think a lot has really changed with my friends or in my community. I’m not best friends with my neighbors yet. I think what I’ve noticed more is just patterns in how I think about my relationship to my community.

Rashid: I feel like that’s what we’ve set out to do, right? Sort of break down these steps of just bringing people closer to us. The initial awkward small talk, the hanging out, the scheduling the hangouts, the tough communication with friendships, and ultimately the sort of selfless disposition that you need to have if you want your relationships to feel more mutual and not feel transactional.

Beck: I think another hallmark of life in our capitalistic society is the pressure to optimize and self-improve all the time. I fall into that trap of thinking things will be better if I change this or if I change that.

So it kind of strikes me that a lot of my angst comes from feeling like I need to optimize my community toward some ideal through my own hard work—which is actually a very self-centered way to think about it.

The point of a community is that it’s not just in one individual’s control. And as much as it’s good to put effort into your relationships, you also have to just let go and be curious and see what’s actually there, and enjoy what’s there.

Rashid: And I think when you do try to control the situation, you can end up with our messaging-behind-the-desk situation, where before saying “Hi” I thought it was maybe a better idea to message you first, and make sure that you were comfortable with the interaction and all of that.

Beck: But you know, an imperfect awkward beginning like that can actually lead to something great. Because we’ve really become friends while making this podcast! You’ve been to my house; we’ve had many long, rambly, chatty drinks together. You’ve met my partner, you’ve met my sister, you’ve met a bunch of my friends.

Some of that was the result of intentional effort and reaching out and scheduling. But it was also the result of easing up on overthinking, and just being together. So I think it’s a balance of effort and ease—or effort, but not to a neurotic degree.