LIFE-CHANGING CONVERSATIONS

If you feel overwhelmed, it makes sense. If you don’t know where to go for help, that does too. When the government and community institutions aren’t there to help us to make sense of hard things, we rely on informal networks, the people in our lives, to help us make sense of what is happening and trade concrete information to help each other. But these social networks, our most basic relationships, are also under stress.

In America, people increasingly report feeling lonely, up to 60 percent in a survey released in early 2020, and that was pre-pandemic. Since then, Covid-19 has only continued to fray our communal fabric. With many workplaces and schools closed, and public gatherings restricted, each of us had to figure out our own individualised strategies to keep earning money, educate our kids, and care for sick loved ones - now from a distance.

“The less interpersonal trust people have, the more frequently they experience bouts of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.”

Yet as our lives collapsed to their most local level, we still lost trust in our neighbours. In the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020, more than half of Americans told the