According to a recent survey, the average American moves about fourteen times during a lifetime. Think about it. That means that during a 70-year period, Americans move every five years! Is it any wonder, then, that we as a nation find it difficult to develop and maintain deep and meaningful relationships with our neighbors, our coworkers, and even our family members? I read about the wife of a business executive whose company moved him and his family three times in a seven-year period. That frustrated wife said, “In order to lessen the pain of saying ‘Goodbye’ to my neighbors, I no longer bothered to even say ‘Hello’!”
Today Americans feel isolated. Our neighbors are often strangers. We miss the sense of shared community and human connection that was so much a part of an earlier era. Sadly, today’s technology is geared to an audience of people who live one by one in front of their own separate “electronic hearths.” And the products are artifacts of individualism. This technology is called “interactive,” when in fact people will only interact with a television screen and a remote control button. They call it progressive when we end up spending even more time with equipment than with each other. Technology doesn’t always give us what we want. Unfortunately we’re expected to want what it gives us! Myriads of information come to clog our arteries. But what we’re lacking isn’t facts, but meaning!
The wise man Solomon speaks to us in relevant ways for the decade of the 90s. He knew that it’s always dangerous to isolate ourselves from others. And therefore he wrote a classic portion of scripture, asserting that people need people! He simply states, “Two are better than one!” (Ecclesiastes 4:9), meaning to say that we need each other.
With the back-fence, the village store, and the front-porch now distant reminders of a disappearing American landscape, it’s undoubtedly taking a concerted effort in this decade to develop and maintain meaningful relationships. But we must have these types of relationships, or we risk losing one of the greatest things in life–our emotional health. Yes, we need each other. Solomon was right in that, Two are better than one!
January/February 1994