Over the summer, in the midst of my endless TikTok doom scrolling, I came across a quote that stopped me in my tracks and snapped me out of social media’s mind-numbing grasp. A quote that many are probably no stranger to, it stated “To have a village, you have to be a villager,” followed by “The price of community is inconvenience.” While certainly not groundbreaking concepts about community, the idea laid out so clearly made me reflect on my first year out of high school and my transition into college, and on all the new and old villagers intertwined in my community.
I consider myself incredibly lucky—I actually enjoyed high school (for the most part). Walking across that stage knowing it was the end of my best friends’ and my In-N-Out runs after football games, beach days, lunches off campus, late-night drives, and what at the time felt like all-consuming high school gossip, was devastating for me. UCSB was (and still is) my dream school, yet I knew it lacked one thing I needed most—my hometown friends.
The seven of us experienced everything together—our awkward stages, first relationships, college admissions season stress, our highest highs, and our lowest lows—building an irreplaceable, forever bond. When I first started at UCSB, I immediately met people who reminded me of these friends, and I was sure that everything would be ok, and it was, for the most part.
But what people don’t tell you about finding your people so early on in life is that there is always lingering loneliness as you attempt to recreate that same bond with others, despite knowing that a bond like that takes years to build and cannot ever be wholly replicated. This is why it is so important to stay connected to friendships from across all years of life. My college friends now and my high school friends then have both seen me develop and grow into the person I currently am, but through very different experiences and circumstances, and both have completed me wholly.
My experience has now made me reflect deeply on the “To have a village, you have to be a villager” quote and the importance of maintaining friendships and actively resisting the urge to burn bridges in contrast to Gen Z’s rising self-first ideology. Existing in a generation where therapy talk and protecting one’s peace are so heavily predominant, perpetuating the notion of prioritizing one’s own needs, we walk a very delicate, thin line between selfishness and self-care.
To be explicit, I am by no means stating that focusing on one’s mental health and well-being is entirely selfish and wrong, but I am emphasizing the harms that come with this “self-first” culture that started as survival—not selfishness—but has spiralled out of control as people foster a deleterious concept of not owing anyone anything.
But we do. We owe strangers kindness and respect, and we certainly owe our friends and community commitment, effort, and love. At what point does repeatedly cancelling on your friends, family, or those you have responsibilities to and acting in one’s own best interest in the name of protecting mental health just become a facade for flakiness and selfishness, revealing our inability to sacrifice moments of comfort for the benefit of others and our community?
The harm festers further when you realize that, in addition to this self-first culture, where we say we don’t owe anyone anything, we expect others to owe us everything. Essentially, we show up for ourselves, fail to show up for others, and then wonder why no one else shows up to help us carry our burdens. We say that it takes a village, but we don’t want to be the ones supporting and upholding that village at the expense of our time.
Yet, that’s exactly how villages work. People need every single villager to survive—they need the blacksmith, the butcher, the healer, etc. We are no different; even if we think we can get our needs from the endless tools of the internet and modern technology, we need the fulfillment and connection that comes from being selfless and wholly committed to one another.
This is why it is so imperative to be a villager—to put yourself through discomfort and things you may not feel like doing for the sake of showing up for and supporting those around you. It is important to be the one to text first, to schedule the hangout, to make an impromptu trip to the airport to drop someone off, to re-arrange your schedule a bit to help a friend out, or simply just be a villager.
People become so focused on who did what and who is being a “good friend” that friendships eventually fall out, getting swept under piles of “Sorry I didn’t see this!” texts and “I’m busy that day” lackluster responses. Boundaries are important, but so are conversations about those boundaries and clear communication about what you need from your friends and what you can give to them in return, not in a superficial transactional way, but through a deeper understanding and intuitive bond.
Additionally, our self-first, “protecting our peace” culture has resulted in heavily criticizing our friends, expecting people to be absolutely perfect, and when they fail to meet those standards or disappoint us in any way, we resort to cutting people off, labelling them as bad friends, and declaring that we deserve better.
While, of course, people do things that may hurt us and may even be worth ending friendships over, often small arguments or misalignments are blown out of proportion, leading to burnt bridges that leave everyone involved covered in scars, no matter how right or mistreated individuals may think they were. Community takes understanding, forgiveness, and mutual respect and compassion, not obsession over who is being a better friend or failure to commit to sacrifices.
Ultimately, what I’ve come to realize is that the reason my hometown friendships have endured isn’t that they were effortless, but because we kept choosing each other through change. Distance, new environments, and evolving versions of ourselves could have easily created excuses to drift apart, yet we stayed because we showed up—sometimes imperfectly, sometimes inconveniently, but consistently.
It was answering the “can anyone talk” texts sent in the middle of the night from thousands of miles away, giving each other comfort knowing we would always be there to listen, to understand, to mess up our sleep schedule or step away from a crowd to be there for one another without a second thought, that created enduring ties.
At the same time, my college friendships are teaching me what it means to build that same kind of village from scratch: to invest before the bond feels guaranteed, to show up without the comfort of history, and to trust that effort will eventually turn into something lasting. Both friendships have shown me that villages aren’t found— hey are maintained, and often built in moments of quiet, unglamorous commitment from every individual villager.