The following is a direct manuscript from the titular seminar held in Harlem for the 2050 United Symposium For A Better World.
“I just wanted to know my neighbor.
Picture me, almost thirty years ago, with the world at my fingertips. I felt connected to the world through the guise of the internet. News from South Africa, celebrity gossip from that award show, or the latest food craze where we dunk desserts in fondue. Trust me, that last one was a revelation. But despite access to everything, I felt alone. I felt isolated. I didn’t feel safe in my surroundings. And I wasn’t the only one. A study done in 2023 showed that fewer than 27% of people ages 25-30 had fewer than six close friends. 15% percent said they had no friends at all. This statistic was up 500% from 1990. While we felt connected to the world because of what was available at the touch of a button, the perception around the world was that it was becoming scarier. The days of asking your neighbor for sugar were over. In fact, 34% of people claimed they didn’t know the people living next to them.
Think about that. A third of the people on this planet didn’t know a single person living next to them. Imagine what that would do to a person. You don’t have to imagine, we all lived it. In the United States alone, it was the era of distrust, the era of polarization, the era of being scared to walk down the street because we couldn’t trust anybody coming to our aid if we drew the short straw of luck. This led to violent outbursts, insurrections, and families breaking apart because they held different beliefs. The US versus THEM mentality.
Everything changed when I decided to knock on the door next to mine. Sixty-three-year-old James McDonough opened the door, and I introduced myself. I was his neighbor, and I brought some cookies, and he welcomed me inside and offered me coffee. I had no idea what I wanted out of this, but I noticed he had a collection of pottery. My mother was also a potter, not by trade but by hobby, so we talked about that. It was a brief conversation, but it changed everything. In the hallway, when I went to grab my mail, whenever he would appear I would ask him about pottery. I would wave to him when I passed him on the street. When I ran out of cumin, he was the first person I asked before I ordered anything on Amazon. I was experiencing something that I had missed for a long time: community.
And you know what happened next. Whenever there’s a good idea, you need to find a way to share it with the world. Enter TikTok. I know, I know! ‘Uriel, you said technology was isolating us.’ But when it is used effectively, it can make something that seemed so daunting, like travel or cooking, into something tangible. Something easily accessible if you just push yourself a little bit. Using TikTok, I created a viral sensation – the Please Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Trend. I walked the streets of Los Angeles and introduced myself to virtual strangers. By showing you that fascinating people live right next door, it was easy to realize that our neighbors aren’t ones to be feared but ones to embrace. Now I wish I could take credit for that guy who just so happened to knock on Jerry Seinfield’s door. That was a stroke of luck. But it also popularized what I was talking about. Most of our neighbors are good people who feel just as lonely and unsure of themselves as you do. I say most because, for every door that led to a great conversation, some just slammed the door on your face. But the trend caught on. When companies count online interactions in the hundreds of millions, our trend hit three billion in just five months.
But this was just the beginning. To institute change, change that can impact the planet, you take a social media phenomenon and you find a way to make it stick. You provide guidance. Sure, people were embracing the idea of knocking on one’s neighbor’s door and interviewing them. But what about the problems plaguing our neighborhood? What about the trash on our streets, the potholes, the guy who puts “We Sell Used Cars” on your windshield that you know will just wind up in the trash? There must be a way to address these and more, right? I turned to the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania. They had this fascinating article listing the five elements of a strong Democracy. The first was Social Cohesion- namely, that a society’s members recognize each other and are willing to collaborate. I know we were getting there on the first part, but the second part was still unknown. Could our neighbors be willing to collaborate?
I decided to host a community gathering – food, music, icebreakers to get to know not just the people living next to me, but the people of my neighborhood. Now I didn’t have the space to do this, I lived in a tiny, tiny, tiny apartment in Los Angeles. But I was within walking distance of a YMCA that was kind enough to let me use their basketball court. I put flyers everywhere, I used my TikTok profile to share the news, and the first time I did it we got twenty people. Not bad. Were there more than twenty people in my neighborhood? Of course. But it was a start. Individuals realized that their neighbors had similar interests. I was into composting, I always wanted to try it, but it was expensive! However, after I found that four other households wanted to try it, we decided to compost and gather our funds together to hire a third party to collect our compost. These monthly hangouts included social events – pizza parties, game nights, arts and crafts. It bridged the gaps between the younger generation who were eager to learn crafts, and the elders who wanted somebody to listen to them. By the end of the first year, these “gatherings” cropped up all around the world.
I saw “gatherings” in quotation marks because I realized quite early what these were. These were town halls. Harkening back to the colonial era, I essentially revitalized the town hall. A safe space for the community to gather, get to know one another and bring up concerns. When our community wanted to do something about the homelessness situation, it was simple to gather over a thousand signatures to send to your representatives. When a new business arrived in our neighborhood, they came to us and introduced themselves and that led to more business frequenting their store. Sometimes the best ideas come from the past, and this is an example of taking an old idea and revitalizing it for a new generation.
I would like to claim credit for changing the world, but I didn’t. I only showed people that they were not alone. And look at the amazing things that are possible when we aren’t afraid of the people next door, but see them as a person just like us. When I saw that this trend extended to El Salvador, The Netherlands, Japan, and even someplace like Egypt, I knew we were hitting something true about ourselves. Just as quickly as we can turn on one another, we can be pushed to embrace one another. And we saw a substantial decrease in loneliness across both genders. We saw a decrease in the perception that this world was a dangerous place. And when people believed that this world was safe, they also believed that it is a world worth protecting. I can’t claim credit for the wonderful technological and political changes that we have witnessed in the 2040s and are still seeing today. But I can take credit for pushing ourselves to find peace in strangers and to not make us so prone to knee-jerk reactions.. It is far easier to work through problems when we can see the other side as a human being.
We may just need someone to show us that it’s okay to knock on a door and talk to a stranger, though it never hurts bringing a tray of cookies.
Thank you.”