Ambient Belonging
A missing piece of the loneliness puzzle
The fourth and final essay of my “Camino Diaries” series. Read parts one, two, and three.
Back in April, I wrote that despite having a good life, I felt like I was missing a sense of belonging. I walked the Camino de Santiago looking for answers, not just for myself but for everyone who feels this way. Somewhere between Saint Jean and Santiago, I realized we were missing a concept.
On the Camino, belonging wasn’t something I had to work for. It was just there, like the weather. Every pilgrim climbed the same hills, slept in the same albergues, and nursed the same blisters. We recognized one another by the scallop shells on our packs and the dust on our shoes. When I was alone, I’d walk up to a table of pilgrims and ask, “May I join you?” The answer was almost always yes. The Camino didn’t make friendship automatic, but it made conversation almost effortless. Belonging was in the air.
I call this ambient belonging. Ambient belonging is the degree to which an environment lowers social friction between people. It’s not the thick, durable belonging we find in family, lifelong friends, or close-knit communities. It’s a social atmosphere where membership is presumed and connection requires less effort.
You’ve probably felt it before without having a name for it. A dorm where everyone left their doors open. A summer camp where you made lifelong friends. A team that bonded so much you developed your own language. You weren’t friends with everyone, but you felt like part of the tribe.
You’ve probably felt its absence too. Maybe you moved to a new city, went remote, or got so busy with work and kids that there wasn’t much room for anyone else. Nothing was hostile. It was just harder to meet people and become a regular anywhere.
In April, I argued that the loneliness crisis is really a belonging crisis and that belonging is structural. Ambient belonging names the ingredient that makes connection easier in some environments than in others. It changes the question from How do we make friends? to Where is friendship easiest to make? Belonging becomes a design question, not just a psychological one.
That realization is making me rethink my own life. Maybe my belonging deficit isn’t just a personal failing but also a function of my lifestyle and environment. I felt more ambient belonging in my walkable neighborhood in Washington DC than I do in my car-dependent one in Florida. Back then, I walked to work and was a regular at neighborhood bars and coffee shops.
That doesn’t let me off the hook. Where and how I live is a choice. I still have to make an effort to join, connect, and organize with others. Ambient belonging doesn’t eliminate the need for social effort. It just makes that effort more likely to succeed.
The Camino also exposed a tradeoff I hadn’t fully appreciated. Some nights, I paid extra for a private room in a pension instead of sleeping in an albergue. I slept so much better without loud snorers nearby. I could spread my stuff out and shower in peace. But by doing so, I lost some of the benefits of the communal experience. I bought comfort at the expense of ambient belonging.
I wonder if I’ve done something similar with my life in Florida. As I’ve gotten older and more affluent, I’ve optimized for independence, privacy, and convenience. Without realizing it, I may have purchased and optimized my way out of environments where belonging comes easily. Oops.
This has become a recurring theme in my writing: how modern, tech-enabled life risks optimizing us out of nature, friction, and now, I think, the kinds of environments that naturally produce belonging.
Money cuts both ways. It can buy us out of ambient belonging through McMansions, remote work, private rooms, and frictionless convenience. But it can also buy us access to it through private clubs, schools, camps, churches, and experiences that create repeated contact and shared identity. As more of American life has become private, ambient belonging is often something we buy our way into.
Even the Camino is a version of this. Not everyone can afford to disappear to Spain for over a month. The irony of modern pilgrimage is that it strips away status once you’re inside it, but it takes privilege to get there.
Ambient belonging doesn’t automatically solve loneliness. In Spain, I felt lonely at times, but I never felt like I didn’t belong. I was a pilgrim among pilgrims. Ambient belonging made connection easier whenever I was ready for it.
That distinction also helps explain Victor Turner’s idea of communitas. Turner argued that pilgrimages create a temporary but powerful sense of shared humanity. I definitely felt that on the Camino. But before communitas emerges, the environment has already lowered the barriers between strangers. If communitas is the bond, ambient belonging is a condition that makes it possible.
Ambient belonging isn’t limited to rites of passage either. In fact, the first place I noticed ambient belonging after the Camino was at the country club I recently joined, of all places. Before Spain, I mostly saw tennis courts, a gym, and a decent place for lunch on Saturdays. Afterwards, I started noticing familiar faces, members saying hi, kids playing in the pool or game room, and tribal markers like branded hats and golf shirts. Ambient belonging was there, lower-voltage and wearing Peter Millar, but real. I just hadn’t noticed it.
Ambient belonging is the feeling I want for my kid when he enters school. I want him to grow up breathing it. Right now, he’s away at sleep-away camp for the first time, and it’s old-school, so no phone calls. They do share a stream of daily photos, and I constantly scan them looking for pictures of him. I’m not just looking to see if he’s happy. I’m looking to see whether he’s found a place he belongs. When I catch a glimpse of him smiling, arm around another kid, it warms me.
Ironically, I’ve been wishing for him the very thing I’ve been neglecting for myself. I’d convinced myself that I was too Gen X and Sigma to be a joiner. I’ve embraced my introversion and built a pretty good life around independence, privacy, and convenience. There’s nothing wrong with that. I just see the tradeoffs more clearly now.
The life I built during Covid has served me well. I suspect a lot of us built similar lives. But I think I’m ready to make different tradeoffs. I like being a pilgrim. I like a private room too. I just don’t want my whole life to become one.
Jeff, thank you for writing about the tension between independence and belonging. As a Zillennial, I often find myself lamenting to my friends these days about how lonely our generation is.
I think an important aspect of ambient belonging is "we're all in this together," as in we're all dealing with this hard problem that is life, together. Some of my friendships were formed because we bore witness to tough moments in each other's lives -- we couldn't solve each others' problems completely, but we were there. As people's lives grow more private, I've felt that peoples' suffering have gone private, as well, and suffering in private can be an extremely isolating and painful experience.
As an immigrant from a collectivist culture I really value western individualism, and the rights it grants to people. I have seen how collectivist cultures erases the selfhood of people, and it was not pretty. But on the other hand, belonging does require giving myself away for something bigger than myself. I'm still figuring out how to reconcile them; maybe the tension is just part of the human condition.
Good piece. While you may not see eye to eye with Robert Reich on some things, he wrote something a long time ago that this piece reminds me of - the idea that we today can purchase isolation and “sorting,” both of which serve as indicators of success. However, this comes at the cost of the “ambience” that you speak of, and to the detriment of community (English documentarian Adam Curtis touched on this in his magnum opus, “The century of the self.”)