They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The idea? That everything has a cost, even if not financial. But I’m at my local Neighbourhood House, one of many community centres found across Australia, breaking bread with strangers and eating a genuinely free lunch. While it cost me time, what I’ve gained feels socially priceless: I’m getting to know my neighbours, something fewer and fewer Australians are doing.
In 2000, Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone warned of declining civic participation and social connection in US society. Americans, he argued, were retreating from clubs, associations and volunteer groups – the building blocks of community connection – in favour of a more solitary existence. As Putnam put it at the time: “We used to bowl in leagues; now we bowl alone.”
Although the prognosis was American, the symptoms were being felt in Australia too. Fast forward 25 years and they are even more pronounced. Australians are attending fewer community activities, volunteering less and have less trust in institutions and democracy. Political polarisation is on the up, while union and political party membership is down.
The personal impacts are clear. Social isolation is now considered one of the greatest health risks to Australian society and nearly one in three people report being lonely. As Hugh Mackay, social psychologist and honorary professor at Australian National University, puts it: “We are born to connect, but lonelier than ever.”
That’s not to say that Australians are not active members of their communities: the country enjoys some of the highest civic participation scores worldwide, helped by compulsory voting. But Australians invest in community with less frequency and vigour and, should the trend continue, it could have profound implications for our wellbeing, society and democracy.
Our desire for connection has not disappeared. Peruse your preferred choice of media – newspaper, TikTok or TV panel show – and you’ll no doubt come across someone opining the loss of community. We have an unmet social hunger – or perhaps we’re looking in the wrong places. So, how does one reconnect with their community in 2025?
My first stop is the social activity du jour in 2025: a running club. It’s relatively easy to sign up, though forcing myself out of bed at 7.30am on a Saturday is a harder sell. Once I arrive, I’m greeted with a warm round of applause as a newcomer. It’s disarming how friendly people are: there’s no pressure, no networking agenda, just a low-stakes friendliness that feels increasingly rare.
Next, I enrol in a 10-week improvised comedy course. There’s a fee, so it’s not accessible to everyone, but it comes with its own kind of social benefit. Lesson one makes clear: being awkward is part of the process. I’m going to need to get used to that.
So far, so good. For my next endeavour I turn to Dr Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale University, for advice. Her class, Psychology and the Good Life, became the most popular course in Yale’s history when it launched in 2018. It focuses on something that statistics suggest eludes many of us: genuine happiness.
Santos says having a strong social connection is correlated with lower levels of stress, reduced risk of chronic disease and longer life expectancy. To see the greatest benefits, one should pick activities that are intentional and involve supporting others.
“Activities like volunteering at a local shelter, mentoring someone, or even organising community events can allow you to connect with others and give you a sense of purpose,” she says. “To make sure you’re getting the biggest happiness boost, try to find prosocial activities that allow you to see the positive effect of your actions on other people.”
Judith Dickson is now retired but has been volunteering since she was 18. Over the years she has been involved in many different forms of community organising, including sports, social justice and gardening.
“The most important thing I’ve learned is I’m not alone,” Dickson says. “It will help you feel useful and you’ll become connected to a wider community.”
Beyond the personal impact, it has opened her up to other points of view. “I’ve met so many fabulous, interesting people and I’ve learned to see the world in different ways,” she says. “You forget what’s going on in your own life, you’re all working toward a shared goal.”
As Dickson demonstrates, volunteering and other prosocial activities are important precisely because they are collective. Increasing individualism is one of the greatest risks to community, says Mackay, and reversing this is central to increasing social cohesion.
“There’s increasing concern about ‘my rights, my entitlements’ – be that gender, ethnicity, religion, politics, culture,” Mackay says. These are important, he says, but far less important than what we have in common: our shared humanity. “In a fire or flood you don’t ask how someone voted in the [Indigenous] voice referendum – you just help.”
In my own search for volunteering, I turn to the internet. What I find is disheartening: most volunteering opportunities involve lengthy forms, interviews and police background checks.
When did trying to do good become so bureaucratic? I try short-circuiting the process by rocking up to my local op-shop and offering my time. I’m met with great enthusiasm – and quickly think to myself that this a great example of why in-person interaction is beneficial – only to be referred online to fill out another form.
Mark Pearce, the chief executive of Volunteering Australia, says my experience is far from unique. He acknowledges the need for proper checks but says the growing administrative burden puts many people off.
“We talk about volunteering as for the common good and without financial gain but it doesn’t always come free and oftentimes costs the volunteer,” he says. “Things like those regulatory burdens impact on people’s proclivity to volunteer through organisations.”
Pearce says the increase in admin has – along with other factors – resulted in a rise of “informal volunteering”, where communities come together to tackle an issue without an institution or organisation. He says as many as 6 million Australians partake in this type of activity.
But even to find that you have to know what you’re looking for and then seek out the right portal: a Facebook page, an Instagram profile or a MeetUp group. These spaces are often gatekept – you must request to join groups – and can be difficult to find. Googling “community events” does not, it turns out, bear fruit. It’s a paradox that the technologies which are blamed for eroding social ties are the ones we have to use to help rebuild them.
Perhaps I’m falling into a trap: an expectation that, just like a takeaway order or parcel delivery arriving as and when I want it, community can be found online without friction or effort.
Unlike many her age, Niamh Murray, 31, is an avid communitarian. She actively seeks out connection in various forms, which she calls “medicine”.
“So often I’m sitting at home alone, feeling so isolated and like there’s so much disagreement in the world,” she says of her own doom-scrolling habits. “But when you come into community spaces you realise that there are so many more people who feel the same as you, who are lost and lonely, want more meaning in their life and want to make the world a better place.”
The interactions she has through her community work are an antidote to the toxicity of the internet, she says.
Despite Murray’s enthusiasm, my desire to attend running club and improv wanes as the burden of the search takes hold. But then around week four something starts to happen: I keep turning up consistently and the connections I’ve made blossom. I get offered lifts home, invited to other events and, through improv, I volunteer for Melbourne international comedy festival, opening up a whole new network of connections.
I’m beginning to experience the benefits of what Putnam would term “reciprocity”. When you give without expectation of immediate return, it will come back to you later down the line. Reciprocity is the soil in which community connection grows. With this comes a sense of conviviality – I actively want to help others, to pay forward the social generosity shown to me.
But so far my focus has been limited. My running club and improv are made up of people who look like me and, mostly, share my educational background. “The real secret for building social cohesion is not that we hang out with people like us, it’s that we’re prepared to hang out with people not like us,” Mackay reminds me. “We succeed when we invite the people next door in for a cup of tea, not for any reason other than because they’re neighbours.”
Even with my newfound positivity, once I start noticing a dearth of community more generally, it feels confronting. Although having a friendly chat with someone while queueing for a coffee is nourishing – and studies show these “weak tie” kinds of interactions are just as important as friendships – I become frustrated with the fleeting nature of these moments. I find myself longing for what is probably a rose-tinted view of the past: a town square full of activity and socialising, where you could just turn up and be with others.
In 2025 – at least in Melbourne – a friendly town square is hard to come by. So I try the next best thing: my local library. There I’m presented with a range of potential events I could join: reading groups, community gardening and walking societies.
Just as with volunteering, choosing a community from a list feels somewhat sanitised, another example of the individualistic and consumerist creep into our everyday lives, rather than something that occurs organically. The tendency to treat community building as another thing to schedule into an already busy, optimised and curated existence feels at odds with what Mackay and Santos have told me. Community should feel natural and altruistic. Perhaps this is why informal volunteering is on the rise.
But I reason that it takes work to get there, so I opt to try Neighbourhood House, which hosts free community events in centres around the country. I start attending their lunches and meet a range of people I can confidently say I would never have spoken to otherwise.
At the same time, I come across an advertisement for a “language exchange” in my local newspaper (proof of local media’s value to community) and decide to go along. It’s in Melbourne’s city centre and the crowd is, from what I can tell, almost all new migrants. This is an important addition: the demographics of Australia have changed significantly in the past 25 years and, for the first time since colonisation, nearly a third of the population were not born here, up from 23% at the turn of the century. Although I’m a fairly new migrant myself, my experience as a white British man is different to many others, and most of my social circle were born in Australia. If I’m to create a truly representative community, I need to mix with people who weren’t.
The Neighbourhood House lunch and the language exchange are somewhat more difficult than my previous attempts to connect: conversations are slower, common ground is harder to find and, on the whole, it feels less immediately satisfying. But buoyed up by the social boost from my other experiences, I push through. Slowly, my sense of community shifts. I feel less like an outsider and more like part of a whole.
I am both energised and exhausted but I definitely feel better for it. It can be awkward, boring and, at times, testing: participation takes planning, but the joy comes from presence. Social friction isn’t avoidable if you want to be a good communitarian – it’s necessary.
“Anyone can be nice to their friends,” Mackay says. “The challenge to social cohesion, to creating truly harmonious societies, is that we extend that to everyone. The state of the nation starts in your street.”