The Four Enemies of Belonging

The feeling is always the same.

I could be walking down Capitol Boulevard in Boise or Water Street in Milwaukee. Even Broad Street in Richmond and Chapel Street in New Haven. Completely different parts of the country but the same realization.

The longer I traveled, the harder it became to ignore the dissonance between the country I encountered and the country reflected back to me through screens.

On these streets, there is a strange familiarity. People on their way to work. Friends laughing at stories I would never know. Dogs pulling toward some invisible urgency. Even in places marked by hardship, there remained the ordinary choreography of people trying, however imperfectly, to make a life.

Then I would glance at my phone and be pulled into a different country altogether. Here was America narrated almost entirely through outrage or contempt. The complexity or nuances of issues flattened into argument with any contradiction edited out. The ordinary acts of cooperation that had filled my whole afternoon vanished beneath a story of permanent collision.

What unsettled me was not that the fractures were imaginary. They were not. Walking Portland block by block, homelessness became harder to reduce to ideology, because exhaustion has a texture when you encounter it at human distance. At Sitting Bull’s original grave on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, the fight over a pipeline became the latest chapter of a much older dispossession. Watching people move between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso across the Santa Fe International Bridge, immigration became workers, families, and obligations that existed long before anyone turned them into talking points.

But somewhere in the repetition, I began to wonder whether America suffers from something deeper than polarization. We are surrounded by information about one another and starved of actual encounters. We absorb headlines about communities we have never visited, opinions about people we have never met, narratives about places we have never stayed in long enough to understand.

Boise, El Paso, Richmond, Portland, Milwaukee, Fort Yates, and New Haven did not resemble one another. The histories, the politics, the demographics were all different. But the same desire kept surfacing in every one of them. The desire to belong.

Belonging is not the same as fitting in. It is closer to a basic human need than a preference. The felt assurance that you are part of something, and that if you went missing, someone would notice. It is one of the quiet conditions that lets a life feel like it is happening somewhere rather than nowhere.

When people have it, they can carry a great deal. They can disagree without rupture, lose an argument without losing their place, take a hard hit and not come apart. Belonging is what makes conflict survivable instead of disqualifying.

When people lose it, they have nothing holding them. And a country full of people with nothing holding them is not so much divided as unmoored. I have come to suspect that much of what we call division is something quieter wearing a louder costume. It is unbelonging, looking for somewhere to put itself.

I saw this most weekday mornings at Biggby Coffee in Dayton where the same regulars gathered before work. They didn’t always agree about everything, but that didn’t matter. They had a table, a standing hour, and the small daily proof that they would be missed if they did not show. Then one day, they invited me over and it was the realization of what I had been missing in my life for a long time.

Biggby Coffee, Dayton, OH (Michael Holland)

That longing is the most ordinary and human thing, and the most easily wounded. Because alongside it, in city after city, I began to notice the same forces working against it. Different communities and different circumstances, but the same underlying pattern. I came to think of them as the Four Enemies of Belonging, interconnected forces that undermine what binds us together.

Performance

Belonging requires being known, but performance is the practiced art of not being known. That is what makes it the first enemy: you cannot belong from behind a mask.

To say public life is increasingly staged would be an understatement. Administration officials and Members of Congress deliver soundbites designed to inflame. Cable panels turn disagreement into entertainment. Influencers post clips engineered to provoke. Every platform rewards the same things: intensity over sincerity, certainty over curiosity, outrage over understanding. Visibility matters more than credibility, reaction more than reflection.

This did not appear from nowhere. Reality television taught us to watch ordinary life as competition. Cable news stretched politics into a twenty-four-hour contest with winners and losers. Social media rewarded the loudest and most combative version of ourselves. Different forces, same result: a public square built for performance.

At the local level, accountability still has a face. A mayor runs into residents at the grocery store. A school board member sits across from frustrated parents. Police officers meet people on the street all day long. Proximity creates friction, and friction creates accountability. Distance can perform without cost.

I was reminded of this while walking down Vine Street on Election Day, when I ran into Mayor Aftab Pureval heading into the polling location at the Cincinnati Public Library. No entourage. No soundtrack. No panel waiting to dissect his every move. Just a citizen walking toward a responsibility. That version of public life rarely goes viral. And yet it is closer to how most of us actually live.

The trouble is that the performance does not just stay on the screen. We learn from it and start curating our own lives, rehearsing our opinions before we offer them, managing how we come across. We begin treating the person across the table as an audience to win or an opponent to beat. The mask that protects us in public follows us home. And belonging cannot form there, because the one thing it asks for is the one thing a performer will not give: to be seen without the costume.

Trust is one of the first casualties. Not because people suddenly turn cynical, but because they learn through repetition. They watch enough staged outrage, enough calculated controversy, enough public figures saying whatever the moment requires, and eventually they stop taking any of it at face value. Performance creates spectacle, and spectacle draws an audience. Belonging asks for something else entirely: friends, neighbors, people who mean what they say. A country can survive deep disagreement. What it cannot survive is the suspicion that nobody means anything at all, because a nation of performers is finally just a nation of strangers.

Erasure

If performance distorts the present, erasure distorts the story a country tells about itself. The core stories of America have always selected who is in and who is out. Lately, though, the rewriting has become explicit.

The administration directed federal agencies to comb through the nation’s monuments, markers, and museum exhibits and remove anything judged to disparage Americans, past or living. The words transgender and queer were scrubbed from the Stonewall National Monument’s website, at the very place the modern movement began. In boardrooms and on campuses, the same impulse traveled under the banner of dismantling DEI.

The erasure does not run in only one direction. Spend time in the deindustrialized towns of the Midwest and you find another version of the same wound. Communities that once built what the country wanted were written out of the story of progress. Their labor was celebrated when they were needed, but their abandonment was not. They learned, too, what it feels like to vanish from the national narrative while still living inside it.

None of this is new. It began with the people who were already here. Travel across the Great Plains and you are crossing ground layered with broken treaties and the deliberate dismantling of Indigenous life. This was not history forgetting itself. It was a method, practiced first on the people who were here before there was a country to forget them. I felt a version of that realization standing on Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, confronted with the fact that I had reached adulthood knowing almost nothing about one of the largest racial massacres in American history. The event had not been hidden exactly. It had simply never become part of the story I was taught about my country.

I used to think of this as amnesia, but amnesia suggests forgetting. Erasure is more active. It is the process by which some experiences are elevated while others are diminished, sanitized, or excluded. The belief that some histories strengthen the nation and others weaken it. That some truths are patriotic and others divisive. That some people belong at the center of the story while others remain on its edges.

The consequences run deeper than just historical accuracy. Stories tell people whether they matter, whether their experience belongs in the national narrative. That is why the fights over what we teach, display, and commemorate feel so intense. They are presented as battles over ideas or language. Increasingly, I think they are battles over belonging. Because whenever a nation narrows the range of stories it is willing to tell about itself, it narrows the range of people who can see themselves inside it.

Dehumanization

If erasure asks who belongs in the story, dehumanization asks whether we still recognize one another as fully human once we are in it.

We have become remarkably fluent in the language of categorization. We sort one another into tribes, blocs, segments, and camps. One group becomes an invasion. Another becomes an elite. Rural Americans become caricatures; urban Americans become cautionary tales. The homeless become a threat. Every immigrant becomes illegal. The working poor become lazy. Disagree with someone and add a label: fascist, marxist, socialist, and the list goes on. Entire populations are compressed into categories small enough to fit inside a headline. The more often we encounter one another as abstractions or talking points, the easier it becomes to stop understanding the complexity beneath the label. Suffering becomes data. Lives become useful mainly insofar as they reinforce an argument.

The longer I stayed in these places, the harder it became to ignore the distance between those abstractions and the people in front of me.

One afternoon on Main Street in Memphis, a man stopped me, shook my hand, and asked if I would buy him lunch. We talked for a few minutes while he ate. He had a way of carrying a conversation. In a policy debate he was a line item, a cost, evidence for somebody’s argument. On the sidewalk, he was a person who was hungry and wanted company while he ate.

I have seen versions of this everywhere: in Chicago, in New Haven, in Austin. I thought about it again in Richmond, standing next to a man in Kroger as he counted coins to see whether he could afford two cans of soup. And in Dayton, watching a mother lay quarters on a Family Dollar counter one at a time while her daughter stood beside her. Neither moment was dramatic. Neither would appear in a campaign ad. Yet both revealed what public discourse obscures. Human vulnerability rarely arrives in the form of an argument. It arrives in the form of a person.

For years I assumed the opposite of belonging was simply exclusion. Increasingly, I think it may be dehumanization. Before people can be excluded, marginalized, or feared, they must first be reduced. They must become something simpler than they are. Whether that is a stereotype, a statistic, a threat, or a burden. The reduction is what makes everything else possible. Once people cease to be fully human to us, it becomes easier to disregard their suffering and deny their place among us.

Belonging depends on the opposite impulse. It asks us to remember that every person carries a history we cannot see and a life more complex than any label. The moment we stop extending that recognition, belonging begins to erode. Not because people disappear, but because their humanity does.

Isolation

Eventually, something gives.

One of the things I heard often during my travels was a growing reluctance to connect. People talked about relationships that had become more difficult to maintain because every interaction seemed to carry the possibility of conflict. Family gatherings required careful navigation. Long-standing friends began avoiding the very subjects that once deepened them. Conversations that once wandered comfortably across politics, religion, culture, and current events now moved cautiously around invisible fault lines.

What struck me was how similar the stories sounded, regardless of geography, politics, age, or background. Again and again, I heard versions of the same calculation. How it was much easier not to bring it up or simply not attend. The decision rarely arrived all at once. It accumulated gradually, through small acts of avoidance that felt reasonable in isolation and consequential only in retrospect.

Viewed individually, those decisions make perfect sense. Most people are not looking for conflict. But after years of outrage, perpetual crisis, and a public culture that rewards confrontation, avoiding a difficult conversation can feel less like surrender than self-preservation.

What interested me was not any single decision but the accumulation of them. The habits that sustain belonging weaken, not because people reject one another outright, but because maintaining connection begins to feel increasingly difficult.

That realization took time to understand. Observation can feel remarkably similar to connection. Both involve attention. Both involve curiosity. Both create the sensation of proximity. Yet one asks very little of us. Real connection requires reciprocity. It requires vulnerability. It requires remaining present long enough for disappointment, disagreement, obligation, and affection to occupy the same space.

That is what makes isolation different from the other enemies. Performance, erasure, and dehumanization operate between people. Isolation operates within them. It persuades us that distance is safer than engagement and that withdrawal is preferable to uncertainty. The tragedy is that these conclusions often contain a measure of truth. The danger is that enough individually reasonable decisions can produce a society that is profoundly disconnected.

Belonging rarely disappears through a single dramatic act. More often it loses its footing quietly, as the relationships, institutions, and shared experiences that sustain it gradually weaken from disuse.

The America in Me

Over the years, it became harder to see these forces as separate from one another. But I have written all of this as if I were standing outside of them. I was not. I carried each one of them with me.

Traveling alone for this long makes one crave connection. More than once I would end up at a bar, laptop open for a pint or two. The usual small talk would start with the person beside me, and at some point it would come out that I had only lived here a few weeks. That was my opening to take them on this journey across this country. My chance to watch their eyes widen and to hear them say they couldn’t believe it. I told myself that it was about connection. But it was closer to a stage and an audience.

I edited my own story the same way a city edits its history. The version I offered at those bars was the marketing brochure of a man trying to understand his country. I left out what I was avoiding, or the parts that did not strengthen the narrative. I kept the version that was easy to celebrate and quietly buried the rest. It is a familiar move. I had just spent years watching a whole country do the same thing.

And I reduced people, too. The man on Main Street in Memphis was not the only one. There were others who asked me for money or for food. Some I stopped for. Many I walked past, and a few of them I was already, somewhere in my head, turning into a sentence. I came to these places to witness, and witnessing can be its own quiet way of turning a person into material or into evidence for a point you already wanted to make. The witness tells himself that looking closely is the same as caring. It is not. You can study a person and still be using them.

And I isolated, more elegantly than most. Withdrawal is harder to notice when it looks like adventure. Every month a new city handed me a clean slate and a built-in reason not to stay long enough for anyone to need me, or for me to need them back. I wrote about a country retreating from one another while building a life that allowed me to retreat from everyone, beautifully, and call it an odyssey. Yes, some of it was a journey. Some of it was just a long way of keeping the world at a comfortable distance.

I came looking for America and kept finding myself in it. The gap I felt between the country on the screen and the country on the street ran straight through me the entire time. I am not its diagnostician. I am one of its symptoms, trying, imperfectly, not to become another one of its causes.

So is the country.