Remembering the Village Impulse: Toward a Well-Being Economy That Rewards Care

True economic freedom isn’t about GDP growth or maximizing wealth—it’s about having the power to shape your own life and care for yourself and your community. New America’s family well-being and economic security team brought together 32 writers to reimagine an economy centered on time, freedom, and belonging. This is the second in a three-part series highlighting stories from the collective.

The day my former boss, Dr. Vivek Murthy, released a U.S. Surgeon General Advisory declaring a national loneliness epidemic, Google Photos surfaced a home video of my family playing cards around our dinner table. It was a game we’ve hardly played since my brother and I left home. And outside of a family text thread, we rarely see each other anymore. In reaching for stability and success, we let the thread of our connection loosen.

My parents immigrated to Detroit from China after the country’s pro-democracy movement ended in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Like millions of other immigrants, they arrived to pursue the promise of meritocracy and the “American Dream.” They worked as auto engineers and raised us in a mostly white, upper-middle-class neighborhood.

Our family life was lively and sensory, with basketballs dribbling down the driveway and my favorite tomato-and-egg dish sizzling from the kitchen as my mom and I cheered on our favorite So You Think You Can Dance contestants. My dad would yell upstairs for my brother to come down because his friends were waiting outside. In the summer heat, we took long road trips and joined church potlucks with the aunties and uncles who became our chosen family. There was an abundance of laughter, messy family dynamics, and community.

My parents came of age during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when you could lose everything overnight. As they neared retirement, seeking greater financial security, they took on real estate investment and stock trading for additional income. Family vacations evolved into scouting trips for property. Conversations once focused on hobbies shifted to market trends. Slowly, we hosted fewer gatherings, attended fewer church events, and even spoke to each other less.

The economic system we live in cannot be faulted for the entirety of my family’s growing isolation. Market factors never forced us to withhold love from each other. But it did incentivize us to direct our time and attention elsewhere. The spare hours that any of us might have to nurture our relationships, we instead poured into our work.

I’ve come to understand this “growth-at-all-costs” culture as a form of structural violence that reorganizes our lives around extraction—typically of our labor—and exhaustion. University of Wisconsin Professor Rob Nixon describes slow violence as threats to human well-being that occur gradually over time and are often overlooked. Scholars have defined loneliness as an inherent feature of capitalism. In my own family, the quiet, pernicious role of our economic system slowly eroded our relationships.

“I’ve come to understand this ‘growth-at-all-costs’ culture as a form of structural violence that reorganizes our lives around extraction—typically of our labor—and exhaustion.”

In November 2023, the World Health Organization formed its Commission on Social Connection, a landmark achievement that shows just how profoundly the loneliness epidemic has entered the global public zeitgeist. Yet many popular interventions for loneliness, such as “social prescribing” (when healthcare professionals refer patients to non-clinical community activities) and peer support groups, while important, only treat the symptoms of loneliness— without examining its deepest roots in the economic systems that incentivize our isolation in the first place.

We cannot tackle loneliness without recognizing it as an economic, structural issue. What does it mean to truly heal our economy from the roots, so the symptoms of loneliness do not manifest? Ultimately, it means reimagining the financial systems that make connection so hard to sustain. And this kind of work takes generations.

So what can we do today? What might change if we designed an economy that rewarded care and belonging? We should consider a range of options: government funding for family therapy, cultural repair ceremonies, and accessible communal spaces. Required “power down” options for social media apps encouraging families, friends, and neighbors to rest or spend time together in person. Subsidies for alternative economies, like Canticle Farm in California, that prioritize sustainability and community over endless growth. Payments for chaplains, elders, and musicians to recognize their vital support in resolving neighborhood conflicts. Grief ceremonies uniting elders and young people to address intergenerational trauma. More widespread education for immigrants and other communities about the predatory risks of investment markets, along with more education for wealthy people about using their money to repair injustices.

This generational work can be joyful and imaginative, leading us on wild adventures. More than that, it can mean a return to our ancestral impulses toward love and community—restoring human connection as, simply, our birthright.

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