“It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for a while their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.”
—Maya Angelou, American poet and civil rights activist

Imagine this: A fella drives into his neighborhood, hits his garage door remote, makes his way into his garage, hits the remote again, and goes into the house through an interior doorway. He orders dinner via a food-delivery app, opens his computer to catch up on “social” media scrolling, and eats the dinner the faceless driver leaves on the front stoop.

He falls asleep while watching television and then wakes up long enough to stumble his way to the bedroom. The following morning, he gets ready for work, walks into the garage, hits the remote, and drives away. The next day: same thing. Wash; rinse; repeat.

It’s not hard to envision such a scenario, is it? Maybe you live in a neighborhood where this happens every day. A neighborhood where just about the only folks seen outside are those walking their four-legged friends. Sadly, this is the state of our community today. How ironic that the technological advances that have made our lives much easier have also made our lives less enriched. This is especially true for young adults in this post-Covid world.

In an article by Axios writer Josephine Walker, she cited the following statistics: From 2012 to 2025, the percentage of adults from 18 to 29 years of age who speak to their neighbors at least a few times a week dropped from fifty-one percent to twenty-five percent. It’s at fifty-six percent for senior adults but, for all Americans, the percentage dropped from fifty-nine percent to forty percent.

What difference does it make? Glad you asked! Clearly, the more isolated we become, the less we interact with others. We subject ourselves to what we see on television, hear on podcasts, and read online. The information coming in is often tainted by confirmation bias; that is, we seek out those thoughts and opinions that reaffirm our own. The opportunity for exchange of ideas, consideration of other opinions, and readjusting our own, is lost.

Just as important, when we don’t interact with our neighbors, we miss a chance for friendship. In a blog on friendship I wrote a few months ago, I cited the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 report that loneliness is a major health risk in today’s society. It’s linked to mental health disorders, early death, heart attack, and hypertension.

In the Gospel of Luke, upon hearing Jesus admonish him to love his neighbor just as he loves himself, a lawyer asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor (Luke 10:29 NIV)?” What follows is the well-known passage about the Good Samaritan. First a priest and then a Levite pass by a man naked and nearly beaten to death by robbers. He’s left for dead . . . until a Samaritan stops to assist him and then arrange for his care. In that day, Jews looked down on Samaritans as scum of the earth, making Jesus’ final point even more salient: Just as the Samaritan showed mercy on a stranger, we are to do likewise.

Okay, hopefully, we won’t encounter a neighbor lying beaten and naked on a neighborhood road, but the point is obvious. Maybe we’ve prejudged the “Samaritan” next door, and see no reason to engage them in conversation. But couldn’t that be the very person who becomes a trusted friend—someone we could count on in the midst of a crisis?

There’s no way we’ll ever know if we never speak to each other.