Let me take a step back and instead ask--do you experience community in Chicago? There are 2.6 million people in Chicago as of 2025. One would think that being surrounded by this many people would make it so no one is ever lonely. After all, most people here cannot leave their house without seeing another person, and a large handful of them cannot be in their house without interacting with one in some way, shape, or form. In the city, we are never alone. Why, then, is it the we hear so many stories of people feeling as though they are alone here? I think it is so many things. I think it is the pain without togetherness, I think it is the movement, and I think it is the masks. So many of us here are hurting, stuck in a perpetual state of existential dread, clocking in, clocking out, going home, repeating. There is no time to connect to any of these people around us. There is no time or energy to even connect to ourselves. We are ushered along by this unseen sense of urgency. There is a facade that our life is our own, as if somehow it is our hands alone that have built and sustained it rather the many hands of those that live and have lived here. No one comes into this world alone. No one leaves it alone. The idea that we do is one of the most heart wrenching betrayals to oursleves and to our humanity that has arisen in the modern age. Community...when people don't feel it, they begin to die both physically and spiritually.
This is why I go almost once a week to a dark, packed location to push, shove, and hurt with others. Chicagoland Hardcore is where I have found community. It gained traction in the late 80s and early 90s, but I am sure it was established well before it gained attention. It is so easy to move through this city utterly disconnected to one's humanity and the humanity of those around them. It is so easy to not feel. A punch to the face or kick in the gut shocks my system. It makes me feel. In a mosh pit, I am part of something. I am part of a collective energy where we are feeling together--hurting together. There are no systems or hierarchies, just movement. It is understanding without words.
This community is a product of creative minds, feeling, and pouring all of this feeling and energy into something that speaks to them. It is raw and it is true. It doesn't matter how it manifests, from Payasa to Teeth Kids, from screamo, to punk, to traditional HC, it is about the willingness to feel and hope others are willing to feel with you.
I love your depiction of Chicago as a native Chicagoan myself! You bring up the amazing music scene in Chicago. Everyone in Chicago knows the classic party music even when you are a kid at your middle school dance. People come from all over for our concerts, artists give us a shout out, and restaurants frame pictures of musicians enjoying their food. Our radio stations play a large variety of music from punk all the way to country. I feel like this definitely impacts the culture of Chicago as a place of acceptance and openness to all sorts of people and music. There’s also that physicality of music that you describes that also brings people together into our sweaty, mosh pit of a culture. Chicago is a melting pot and melting at Lollapalooza definitely makes you feel the compassion and a bit of sweaty frustration that makes Chicago so fantastic.
ReplyDeleteTackling loneliness in a big city definitely requires creativity and constant effort. You say, "there is a facade that our life is our own, as if somehow it is our hands alone that have built and sustained it rather the many hands of those that live and have lived here," but I wonder if this is a positive or negative construction. I ask myself, would I rather a life that is entirely my own, or a life built and sustained by those around and before me. I feel myself drawn to the latter. What is more creative? More effective? A life independent, with agency to interact with others on my own accord? Or a life inherently intertwined?
ReplyDeleteTackling loneliness in a big city also requires discipline and the willingness to embrace potentially chaotic moments (similar to what Rubin described with creativity being in between discipline and freedom or something along those lines). The discipline to attend events combined with the chaos and agency that accompanies interactions with others.
Delete