When friendship doesn’t fit in your calendar

Musings on community, culture, friendship, and discomfort from a third culture kid

As I stood outside JFK, waiting for my Uber to arrive I started feeling the familiar heaviness settle in on my shoulders. At one airport, I stare at my phone tracking a stranger driving towards me. At the other airport, just three weeks ago, my friend had come to pick me up and joyfully drive me home with the promise of a fresh manakeesh.

Three weeks between my two homes and a whole world apart. I realize this heaviness isn’t just jet lag—it’s the weight of straddling two fundamentally different ways of existing.

In Dubai, where I grew up, someone will drive you to the airport at 3 AM without hesitation. Here in New York, we schedule our connections between meetings and measure our worth by productivity.

And so, we're isolated as hell.

After thirteen years in New York, I spent three weeks in Dubai—my first visit in three years—and something’s shifted in me—not because Dubai is perfect, but because it reminded me of what we've sacrificed at the altar of individualism: the messy, uncomfortable, joy of true community.

In Dubai (or any collectivist culture for that matter), community isn't something you schedule between work meetings or squeeze into your calendar when it's convenient. Community is supposed to be inconvenient. That's the whole point.

Someone dropping you at the airport at 3 AM? Inconvenient. Taking your friend's daughter out for ice cream when you'd rather be doing literally anything else? Inconvenient. Grocery shopping for a neighbor who's too busy? Inconvenient.

They do it anyway. They do it. Anyway.

These acts aren't seen as burdens but as the essential fabric of connection, often even overlooked, and not even worth mentioning as an act of sacrifice—because community requires sacrifice and discomfort. This “inconvenience” is where the magic happens.

Many Western cultures like America offer the antithesis of this. Here, we've perfected the art of individualism while simultaneously drowning in isolation. We’ve dressed up this isolation as “productivity”, “self-care”, “recharging because I’m an introvert”, or “setting boundaries”, (or whatever else you’re choosing to call it). And so while we crave community, and want to be part of something bigger, we’ll cling to our precious "me time" like it's the last oxygen mask on a failing plane.

In today's world "boundaries" has become the tray that sits at your entryway to catch everything that feels uncomfortable: shame, guilt, safety. Don't have the bandwidth to socialize with 10 new people? "That's a personal boundary for me."

Don't get me wrong—healthy boundaries are integral to one's sense of self. I understand their value, especially coming from a collectivist culture where their absence can mask a lack of gratitude and respect for connections we often take for granted. The issue isn't boundaries themselves, but how we've weaponized them against the very discomfort that meaningful community requires.

We've created a hyper individualistic culture that recoils from inconvenience, sacrifice, or discomfort when it comes to helping others. And in that vacuum of genuine connection, businesses thrive.

I was recently reading an article (okay, fine—I was watching a TikTok) where Amelia talked about the “small favors economy.” She pointed out that in America, late-stage capitalism has all but erased the casual, everyday asks—borrowing a cup of sugar, catching a ride to the airport. Instead of leaning on our communities, we’ve been conditioned to outsource our needs to the market.

The lack of true connection doesn’t just hurt us emotionally—it fuels entire industries. You take an Uber because no one offers you a lift. You pay for grocery delivery because knocking on a neighbor’s door feels unthinkable. You shell out for expensive membership clubs because organic, local connections have eroded. Even our social lives have a price tag—curated “experiences” designed to mimic the warmth of real community, but without the depth.

Look at what’s happening in fashion and hospitality. In an article on the subject, Woods notes that “despite the varying levels of immersion a restaurant, café, or pop-up provides, the general consensus is that these physical settings bring about a sense of community.” Brands like Miu Miu and Ralph Lauren aren’t just selling clothes anymore—they’re selling belonging. Cafés, pop-ups, lifestyle spaces—mini worlds where you can pay to feel like you’re part of something.

And listen, I love a good aesthetic experience as much as anyone. But let’s not kid ourselves—these spaces are designed to fill the void we’ve created. They’re polished, intentional, and beautifully put together. And yet, the irony is glaring: we’re so starved for connection that we’ll spend money just to experience a version of it, even if that version is nothing more than a brand identity wrapped in warm lighting and good design. A manufactured substitute that lets us bypass the messy, unfiltered, vulnerable work of actually building relationships.

The post-pandemic world has only intensified this, with people fleeing dating apps for run clubs and padel groups, searching for that elusive sense of belonging.

But joining isn't the same as building.

The irony cuts deeper: we crave community while overlooking the most accessible forms of it in our daily lives. We complain about loneliness but won't attend events in our own neighborhoods or buildings. We don't know the names of the bodega workers who make our coffee every morning. We haven't even bothered knocking on our neighbors' doors. We exist in the same spaces, pass each other daily, yet remain invisible to one another—by choice.

And yet, these very people—our baristas, deli workers, super—know us. They remember our coffee orders, our go-to bagel combinations, the way our sink has been leaking for weeks. They hold small details of our lives, while we hold none of theirs.

If you think about the expanding circles of community, they fall into what should be our “neighborhood” circle—one of our closest rings around us. But for them? We exist in their “work” circle, further out, less intimate. The imbalance is glaring: their presence in our routines is personal, but our acknowledgement of them remains distant.

Meanwhile, for those workers, the spaces where they serve us —our “third spaces”— are just a stop in their much longer days. They commute from homes far away, creating their own communities out of necessity while we pay premium prices to manufacture a sense of belonging and are blind to the most organic forms of it. Which makes me wonder, if we don’t start by recognizing the people who already exist in our everyday orbit, what kind of community are we really searching for?

Not long ago, I was doing laundry on a particularly difficult day. Without being asked, my best friend (who hates doing laundry more than I hate unloading the dishwasher) grabbed my laundry and walked downstairs with me to the laundry room. This boring, annoying, actually pretty tiresome act moved me so deeply that I thanked her ‘for loving me when I don't feel lovable.’

"No worries," she said automatically. Then, seconds later: "Actually, yes worries. But you know, I love you so much. It doesn't even make a difference."

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Community is saying "yes worries" and showing up anyway.

My friend Ashna, founder of Saffron—a women’s membership community— recently said something that really sat with me, "Community isn't a Netflix subscription you can pop in and out of." The moment we treat belonging as something to consume and participate in on a whim rather than build upon, we've already lost.

Within the collectivist culture I grew up in, help arrived before I could even recognize I needed it. I was embedded in a system that anticipated needs rather than waiting for requests. But that comes with its own double-edged sword. Once I moved to America at 17, I actually didn't know how to ask for help because I'd never needed to.

Maybe that's what I was feeling in that wave of sadness returning to America—the stark contrast between a world where inconvenience is the price willingly paid for connection, and one where convenience has become our prison.

We're stuck in a cycle of isolation that feeds itself.

What we have here is people who don't know how to ask for help (or worse, don’t think they need it or, even worse, cannot accept it), therefore don't get help, and consequently feel even lonelier.

There's hope, though. Some people do embrace the vulnerability of asking for help (not all heroes wear capes, am I right?). But when they're met with resistance from their community—which happens, y'know, cause life!—they might get discouraged. To those people, I say: please don't give up.

Equally damaging? Being the person who always drives others to the airport but never asks for a ride themselves. You have to muster up the courage to humbly sit at the steps of your village and ask for help. When you don’t, you’re inherently perpetuating the idea that the burden to sustain and grow your community is on one person rather than fabric you’re weaving together.

So, I’m going to hold your hand when I say this—you don't get a medal for being the kind of person who thinks they don't need any help. That hyper-independence is precisely what stops us from having a village. Nobody is going to stand at your grave and say, "Here lies Meher, the woman who did it all on her own and never needed any help."

If you're reading this and thinking "but I really don't need help!", I hope you ask anyway. Having a hard time cooking for yourself and eating healthy meals? Ask for help. Putting off cleaning out your closet after going through another personal rebrand? Ask for help. Writing a thought-piece and want someone to edit it for you? Ask for help (thank you to my generous "yes, worries" editor).

When you live by these principles, they ripple outward in concentric circles—starting with you, then your friendships, your family, your neighbors, your extended community, and beyond.

The question isn't whether we want a village. We all do. The question is whether we're willing to be inconvenienced for it. Whether we'll sacrifice some of our discomfort, tightly knitted up boundaries and protected energy to create something deeper.

So where is the balance? Where do we start? Where do we go from here? With a laundry basket, perhaps. With an airport run at 3 AM. With learning the name of the person who makes your coffee every morning. Maybe even a kind note to that neighbor who plays that Jazz album on repeat 10 times every morning. And if you’re feeling really courageous, ask for help for that thing you’ve been putting off for weeks.

Maybe true belonging lives in that space where convenience ends and commitment begins—in the messy (but awe inspiring) act of showing up when it would be easier not to. Not out of guilt or obligation, but out of genuine desire to be part of something larger than yourself. And in the process, allowing yourself to be held by the sheer weight (read: joy, support, endless abundance) of community.

So I urge you to ask yourself today, “what small discomfort am I willing to embrace today to weave someone else more tightly into my life?”

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