Lakou

Community and the words we have hollowed out

The Community I Grew Up In

I have always lived in community. As a child, I was passed around among friends, family, and church. Acts of service arrived in the shape of drives to school, meals prepared when someone fell ill, a quiet check-in after a death, and watchful eyes when there were too few hands. This was my lakou.

In Creole, lakou describes both a shared physical space and a figurative one — a courtyard where family and friends gather, where life is held collectively.

Lakou was my first understanding of generosity and its many forms. We often forget that care is not only a feeling but action in motion. It shows up as food, a tap on the forehead, eyes that carefully watch over you, and affirmations spoken as prayer. In hindsight, what a gift it was to be so deeply cared for and prayed over.

How Lakou Has Shown Up For Me

As an adult, the story became more complicated. I have moved four times since I was seventeen, and each time I have had to rebuild my community from the ground up — with mixed results around longevity once I left the space, the place, and closed that chapter of my life.

One of the reasons I went to business school was to make new friends. I don’t think many people would admit that openly, but it was true for me. My existing circle was not lacking, but my community was dispersed. COVID made clear that nurturing and cultivating community was a skill I could improve — one we could all stand to practice more intentionally.

I made good friends, many acquaintances, and left feeling quietly dissatisfied with the community I had built. This feeling sat in contrast to the promises we had been sold — that business school was more than networking, that we were building a community for life. When people make those promises, raise a skeptical brow.

Then, in a quiet eureka moment somewhere in Parque de México, it clicked: we did not share the same definition of community. We had been talking past each other all along.

Why Technology Falls Short

Modern society has diluted the meaning of many words. I am not speaking of the natural evolution of language, but of something more deliberate — words that represent pillars of our shared life, hollowed into something palatable and ambiguous, their historical weight quietly buried. Community is one of those words.

In its modern usage, community has lost the recognition that it requires exchange — a balance in which people contribute more or less depending on the season of their lives, and in which what you give, you may also receive. Today, there is a hyper-focus on equality, transaction, and what community can offer you, rather than what you might offer your community.

It is a phenomenon where everyone claims family but no one participates in the rituals that make family real. Perhaps that is why we are lonelier — everyone wants to belong to a village, but few are willing to bear the weight of being a villager.

We sense this absence. Walk down any street in San Francisco, scroll through Instagram, and you will find fliers and posts from people searching for connection — for lovers, for friends, for something that holds. The hunger is real. But the manufactured community that technology offers has delivered mixed results. Reddit forums thrive; Facebook groups wither. The infrastructure of connection exists, but the texture of it — the warmth, the obligation, the showing up — does not translate easily through a screen.

What Comes Next: Building Lakou From Scratch

A few years ago, I went to Mexico City — part adventure, part an opportunity to process the business school experience. After nearly two years of being surrounded by people every single day, I welcomed the forced displacement and, finally, the ability to be alone with my own thoughts.

What I found instead was connection — the kind that arrives without agenda. A woman I met in my hotel became a short-term friend. Another appeared through a mutual college friend, the thread of an old relationship pulling us into each other’s orbit across time. A third I encountered again, unexpectedly, in Parque México. None of these were engineered. All of them were real.

A built-in lakou is far easier than one you must construct yourself — one where you have to figure out which components make the most sense for who you are now, not who you were when community first found you. But that construction is possible. It’s hard, but possible. Mexico City reminded me of that.

We need to stop handing our need for connection back to technology and return to older, slower methods: meeting people outside, showing up, and being a villager. Not because technology is without value, but because the rituals of lakou — the meal, the watchful eye, the prayer, the presence — cannot be replicated by an algorithm.

I am still building my lakou. It’s been hard, but I have found my people — one city and one chapter at a time. It is also different now than it was in childhood — smaller, perhaps more intentional, assembled piece by piece. But the definition has not changed. To be in community is to give and to receive, to show up and to be shown up for, to hold and to be held. That is what I was given. That is what I am learning, again, to build.