The People Yearn for Community

From July 16, 2025, to September 17, 2025, the internet collectively tuned in every Wednesday to watch the latest episode of “The Summer I Turned Pretty (TSITP).” It was a perfect routine. Spend 45-60 minutes watching the episode, text your fellow Team Conrad friends to debrief, then spend the next week watching edits and theories on Instagram, X, and TikTok. For many of us, that was perfect.

Not because the show was extraordinary—although watching Belly choose Conrad was truly mesmerizing—), but because of the ritual. There was comfort in knowing that strangers across the world were syncing their week with yours, laughing at the same lines, gasping at the same scenes, caring about the same fictional heartbreak. It was less about the plot and more about the rhythm we briefly shared. It felt like a tiny nation-state made of fan edits, reaction videos, and group chats. 

A soft, pastel republic with weekly elections where nobody got hurt and the only political stake was whether you were Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah.

It sounds silly. But the truth is: we weren’t looking for entertainment. We were looking for a community.

And once you see that, you start noticing how often the internet recreates this, how quickly people gather around something sweet or unserious and treat it like a national holiday. Because a few months later, we did it again.

Only this time, it wasn’t a fictional boy who yearned.

It was a state assemblyman from Astoria.

There was something uncanny about watching Zohran Mamdani’s campaign unfold online, not because of the politics (though those mattered), but because of the comments. Thousands of people from places nowhere near New York, Brazil, Nigeria, Japan, Australia, flooded his posts with the same line:

“That’s my mayor (I’m from ___).”

It was funny, but it was also revealing.

People weren’t just supporting a politician; they were adopting him, claiming him, imagining themselves in a city they had never set foot in. They were creating a kind of digital citizenship out of thin air, just as “TSITP” Wednesdays became our soft weekly republic.

Because what Mamdani represented wasn’t just an assemblyman. He became a symbol of the kind of political community people wish they had but don’t, one rooted in shared values, shared possibilities, shared direction.

And why do we latch onto things like this? Because the places we actually belong to no longer feel like places built for us. It’s hard to build community when every institution that’s supposed to hold people collapses under the weight of its own indifference.

So we found community where it was easiest to create: inside jokes, comment sections, and whatever small rituals the internet could hold. We turned to pastel fandoms because the real world had stopped offering anything warmer than survival.

What “TSITP” Wednesdays and Mamdani’s campaign reveal is the same truth, just in different fonts:

Maybe we weren’t obsessed with Conrad or Zohran.

Maybe we were obsessed with not being alone.

Maybe we are desperate for a sense of “we.”

So we stitched our own communities out of what was left.

So we settle for softer stand-ins.

Weekly rituals disguised as TV episodes.

Political hope disguised as memes.

Digital citizenship disguised as jokes.

None of it is actually silly. It’s a symptom.

A symptom of a world that has made collective identity hard to find and even harder to keep.

So yes, it’s funny to say, “That’s my mayor (I’m from Palestine)” or to treat “TSITP” Wednesdays like a national holiday. It’s funny until you realize the joke is the only place we feel safe enough to tell the truth.

Because beneath the irony is a longing we don’t know how to name:

We will build a community out of anything when the real world refuses to let us have one.

That’s the point.

That’s the argument.

That’s the ache sitting under all the cuteness.