It is in fact smeared, exported and outsourced, a communal effort in stability and homeostasis. This is one of the reasons why you cannot do it all alone, why you cannot flourish removed from the community and why no one is a solitary isolated island, a closed ecosystem of untouched endemic bounty. You need to be touched by the outside because isolated things sustained only within themselves become fragile and susceptible to falling apart if not breed in contact with what is different than themselves.

Why is your sanity not your own and why do you need the group? There is a deep undeniable and unshakable urge for company, even for those who prefer more time alone and pride themselves in their hermit status, even for those who proudly carry the badge of an introvert. The constant spinning of interaction keeps the axis of you aligned. You need to keep moving to stay upright. Your sanity and common sense, morals and emotional landscape are contextual and a consensus. Left to our own devices we tend to go off the realis, get stuck in a mental loop like an OCD symptom, which we’re not aware of, having no one to pitch in with new information that will snap us out of it. We get on a marry-go-round spinning in circles never going anywhere although traveling all that distance. Once you’re part of a community (more or less a part of it, as much as you feel comfortable, but part of it still) your actions have a marker to align themselves by – if you go to far of the path the group of a well-meaning and honest community will grab you by the scruff of the neck and pull you back before you get hurt, or help you reestablish the parameters of sanity if you’ve broken it’s structure already. Harmful and auto destructive or destructive behavior will be reprimanded and kept in check by belonging.

Have you ever wondered what was the biggest and most vicious tool and threat of all totalitarianism inclined systems? It was overwhelmingly not a death sentence, because that would remove the suffering in one swift blow. It was something far more sinister that destroyed the individual slowly and pushed him/her into an abyss of insanity and loneliness – excommunication, being completely cut off from all you knew and thrust into the world alone without anyone talking to you or paying attention to your person. By excommunication you’re effectively dead to all, dying a slow death. Yes, society might have done some pretty insane thigs as a whole on the historic scale but for the individual it is necessary to find niches and spaces between it that will provide meaning, understanding and support.

You may sometimes wish to not belong, but you enjoy entertaining this thought precisely because you do belong to a community and know you have a chance to return to it when you please. Even castaways at island paradises lacking nothing to sustain their bodies go mad if they’ve got no one to talk to about it, turning the paradise into a personal hell by experiencing it… alone.