If Everyone Wants a Village, Why Are Brands Still Building Islands?

Image credit: John Cameron via Unsplash​

As 2025 winds down, one cultural tension stands out: people aren’t rejecting convenience, they’re rejecting the emotional cost of convenience.

We like to pretend the problem is laziness or lack of effort. It isn’t. We’ve spent the past decade training people to default to transactions instead of humans. Book the Uber. Buy the flour. Order the service. We optimised life so efficiently that we accidentally rewired how we relate to each other. Convenience culture didn’t just shape what we buy, it shaped how we behave.

This year, the cracks finally showed. The convenience economy solved logistics and created loneliness. And the more the world promised frictionless living, the more frictionless our relationship became.

That’s why the “everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager” line took off. TikTok saw a spike in March 2025, with two creators alone generating nearly 3 million views and more than 5,000 comments in a week. It started as a motherhood gripe, but quickly became something bigger: a cultural confession that people are tired of being relentlessly self-sufficient.

And you can see the early signs of behaviour shifting. Asking a mate for a lift instead of ordering a car. Borrowing sugar from next door instead of buying a whole bag. Rediscovering the basic truth that being helped by someone you know feels better than being serviced by a brand.

This matters for marketers. We might be at the start of a dip in hyper-consumerism. Convenience isn’t disappearing, but its cultural value is. Efficiency has reached diminishing returns. People want meaning again. They want to feel part of something, because belonging now carries the emotional weight that convenience used to.

Some brands are already sensing the turn. Pubs offering free ride shares home. It’s not just about safer drinking habits; it mirrors the cultural move back towards looking after your community instead of outsourcing everything to an app.

Or take Library of Things. Yes, it reduces waste. But the real magic is in the human bit: neighbours meeting across the counter, remembering they actually live among other people. It’s community designed for modern life, not a cosy nostalgic project.

Here’s my view: 2026 will reward brands that create belonging, not just convenience. We don’t need another frictionless service. We need products, experiences and systems that make people feel part of something bigger than transaction.

If brands don’t step into this space, people will build these micro-communities without them. They already are. And once communities are self-sustaining, brands struggle to earn a seat at the table.

So if you’re shaping your roadmap for next year, design for the village. Shift the question from “How do we make life easier?” to “How do we make life feel more human?” Because if connection is what people value now, then connection will drive growth the same way convenience once did.

And for brands still clinging to the old playbook: people aren’t participating in culture, community or each other by accident. They’re doing it because the alternative finally broke. In a world like that, the choice is simple - participate, or get left behind.