During a recent conversation over coffee with a friend, I was reminded of a term I first learned from a Brené Brown conversation with musician Dave Grohl at ACL Festival in 2023: “collective effervescence”.
Collective Effervescence is a feeling of energy and harmony that people feel when they engage enthusiastically in a shared purpose. It is a joie de vivre that manifests when we share joyous moments with other people en masse, such as being in a stadium that erupts into simultaneous applause when a musician returns for an encore performance. (This is why Brené and Dave were discussing it at a music festival.)
I love talking about this sensation with people who have never heard the term before, because when I give the concert example, everyone immediately knows the feeling. If you’ve ever been to a concert that ended on a high note, and been part of a crowd that’s cheering and whooping with increasingly giddy enthusiasm, you know the feeling of collective effervescence.
It’s easy to intuit and be transported by the memory of witnessing a moment of collective effervescence like the above, which is why those experiences often persist in memory.
This feeling, ultimately, is healing— and I think it’s more necessary for living a meaningful life than you might initially think.
A moment of collective effervescence is like a vitamin for the soul.
When you experience a moment of collective effervescence, it’s like a vitamin for the soul. Creating moments or seeking out experiences that hold potential for collective effervescence, moreover, is good for your mental and physical health.
It takes active work, but we should all be proactively seeking out these kind of experiences within our means– going to concerts, comedy shows, free talks, book clubs, farm dinners, yoga classes, dance parties, sporting events, fairs, street performances, and the like. Not everything that gives us a sense of collective effervescence costs money, however. When a crowd delights in a free street performance together, that is collective effervescence. When you attend a wedding and are moved to tears by a speech, and others are, too– that is collective effervescence, as well.
Even introverts need to periodically do things in a crowd in order to reaffirm this fundamentally important part of our existence: that ultimately, we belong to each other, and we need other people to mirror and reflect on our own lives. Each of us is on a singular path, but moments of collective effervescence remind us — through beauty, awe, or a shared sense of wonder– that we never have to walk that path alone.
Moments of collective effervescence were some of the first privileges our society revoked during the 2020 Pandemic. During this time, all social gathering was prohibited and people were left, often for the first times in their lives, to entertain themselves in complete isolation. It bears repeating that this is not natural or good for the human spirit.
As a result, in the realm of mental health, we saw huge spikes in cases of self-identified loneliness and other related mental health issues like anxiety and depression. The 2020 Pandemic, moreover, with its stark absence of collective effervescence, left many people with a kind of social PTSD that persists to this day, though we are slowly starting to unpack it.
If the lasting impact of that time period on our culture and on our collective psyche has yet to be fully understood, we do now know that 2020 reaffirmed the critical need that we all have as human beings to gather and cherish things together.
Ultimately, when we remove ourselves from opportunities for shared novelty and enthusiasm, we distance ourselves from our friends and neighbors– and we’re ultimately less happy, more divided, more cynical about the human experience.
In an era when our culture is increasingly fraught and politicized, moments of collective effervescence remind us of our singular, shared humanity.
So, my daily recommendation for how we heal ourselves and our culture, now that it’s years later and many people are still struggling with loneliness? Seek out more experiences of collective effervescence. It’s more than just a fun phrase– it’s an important, often ineffable delight of the human experience. In an era when our culture is increasingly fraught and politicized, moments of collective effervescence remind us of our singular, shared humanity.
This is why seeking out the feeling of collective effervescence is so important: because it has the capacity to heal not just the darkness you might feel on any given day– but it can also make you feel more connected to your surrounding community, or the self-selected community of people who share your similar interests (such as a group of people who like the same music, or people who elect to see a comedian perform live because they share a similar sense of humor).
This kind of grand-scale validation can be a powerful antidote to malaise.
The benefits of this feeling are manifold, because on a psychological level we all simply want to feel seen and known, like our life matters and has purpose. Having your internal experience reflected and celebrated as part of a larger group not only satisfies this core need, but supersedes it– and this kind of grand-scale validation can be a powerful antidote to malaise.
You know, for example, that other people attending the same movie or musical as you are similarly intrigued by the story and probably have something in common with you– otherwise they wouldn’t buy tickets. But there’s nothing like being in a theatre when the entire audience erupts in laughter or applause. The enthusiasm is contagious, and experiencing it first hand in a group multiplies the sensation.
Imagine It In Your Mind
Another great example would be the anticipatory applause that erupts after a musician finishes their set, and the audience is cheering for an encore. Imagining that feeling in your mind– the mounting excitement as the clapping is getting louder and you can just feel the energy shift as you wait for the musician to return, and you know that they will– THAT is a healing sensation in an of itself.
^ Envisioning this scenario in your mind even when it’s not happening in real time is also soothing to the spirit, almost like a visualization-driven meditation practice. Collective effervescence is simply THAT powerful. That’s why we need it so deeply in our lives, even if it feels like an oblique luxury during trying times.
Eventually, if you experience the sensation of collective effervescence enough times in life, it becomes easier and easier to recall the feeling of ease that it inspires, so you can extend the benefits well into your life long after the experience of profundity has ended.
Like anything, channeling it just takes practice. But that feeling– the one we are always chasing, whether we are conscious of it or not– is ultimately about belonging. And when you give yourself the opportunity to realize that you do belong, and have always belonged, that there is always a community of people like you who enjoy the same things and feel things in the same way you do– well, that is a comfort in and of itself. And it’s always available to anyone and everyone– we just have to be willing to seek it out.
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Related: Understanding Gezelligheid: A Dutch Word That Captures Why It’s Important to Not Bum Each Other Out
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