For most of my career, I didn’t question whether community mattered. In fact, it was the most fundamental reason I ended up training to be a vet in the first place. Shows like All Creatures Great & Small, Northern Exposure, and even the movie Doc Hollywood seemed to stir something deep within, a desire to connect, contribute, and be part of something that mattered.

I’m from a small rural community that sits atop a hill about three miles outside the golfing mecca of St Andrews. It’s a beautiful place, surrounded by gently rolling hills, where the sun rises over the North Sea and sets over the sweeping cornfields of Fife.

I became a vet because it felt like a legitimate way to contribute to the place I lived. Animals mattered, both farmed and fondled. People mattered. Practices were woven into the fabric of local life. You showed up, did good work, built trust over time, and that trust compounded into something solid and human. There was an emotional paycheck as well as a financial one to be gained.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself a harder question: is that way of thinking, or being, outdated?

In an age of digital connection, remote everything, and increasing migration and fragmentation, is my belief in community just nostalgia dressed up as principle?

It’s not an academic question for me. It sits underneath the work I do now, the business I’m trying to build, and the decisions about what work we do and who we do it with.

So this feels more like an existential big deal.

What’s actually changed

It’s obvious that the world looks different.

Community used to be ambient; you didn’t have to design for it, it was just kind of there. Local institutions (like vet clinics, doctors, dentists, schools, town councils, churches) were trusted by default.

Now, connection feels fractured, or perhaps even forced, fragile, and often transactional. Trust has to be earned repeatedly. Many of the structures that once held people together feel hollowed out, overstretched, or simply overlooked. Instead, we try to find connections on devices with people who do not live near us and can offer little better than “thoughts and prayers” when we need help. While both are welcome, neither is particularly useful when you’re facing the practicalities of a midnight emergency or a personal crisis.

From the outside, it’s easy to conclude that the idea of community itself is fading, replaced by proxy platforms, networks, and convenience.

But I’m not convinced that’s what’s really happening. Or if it is, it feels like a bad move.

What hasn’t changed

Pets haven’t become less important. If anything, they’ve become more central to people’s emotional lives as families fragment and loneliness rises.

Care hasn’t become less valuable. It’s just become harder to access as pet numbers have increased, veterinary availability has wobbled, and costs have risen.

And trust, real, embodied trust, hasn’t disappeared. It’s just distributed differently. Everyone now has a GPT-enabled device in their pocket, which means places where information once lived have been democratised and, in some cases, demoted. It’s perhaps inevitable that trust shifts in this situation, not because distrust is rising, but because the need to trust an institution or expert is lower than it once was. The knowledge component of expertise has been disseminated and commoditised by ubiquitous AI. (The skill component is another matter altogether.)

Yet trust in veterinary practices remains very high. You may challenge me on that statement if you wish, but the data supports it. A fading dream?

At their best, veterinary practices aren’t just service businesses. They are nodes of care, continuity, and human connection. They sit quietly at the intersection of science, emotion, and responsibility. When they’re healthy, they anchor something much larger than their own balance sheet. They are part of the mycelial network of community that binds, protects, and nurtures us.

At their worst, vet practices are under- or transiently staffed, or excessively profit-focused throughput machines. The damage done in these dysfunctional businesses ripples outward to teams, clients, and into communities. Distrust grows, and the mycelial relational network weakens.

Is it a fading dream that a local vet might drop a bag of food off to an elderly client on their way home, not for more cash, but because it’s the right thing to do? Karma isn’t always a bitch. Looking after others pays dividends.

Perhaps one of the starkest examples of this is the fact that young vets often cite client relationships as both the most draining and the most energising part of their working lives. How can both be true? The answer lies in how much trust exists between a practice and its community, and how much skill and stability have been invested in encouraging that trust to grow. (Spoiler alert - we’ve not nearly invested enough.)

Why this still matters to me

When I left clinical practice, I left a piece of my soul behind. But I didn’t leave the underlying impulse that took me there in the first place.

What’s always drawn me, whether to veterinary medicine, to working with practice owners, or more recently to farming and permaculture, is living systems. Places where care, stewardship, and long-term horizons matter. Places where contribution compounds quietly rather than being extracted loudly.

That’s why the question of community still grips me.

If community really is a relic, then much of what I’m trying to protect no longer has a place. But if community is simply more fragile, and yet more valuable than before, then supporting the people who hold it becomes even more essential work, not sentimental work.

The uncomfortable truth

Here’s the part I find hardest to admit. Believing in community doesn’t guarantee success. Standing for connection doesn’t make a business viable by default. I may be out of touch. I may be wrong. At times, it feels like yelling into the wind when plenty of people really want to talk about AI, efficiency, and EBITDA.

But without community and its abundance of connection, what’s the point of being more efficient, more effective, more wealthy? Just for animals? That feels incomplete if happiness is part of the picture. There’s no shortage, after all, of people helping animals who seem deeply unhappy with their lot.

In the next six months, I’m leaning into this and paying attention. In the end, reality, as always, will provide the necessary answers and feedback.

I hope belief in community is not outdated. I think it’s been one of our secret superpowers all along. And if you are an independent, locally owned practice, run by people who walk past their clients on the high street, whose kids go to the same school, or who pack down in the same sports team at weekends, then community and trust are weapons of mass construction that can serve you well.

But only if the purpose is to serve others first. Being a member of a community shouldn’t be considered a strategy, but it is strategically important. And it has to be designed for, protected, and consciously supported, whether that’s in a veterinary practice, a farm, or any other place where people take responsibility for others over time.

That makes the work heavier. But it also makes it clearer. And perhaps that’s the real shift of our age. Not that community no longer matters, but that those who choose to stand for it have to do so with open eyes, real economics, and a willingness to adapt without abandoning what they value. For those who lean in, I suspect you’ll always have a moat that protects you from the financial might of corporate competition. And your local community high street will be all the brighter for the presence of a local independent business too. 

That’s the work I’m still committed to. How about you? I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts.