When I was in 8th grade, all I wanted was a new pair of Umbro soccer shorts. This style is coming back into fashion, so it might be slightly easier to understand the desire today. But my adult self has been baffled for some time by the ardency of that 8th grade desire. It had nothing to do with utility or beauty. I didn’t play soccer, and these shorts were not beautiful. They were pure signifier: of means, of ability to use those means to knit myself solidly into the status quo.
"But we have also been well-trained to resist inconvenience, even of the mildest sort"
It's funny you should post this today as I'm sitting here on my couch apartment hunting. I'm currently renting a whole house in the suburbs that I've decided I can't afford if I ever want to actually pay my student loans off, so the hunt for something more reasonable has begun. This has come with a lot of questions though, about what I *actually need*. The cost of convenience is high.
The truth is that, even for this relatively antisocial guy, after a year of near total isolation thanks to the pandemic, I think what I want more than anything is to be somewhere that isn't isolating. I've become accustomed to my garage, and my lawn, and my washer and dryer. But I think I would be happy to give that all up for an "artsy" one bedroom in a walkable area of the city. I've *never* lived in the city. I've never parked my car on the street. I've never had to use a laundromat. But the isolation of the suburbs has become very ugly to me. I'm willing to sacrifice a lot of convenience to avoid living in some depressing apartment complex just because it's convenient.
There's opportunity in learning how to live a different lifestyle.
As someone who has dreamed her entire life of just being alone and has felt loneliness maybe once during this pandemic, I'll admit that my first response was to balk at this suggestion. Even though living alone has taught me how truly overwhelming it is to do everything for yourself! I think the big fear for many, but certainly for neurodiverse folks, is what I would consider the "interaction tax" of mutual aid. Sharing dinner with someone usually means having to put on a social mask for potentially hours, which can be exhausting, but this is not considered a "contribution" in kind and thus just becomes extra labor. It becomes overwhelming to imagine all of your physical needs being tied to social interactions that you find unbearable. That said, I work 8+ hours a day while masking my symptoms during meetings etc. in order to afford to live alone, so I do wonder if the net amount of "interaction tax" would go down. There's also the argument that these sorts of mutually beneficial communities can be built to accommodate a greater diversity of abilities, which is ideal, but I think we are a long way away from the general population having a strong enough understanding of disability that you can assume that of any community you move to (and certainly not any community you are born into). That said, I definitely see the appeal of this model! My parents couldn't afford a babysitter while they were at work on their own and so pooled with a few other families; I certainly have felt the call of "I wish all my friends lived in the same neighborhood" (or the same state at least); and I contribute to direct aid when I can because I know that "donation to big non-profit" =/= food on the table or bills paid. Definitely going to read Jezer-Morton's articles now - thank you for sharing.
I am also a person who feels the interaction tax — although I will say that it goes significantly, SIGNIFICANTLY down when the people I'm interacting with are people I know very well and trust. But also: I do think that we can find other people who feel similarly, and make dinner for each other a few times a week and depend on one another....but maybe only spend like 5 minutes each time with one another? Essentially: a community of loners who like and care for one another and acknowledge and appreciate our limits?
I absolutely agree on the tax being less (but not gone) for people I know very well. I tend to drift toward people with similar temperaments, which actually sounds a lot like what you’re describing! (A DREAM). It makes sense that building up that mutual trust and understanding of individual needs within a specific community isn’t something you should expect overnight, and that of course that’s one of the aspects to nurturing a system like this.
I dunno -- in theory, I get all of this, and don't really disagree with the crux of it at all. But, personally, I just want my solitude for the most part more than anything else. I lived with someone (romantically) for most of my 20s, but not really because I _wanted_ to, it was kind of a situation that happened and then, like many things, it was difficult to end because there was no big reason to end it (other than...I didn't want to be in that kind of relationship/not alone). I've lived alone for the last 12 years, and also avoided monogamous entanglements for that long, and...I just can't imagine wanting to change either of those situations ever again. I've always been desperate to protect my solitude more than I ever crave company -- even with the people I love most -- and also I just don't ever get _lonely_. I miss specific people/feel lonely for them, specifically, at times, of course. But wholesale loneliness? I just don't get it, like I don't even have a concept of what that feels like. I travel semi-regularly (pre-COVID, obvs) and I have _always_ traveled alone -- the idea of taking a vacation with someone is basically horrifying to me. All the things I enjoy doing are things I almost always like doing better by myself. I'd probably describe myself as a near-hermit who just happens to be also pretty gregarious and really good with people? Like most people, I miss my day-to-day mundane loose interactions with strangers or vague acquaintances, that kind of thing (and of course I miss the option of sex/physical intimacy and also hugging my friends and all of that) but the solitude of the pandemic has in no way been the difficult part of the past year for me; living _with_ people in close proximity in a commune-ish way sounds ideal in the social-contract kind of way, but also...I'd go mad so quickly if I had to be in close proximity to others constantly, my god.
This deeply spoke to me. I've spent most of the pandemic with my parents to pool the chores and hassle of safely obtaining food and other necessities. It's gone well and I'd make that decision again in a heartbeat, but even though we tolerate each other's company well, I am craving solitude so badly. I want to live alone. I love living alone.
That said, I've thought about this a great deal in the context of my own aging. I don't have kids and I don't have a partner and am not interested in either, and I want my hermit life, but it's also likely that at some point I won't be entirely capable of it. At that point, the choices are some form of mutual aid or some form of hired assistance, and while the latter can provide a lot of flexibility when one can afford it, the former feels more appealing if I can get it without losing my beloved solitude.
I reached a couple of conclusions: I want to live in a city, and I want to live close to friends (either by moving close to existing friends or making friends where I live). My ideal fantasy world is an apartment complex populated by my friends.
I find a city makes solitude so much logistically easier: there are many food options available, I can get to appointments without having to drive, and there are numerous other services easily available to handle bits of life I may not be able to or want to handle. The downside is that it's much more expensive; in a weird way, a city is the capitalist instantiation of a commune, where you can pool resources and share labor, but only by reducing everything to a price.
I would love to live in a communal rather than capitalist city, but I have no idea how we could construct such a thing.
That's an incredibly thought-provoking observation, "a city is the capitalist instantiation of a commune, where you can pool resources and share labor, but only by reducing everything to a price." I never thought about it that way.
I think that it's not exactly about having to live *with* people all the time--as a serious introvert I sympathize completely with this, and having my kids and spouse around all day every day the last year has unravelled me--but about intentionally creating networks of mutual and accessible support. Like, there's this retired teacher in my town who lives alone and is obviously very happy with that. She walks a lot so we spend time together walking, and she visits the main coffee shop downtown almost daily to hang out for a bit. Since it's a small community, large numbers of people know her and her house, and it's not that anybody intrudes on her solitude, but that when something like a big snowstorm or a power outage happens, she's someone who's on the mental list to check on, for example.
I guess I read this not as commune but as community, with that commune as an example. (I had friends in high school who spent most of their early years on a commune, and it wasn't as beneficial and definitely not as egalitarian as this one sounds.)
I never thought of this comparison, but you're so right - - the new commune is like living in a place that has a village community core, a Jane Jacobs city where people recognise and look out for each other (but aren't so enmeshed that they're all up in each other's biz/choices in an intrusive way).
Like, in the last year I had to get some documents witnessed, and during "normal times", I would have travelled across town to see friends or asked a colleague at the office to help out. But in lockdown, I realised that I have tons of neighbours and local shopkeepers who know me by name, with whom I've exchanged friendly greetings over the years.
Maybe it's as simple as being able to walk to a high street to run your errands (and the greetings along the way) vs getting in an isolating car to drive to the big box strip malls.
Jane Jacobs all the way 😀 There are a ton of memorable stories and examples in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" but one toward the end that I really love is how she talks about resilient neighborhoods as being places that have "people who stay put." (Part of her intent in that passage was to push back against the idea that strong communities need to be ethnically heterogeneous, which, as it was published in 1961, I'm guessing might have been even more important to negate than it is now, though that's just a guess.) "Community" doesn't have to mean "closest friends and/or family." It's just a place high in social capital, which is developed through exactly those kinds of small exchanges you're talking about. We really on such a wide variety of people for different things and it's such a wonderful luxury these days to have those needs met nearby.
Okay, yes, that sounds much better -- I guess to me that just seems like...being a decent human being (something that I do realize, more and more, isn't actually the norm, so...yeah *sigh*). I certainly had a couple of friends who picked up and delivered grocery or produce orders for me during the first 3 or 4 months of all this, before mask-wearing was widespread and mandated and I didn't even go to the grocery store at all (autoimmune problem, so I've been much more cautious this whole year than most people, and I don't drive), and that sort of care in a wider way is certainly something I'd like to see in the world just in general.
I love that! There was so much of this happening and I think a lot of people are starting to emerge from it realizing that they *want* those kinds of resilient communities and mutual care networks. It doesn't have to be a formal thing.
I think part of the problem is that our dominant narratives try to convince us it isn't the norm. I think more people want this kind of world than don't, but we're inundated all day long with stories of the people who have made life worse (also those people tend to be very loud). Maybe part of our neurological wiring--we tend to remember and highlight the stories of harm more than that of care? Like, my sister manages a local chain of coffee shops and the one person or couple who's a jerk each day leaves greater impact than the string of nice people. Your friends sound awesome :)
I love what you said about travel, BTW. The best vacation I ever had was when my husband surprised me by using frequent flyer miles to send me alone to my home state for four days one March. The weather was miserable and all I did was walk around and write and read for the entire time and the most I said to a single person was, "Double espresso, please." Literally one of the best weeks of the last decade for me.
Coffeeshop/tearoom-hopping on a weather-y day with a book or two, maybe a stack of postcards to write, while aimlessly wandering the streets in a foreign city, followed by a loooooong idle trip through an unfamiliar grocery store (grocery stores in other countries used to be one of my FAVORITE THINGS -- I miss when grocery shopping/browsing didn't have to be planned out like preparing for war) was one of my ideal ways to spend a day while traveling. And if I was in a country where I didn't really speak or understand the language, I could easily go days without a real conversation -- loved it. (Hungary was always particularly good for this, god I miss Budapest.)
Your comment, and the replies below, seem to be the cries of the privileged to keep their privileges no matter what the cost to others and to the natural world. One of the responses to the coming climate disasters that might mitigate them is communal living. Whether we like it or not, if we want to make a difference we will have to get used to living more closely and intimately with other people. The single life is an historically recent innovation. How many indigenous communities have anyone living alone? They are, by most measures, happier people.
This: “I'd probably describe myself as a near-hermit who just happens to be also pretty gregarious and really good with people?” The community I imagine would support exactly this kind of person—me, you—or it wouldn’t work.
If anyone can make this idyllic vision happen, I absolutely volunteer to be the weird person who lives quietly in the lone cottage or little apartment on the outskirts and walks everyone's dogs/house-sits/distributes delicious surplus baked goods on the regular. Petting animals and baking things are really my top two skill sets. : )
I wrote an essay about this a few years ago, after my sister and her family hit a financial wall and had to move in with us. It was *hard* and nothing any of us wanted. But it taught me a lot about the softening and adapting we have to do if we truly care about one another. In a society where we already understood that mutual care is a primary necessity, they wouldn't have been in the position they were in in the first place and we might not have needed the lesson. Living together for over a year sucked, we all agreed on that. We wanted our own space, our own routines, our own lives. But there is a vast territory between living commune-like or on top of one another (literally), and the isolated every-person-for-themselves idealization that North American society is prone to (and which our car-centric infrastructure makes very difficult to extract ourselves from). We now live next door to each other and are able to give mutual support (like shared dinners, impromptu child care for a couple hours in the evenings sometimes, or the inevitable "Do you have any powdered sugar we could borrow?") without having to be in each other's spaces day in and day out.
I've been asked to be part of a mutual aid association here in Mexico and what that will look like is very much on the minds of all of those involved. As you say: when you feel cared for yourself, it's easier to care for others.
I'm reading Sylvia Federici's "Re-Enchanting the World" right now and her explication of how capitalism keeps enacting new "enclosures" in order to extract wealth and labor applies to the atomization of personal life we're all experiencing. I dearly hope we'll come up with new and creative ways to share labor and resources coming out of this ... sadly, I'm seeing a lot of "the new Roaring 20s" which is not going to be that.
This really ties in to what I've been thinking about aaaaaall weekend. Thank you, AHP. It also reminds me how often people get all snippy about how Thoreau really wasn't isolated, that [insert snotty voice], "His MOM did his LAUNDRY!" But isolation wasn't his point, living intentionally was. He remained part of his community. He was a surveyor for people. A babysitter. He enjoyed visitors. He wanted something not so different from what you are talking about, where people (a product of his era, it's man this, man that, meh) aren't enslaved by unnecessary toil, and for what?
I'm really worried about so many of my friends. It's what I was planning to write about next week anyway, now this has solidified that for me. Thank you.
I will continue to snip on occasion but will try to rein it in ;) It's not people's reverence for his nonexistent isolation that I criticize, but their idolization of his supposed self-sufficiency. But maybe that's just how it was taught to me. Also not necessarily *his* fault but the lessons the dominant society has taken from Walden: "He lived alone in the woods and was self-sufficient, the American way!" Maybe if more it were taught more from the "trying to live intentionally while remaining part of necessary community" aspect we'd take healthier lessons from it?
I forget you are one of THOSE people, Nia, since you seem so perfect in every other way. :P
This is spot on: "Maybe if more it were taught more from the "trying to live intentionally while remaining part of necessary community" aspect we'd take healthier lessons from it?"
I'm old enough that I learned about Thoreau from hippies, so I've always been a tiny bit confused by the backlash. But if the system is using him as some sort of "bootstraps!" lesson -- no wonder.
I think the line "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately" is often used as a launching point for promoting self-sufficiency as well as intentional living and/or hermitage. Maybe it's time for a Thoreau reboot :)
Hahaha! ;) Yeah, really thinking about your comments, I think the main issue is in the way it's taught and what kinds of messages are shared about it, rather than the book itself. I should check myself before I wreck myself!
You might take a look at the journals -- it's just Henry wandering around in the woods and making notes on what he sees. They've become a real ecological treasure as climate change has hit.
I find the essays tedious at times, but he was mentored (hectored) by Emerson, and I find Emerson and his Germanic Initial Caps very tiresome.
I have a soft spot for Emerson because my father-in-law liked him so much and game me more appreciation than I'd had before, but in general, yes, I agree, especially about the Germanic Initial Caps!
This is such a good subject! I have been in a sort of “quasi-commune” since august when our school announced they would not open in the fall. A pod with a family we casually knew, now we are some kind of “reliance-kin.” We share childcare, remote learning, making dinner for each other 2+ meals a week, muddy and snowy kids clothes getting passed back and forth... now we know how to do the dishes in each other’s kitchens and put them all away, where the broom is, etc. Our kids love each other and sometimes don’t. We know the emotional ups and downs of all the adults. It’s messy, and loud, not always convenient to my own need for personal space, but for that there is usually wine ;) there are gifts here and also challenges. At dinner, in our bubble, we wonder what parts of this will we continue. If we can once again rely on anyone, will we lean on others less?
We have a pod with another family in the neighborhood too! After sharing meals all of Thanksgiving week and savoring how much less net WORK it was, it belatedly occurred to use that we could just do some version of that all the time. Now they cook for us every Tuesday and we cook for them every Thursday. We both have babies with fluctuating bedtimes/evening routines so dinners are usually just dropped off hot on the doorstep, but just pooling our labor in that one little way has made such a difference to our respective lives. We formed the pod in part to share childcare and to have backup "covid safe" caregivers in case of emergency but it's become so much more than that, and as vaccinations ramp up, I'm feeling weirdly mournful about The Death of the Pod, even though I think we'll keep up the Tuesday/Thursday dinner swap long past covid.
Thank you. “I’ve figured out how I’m most comfortable, and I’m unaccustomed to bending my desires towards others.” is something I've been trying to articulate for the last few years. The best I could do was "people want community, but they don't want to do the work to create a community" which wasn't quite it. This shows up in the large ways you mention but in small ways as well. For many years our shop at work threw a giant all school holiday party. The shop provided some basic dishes (a turkey, a ham) but mostly it was done by pot luck via a sign up sheet. Then slowly over a few years people didn't bring as many dishes, so we started subbing in catering which had budget limits, and students started coming in, piling up giant plates and leaving immediately. Which, fine they are poor students looking for a free meal but part of the joy was interacting with members of the community you might not spend time with regularly. Eventually it was such a stressful burden we stopped doing it entirely much to everyone's disappointment. I'm still not entirely sure how the attitude changed from "a community event organized by our shop" to "a party thrown by our shop" other than people not wanting to inconvenience themselves. And hey, I get it. I definitely tossed down a plate of cookies at the last in person charity Holiday Bake-Off with an attitude of "Here's your goddamn cookies. Quit bugging me." It's just a shame we all seem to be in an I-don't-want-the-inconvenience headspace as opposed to being able to take turns with community labor. Which despite being a hermit, I am usually down for.
Maybe I'm reading this at a time of the day when I'm particularly prone to melancholy (6am in the morning), but something about this feels very heartbreaking to me. I used to regularly organize pub nights and dinners as socializing opportunities with coworkers and classmates, and I have grown to realize that people didn't actually think it was worth their time. There wasn't even an element of labor in it, really, apart from just showing up and not being a dick, and yet... the vibe I got was that they'd rather spend time with the friends *they* had made of their own volition than expend any additional effort.
I don't know, I have just never felt like it was a burden to to try to get to know people you were already going to spend time with in some other way. Like, we're all stuck here together; why not play nice? To me that doesn't even feel as radical as the idea of consciously relying upon and sharing space meaningfully with others, and yet it still felt like I was asking too much.
I get how you feel, but actually, depending on the people/situation, expending that kind of social energy can be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more labor than doing a thing someone needs. I'd find regularly cooking/delivering some meals for a neighbor/coworker/&c. who couldn't a lot less exhausting than being stuck in a public place having to make small-talk with them for 2 hours, for instance. Like, a LOT less.
That's a very, very fair point! I guess it's also a matter of figuring out what kind of engagement makes sense for different people as well (i.e. what they actually find engaging!). Thank you for sharing your perspective on this - it's given me more food for thought!
I’m excited to read this and more of Jezer-Morton’s work. I think graduate student married student housing has come the closest to commune living in my life and it was wonderful. Living in cinder block one and two bedroom apartments on the outskirts of campus, sharing playgrounds, community center and gardening plots. I depended so much on my neighbors for help, entertainment and friendship.
This was a great piece and I do really love thinking about communes...I went through a phase where moving to The Farm was a dream of mine.
But one thing that’s left out of most narratives about communes is how your worth is tied to your ability to work.
You do bring up childcare and eldercare which makes sense in commune ideology...children WILL be able to work one day and elders DID work so now they get care. You also bring up how it’s can function as a safety net if you get sick but to me that reads as a temporarily disabling sickness.
But in reality communes just aren’t set up for disabled people. I think the sticker for me comes in this resurgence (thanks to the pandemic and work done by you, AHP) in realizing our worth is not tied up in our productivity but communes are set up in exactly that manner.
This is something I’ve thought about a lot. Pre-pandemic, my close friends and I discussed a "someday" pooling of resources so that we could make a life together as we got older.
Then the pandemic hit. I was alone in my studio apartment, separated from my fiancé by a closed border, and it seemed natural for my best friend and her husband to ask me if I wanted to stay in their spare room for the duration. So for the first time in ten years, I had housemates. And...it was easy, well, easy-ish (there was a pandemic and we took turns having depressive fall-aparts).
There are always enough people to split up the household work, in ways that no one has to do too much or things they hate. (I do most, but not all, of the kitchen stuff, and never have to touch a vacuum cleaner, and for me that is the best and happiest of divisions of labor.)
I think it helps that all three of us are introverts; that the house is big enough that we can have space when necessary; that we are all people who try to choose kindness; that my best friend and I have been friends for twenty a couple of decades and have worked through mutual exasperation and periodic incomprehension and come out the other side into abiding affection.
As I think about the future one of the things I fear is losing that sort of community. I don’t necessarily want to live with them forever (see the aforementioned fiancé in Canada), but losing that interconnected intimacy, where there are always enough hands, and the sense of safety that comes with it,
I'm someone who feels more comfortable one on one and in small groups, and often feel like when I'm in larger groups, it's harder to form genuine connections without feeling like you're excluding other people, or feeling excluded when other people do. An idea of a commune sounds good in theory, but I don't think it's so easy to shake the dynamics that come into play.
I can't read this and not think of Rutger Bregman's book, HumanKind, which deals pretty extensively with the dissolution of mutually beneficial societal fabrics (and the subsequent birth of cultures of violence) as part of the rise of property rights.
Thanks to Chris La Tray's urging, I upped Nick Estes's book "Our History is the Future" on my TBR list, and the way he addressed violence against Indigenous people as a direct result of Europeans' need to turn land into private property was one of the best articulations I've read of the damage that private property causes. (Also I can never recommend enough Andro Linklater's book "Owning the Earth," which is all about land as private property and is way better than Simon Winchester's recent book on the subject.)
We've seen over and over and over again the mindset (and corresponding actions) that property rights supersede human rights. Arkansas just passed a Stand Your Ground law that - in part - further codifies this mindset. I'm not really sure where we go from here either, and I usually have a half-baked idea how to fix the world.
I read a very interesting thing a few weeks ago about changing the weight of the legal system to focus on systems of interconnection rather than the enclosures of private property. Can't remember where I read it but will try to find it! I think it'll just take a lot of focus, attention, intention, and at least two generations.
I would be incredibly interested in that piece, if you come across it again. A couple of months ago I came across some policy in France that absolutely shifted my paradigm on this. There are several factors that have to be met for this to work out, but essentially an unhoused person can take up in a vacant property because the human right to shelter outweighs the owner's property rights to leave a building vacant. Again, the actual policy is more nuanced but the balance test is weighted towards human rights and against property rights, when those two rights are in conflict. I'd say that our system at best treats the two things as equal and at worst weighs property rights over human rights.
Vancouver has an empty housing tax (forget what it's called) that I think cities like Los Angeles have been batting around. Places that have high rates of absentee or part-time ownership combined with difficulty accessing affordable housing could benefit greatly from that if executed correctly. It's not the best fix, but it does at least begin to acknowledge that people's right to housing is greater than rights to unfettered private property ownership. Those rights have really become so destructive (and this publicly stated opinion is one of the reasons I can never run for public office in Montana!).
That is a really interesting piece, thanks for sending it over! One thing in that I really wanted the author to get into was the difference in regular logic vs. the difference in legal logic. You and I could have a conversation about this stuff, and it is likely that we would be talking about problems that began within the lifetimes of people we know (ourselves, our parents, our grandparents, whatever). But the law began codifying this stuff centuries ago (I think the earliest case we dealt with in Property Law was in the 1600s), and the subsequent case law, holdings, and legislative actions have created this massive Gordian knot of legal logic that is resistant to "common" logic because of 1) inertia and 2) monied interests. To make any real change, it'll require just massive amounts of communication efforts (comparable to Koch levels of investment) and real coordination to take back statehouses long abandoned to Republicans. And I feel you on electability, this post alone is enough to keep me off the ballot in Arkansas :)
I love this piece so much. I have long wished to set up quasi-communal living with close friends. I live in the Bay Area where housing is prohibitively expensive and it always seems to be a natural solution to the problem. It surprises me that families haven’t taken on this solution but I think it’s largely that the existing infrastructure doesn’t supported and new construction is so expensive. Thanks for sharing this perspective!
"But we have also been well-trained to resist inconvenience, even of the mildest sort"
It's funny you should post this today as I'm sitting here on my couch apartment hunting. I'm currently renting a whole house in the suburbs that I've decided I can't afford if I ever want to actually pay my student loans off, so the hunt for something more reasonable has begun. This has come with a lot of questions though, about what I *actually need*. The cost of convenience is high.
The truth is that, even for this relatively antisocial guy, after a year of near total isolation thanks to the pandemic, I think what I want more than anything is to be somewhere that isn't isolating. I've become accustomed to my garage, and my lawn, and my washer and dryer. But I think I would be happy to give that all up for an "artsy" one bedroom in a walkable area of the city. I've *never* lived in the city. I've never parked my car on the street. I've never had to use a laundromat. But the isolation of the suburbs has become very ugly to me. I'm willing to sacrifice a lot of convenience to avoid living in some depressing apartment complex just because it's convenient.
There's opportunity in learning how to live a different lifestyle.
As someone who has dreamed her entire life of just being alone and has felt loneliness maybe once during this pandemic, I'll admit that my first response was to balk at this suggestion. Even though living alone has taught me how truly overwhelming it is to do everything for yourself! I think the big fear for many, but certainly for neurodiverse folks, is what I would consider the "interaction tax" of mutual aid. Sharing dinner with someone usually means having to put on a social mask for potentially hours, which can be exhausting, but this is not considered a "contribution" in kind and thus just becomes extra labor. It becomes overwhelming to imagine all of your physical needs being tied to social interactions that you find unbearable. That said, I work 8+ hours a day while masking my symptoms during meetings etc. in order to afford to live alone, so I do wonder if the net amount of "interaction tax" would go down. There's also the argument that these sorts of mutually beneficial communities can be built to accommodate a greater diversity of abilities, which is ideal, but I think we are a long way away from the general population having a strong enough understanding of disability that you can assume that of any community you move to (and certainly not any community you are born into). That said, I definitely see the appeal of this model! My parents couldn't afford a babysitter while they were at work on their own and so pooled with a few other families; I certainly have felt the call of "I wish all my friends lived in the same neighborhood" (or the same state at least); and I contribute to direct aid when I can because I know that "donation to big non-profit" =/= food on the table or bills paid. Definitely going to read Jezer-Morton's articles now - thank you for sharing.
I am also a person who feels the interaction tax — although I will say that it goes significantly, SIGNIFICANTLY down when the people I'm interacting with are people I know very well and trust. But also: I do think that we can find other people who feel similarly, and make dinner for each other a few times a week and depend on one another....but maybe only spend like 5 minutes each time with one another? Essentially: a community of loners who like and care for one another and acknowledge and appreciate our limits?
I absolutely agree on the tax being less (but not gone) for people I know very well. I tend to drift toward people with similar temperaments, which actually sounds a lot like what you’re describing! (A DREAM). It makes sense that building up that mutual trust and understanding of individual needs within a specific community isn’t something you should expect overnight, and that of course that’s one of the aspects to nurturing a system like this.
I dunno -- in theory, I get all of this, and don't really disagree with the crux of it at all. But, personally, I just want my solitude for the most part more than anything else. I lived with someone (romantically) for most of my 20s, but not really because I _wanted_ to, it was kind of a situation that happened and then, like many things, it was difficult to end because there was no big reason to end it (other than...I didn't want to be in that kind of relationship/not alone). I've lived alone for the last 12 years, and also avoided monogamous entanglements for that long, and...I just can't imagine wanting to change either of those situations ever again. I've always been desperate to protect my solitude more than I ever crave company -- even with the people I love most -- and also I just don't ever get _lonely_. I miss specific people/feel lonely for them, specifically, at times, of course. But wholesale loneliness? I just don't get it, like I don't even have a concept of what that feels like. I travel semi-regularly (pre-COVID, obvs) and I have _always_ traveled alone -- the idea of taking a vacation with someone is basically horrifying to me. All the things I enjoy doing are things I almost always like doing better by myself. I'd probably describe myself as a near-hermit who just happens to be also pretty gregarious and really good with people? Like most people, I miss my day-to-day mundane loose interactions with strangers or vague acquaintances, that kind of thing (and of course I miss the option of sex/physical intimacy and also hugging my friends and all of that) but the solitude of the pandemic has in no way been the difficult part of the past year for me; living _with_ people in close proximity in a commune-ish way sounds ideal in the social-contract kind of way, but also...I'd go mad so quickly if I had to be in close proximity to others constantly, my god.
This deeply spoke to me. I've spent most of the pandemic with my parents to pool the chores and hassle of safely obtaining food and other necessities. It's gone well and I'd make that decision again in a heartbeat, but even though we tolerate each other's company well, I am craving solitude so badly. I want to live alone. I love living alone.
That said, I've thought about this a great deal in the context of my own aging. I don't have kids and I don't have a partner and am not interested in either, and I want my hermit life, but it's also likely that at some point I won't be entirely capable of it. At that point, the choices are some form of mutual aid or some form of hired assistance, and while the latter can provide a lot of flexibility when one can afford it, the former feels more appealing if I can get it without losing my beloved solitude.
I reached a couple of conclusions: I want to live in a city, and I want to live close to friends (either by moving close to existing friends or making friends where I live). My ideal fantasy world is an apartment complex populated by my friends.
I find a city makes solitude so much logistically easier: there are many food options available, I can get to appointments without having to drive, and there are numerous other services easily available to handle bits of life I may not be able to or want to handle. The downside is that it's much more expensive; in a weird way, a city is the capitalist instantiation of a commune, where you can pool resources and share labor, but only by reducing everything to a price.
I would love to live in a communal rather than capitalist city, but I have no idea how we could construct such a thing.
That's an incredibly thought-provoking observation, "a city is the capitalist instantiation of a commune, where you can pool resources and share labor, but only by reducing everything to a price." I never thought about it that way.
I think that it's not exactly about having to live *with* people all the time--as a serious introvert I sympathize completely with this, and having my kids and spouse around all day every day the last year has unravelled me--but about intentionally creating networks of mutual and accessible support. Like, there's this retired teacher in my town who lives alone and is obviously very happy with that. She walks a lot so we spend time together walking, and she visits the main coffee shop downtown almost daily to hang out for a bit. Since it's a small community, large numbers of people know her and her house, and it's not that anybody intrudes on her solitude, but that when something like a big snowstorm or a power outage happens, she's someone who's on the mental list to check on, for example.
I guess I read this not as commune but as community, with that commune as an example. (I had friends in high school who spent most of their early years on a commune, and it wasn't as beneficial and definitely not as egalitarian as this one sounds.)
I never thought of this comparison, but you're so right - - the new commune is like living in a place that has a village community core, a Jane Jacobs city where people recognise and look out for each other (but aren't so enmeshed that they're all up in each other's biz/choices in an intrusive way).
Like, in the last year I had to get some documents witnessed, and during "normal times", I would have travelled across town to see friends or asked a colleague at the office to help out. But in lockdown, I realised that I have tons of neighbours and local shopkeepers who know me by name, with whom I've exchanged friendly greetings over the years.
Maybe it's as simple as being able to walk to a high street to run your errands (and the greetings along the way) vs getting in an isolating car to drive to the big box strip malls.
(Can you tell I'm a Jane Jacobs superfangirl?)
Ditto, I need to add her book onto my list to re-read :)
Jane Jacobs all the way 😀 There are a ton of memorable stories and examples in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" but one toward the end that I really love is how she talks about resilient neighborhoods as being places that have "people who stay put." (Part of her intent in that passage was to push back against the idea that strong communities need to be ethnically heterogeneous, which, as it was published in 1961, I'm guessing might have been even more important to negate than it is now, though that's just a guess.) "Community" doesn't have to mean "closest friends and/or family." It's just a place high in social capital, which is developed through exactly those kinds of small exchanges you're talking about. We really on such a wide variety of people for different things and it's such a wonderful luxury these days to have those needs met nearby.
Okay, yes, that sounds much better -- I guess to me that just seems like...being a decent human being (something that I do realize, more and more, isn't actually the norm, so...yeah *sigh*). I certainly had a couple of friends who picked up and delivered grocery or produce orders for me during the first 3 or 4 months of all this, before mask-wearing was widespread and mandated and I didn't even go to the grocery store at all (autoimmune problem, so I've been much more cautious this whole year than most people, and I don't drive), and that sort of care in a wider way is certainly something I'd like to see in the world just in general.
I love that! There was so much of this happening and I think a lot of people are starting to emerge from it realizing that they *want* those kinds of resilient communities and mutual care networks. It doesn't have to be a formal thing.
I think part of the problem is that our dominant narratives try to convince us it isn't the norm. I think more people want this kind of world than don't, but we're inundated all day long with stories of the people who have made life worse (also those people tend to be very loud). Maybe part of our neurological wiring--we tend to remember and highlight the stories of harm more than that of care? Like, my sister manages a local chain of coffee shops and the one person or couple who's a jerk each day leaves greater impact than the string of nice people. Your friends sound awesome :)
I love what you said about travel, BTW. The best vacation I ever had was when my husband surprised me by using frequent flyer miles to send me alone to my home state for four days one March. The weather was miserable and all I did was walk around and write and read for the entire time and the most I said to a single person was, "Double espresso, please." Literally one of the best weeks of the last decade for me.
Coffeeshop/tearoom-hopping on a weather-y day with a book or two, maybe a stack of postcards to write, while aimlessly wandering the streets in a foreign city, followed by a loooooong idle trip through an unfamiliar grocery store (grocery stores in other countries used to be one of my FAVORITE THINGS -- I miss when grocery shopping/browsing didn't have to be planned out like preparing for war) was one of my ideal ways to spend a day while traveling. And if I was in a country where I didn't really speak or understand the language, I could easily go days without a real conversation -- loved it. (Hungary was always particularly good for this, god I miss Budapest.)
I have never been alone in Budapest but was in Lisbon for a couple of days and ... all of this! Oh my gosh, I miss all of this.
I will allllllways need my own apartment.
Your comment, and the replies below, seem to be the cries of the privileged to keep their privileges no matter what the cost to others and to the natural world. One of the responses to the coming climate disasters that might mitigate them is communal living. Whether we like it or not, if we want to make a difference we will have to get used to living more closely and intimately with other people. The single life is an historically recent innovation. How many indigenous communities have anyone living alone? They are, by most measures, happier people.
This: “I'd probably describe myself as a near-hermit who just happens to be also pretty gregarious and really good with people?” The community I imagine would support exactly this kind of person—me, you—or it wouldn’t work.
If anyone can make this idyllic vision happen, I absolutely volunteer to be the weird person who lives quietly in the lone cottage or little apartment on the outskirts and walks everyone's dogs/house-sits/distributes delicious surplus baked goods on the regular. Petting animals and baking things are really my top two skill sets. : )
For years, my friends and I have joked about buying some land together, but it’s becoming less of a joke.
I wrote an essay about this a few years ago, after my sister and her family hit a financial wall and had to move in with us. It was *hard* and nothing any of us wanted. But it taught me a lot about the softening and adapting we have to do if we truly care about one another. In a society where we already understood that mutual care is a primary necessity, they wouldn't have been in the position they were in in the first place and we might not have needed the lesson. Living together for over a year sucked, we all agreed on that. We wanted our own space, our own routines, our own lives. But there is a vast territory between living commune-like or on top of one another (literally), and the isolated every-person-for-themselves idealization that North American society is prone to (and which our car-centric infrastructure makes very difficult to extract ourselves from). We now live next door to each other and are able to give mutual support (like shared dinners, impromptu child care for a couple hours in the evenings sometimes, or the inevitable "Do you have any powdered sugar we could borrow?") without having to be in each other's spaces day in and day out.
AH, you've outdone yourself with this column.
I've been asked to be part of a mutual aid association here in Mexico and what that will look like is very much on the minds of all of those involved. As you say: when you feel cared for yourself, it's easier to care for others.
I'm reading Sylvia Federici's "Re-Enchanting the World" right now and her explication of how capitalism keeps enacting new "enclosures" in order to extract wealth and labor applies to the atomization of personal life we're all experiencing. I dearly hope we'll come up with new and creative ways to share labor and resources coming out of this ... sadly, I'm seeing a lot of "the new Roaring 20s" which is not going to be that.
This really ties in to what I've been thinking about aaaaaall weekend. Thank you, AHP. It also reminds me how often people get all snippy about how Thoreau really wasn't isolated, that [insert snotty voice], "His MOM did his LAUNDRY!" But isolation wasn't his point, living intentionally was. He remained part of his community. He was a surveyor for people. A babysitter. He enjoyed visitors. He wanted something not so different from what you are talking about, where people (a product of his era, it's man this, man that, meh) aren't enslaved by unnecessary toil, and for what?
I'm really worried about so many of my friends. It's what I was planning to write about next week anyway, now this has solidified that for me. Thank you.
I will continue to snip on occasion but will try to rein it in ;) It's not people's reverence for his nonexistent isolation that I criticize, but their idolization of his supposed self-sufficiency. But maybe that's just how it was taught to me. Also not necessarily *his* fault but the lessons the dominant society has taken from Walden: "He lived alone in the woods and was self-sufficient, the American way!" Maybe if more it were taught more from the "trying to live intentionally while remaining part of necessary community" aspect we'd take healthier lessons from it?
I forget you are one of THOSE people, Nia, since you seem so perfect in every other way. :P
This is spot on: "Maybe if more it were taught more from the "trying to live intentionally while remaining part of necessary community" aspect we'd take healthier lessons from it?"
I'm old enough that I learned about Thoreau from hippies, so I've always been a tiny bit confused by the backlash. But if the system is using him as some sort of "bootstraps!" lesson -- no wonder.
But then, my heart belongs to the diaries ...
I think the line "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately" is often used as a launching point for promoting self-sufficiency as well as intentional living and/or hermitage. Maybe it's time for a Thoreau reboot :)
Hahaha! ;) Yeah, really thinking about your comments, I think the main issue is in the way it's taught and what kinds of messages are shared about it, rather than the book itself. I should check myself before I wreck myself!
You might take a look at the journals -- it's just Henry wandering around in the woods and making notes on what he sees. They've become a real ecological treasure as climate change has hit.
I find the essays tedious at times, but he was mentored (hectored) by Emerson, and I find Emerson and his Germanic Initial Caps very tiresome.
I have a soft spot for Emerson because my father-in-law liked him so much and game me more appreciation than I'd had before, but in general, yes, I agree, especially about the Germanic Initial Caps!
This is such a good subject! I have been in a sort of “quasi-commune” since august when our school announced they would not open in the fall. A pod with a family we casually knew, now we are some kind of “reliance-kin.” We share childcare, remote learning, making dinner for each other 2+ meals a week, muddy and snowy kids clothes getting passed back and forth... now we know how to do the dishes in each other’s kitchens and put them all away, where the broom is, etc. Our kids love each other and sometimes don’t. We know the emotional ups and downs of all the adults. It’s messy, and loud, not always convenient to my own need for personal space, but for that there is usually wine ;) there are gifts here and also challenges. At dinner, in our bubble, we wonder what parts of this will we continue. If we can once again rely on anyone, will we lean on others less?
We have a pod with another family in the neighborhood too! After sharing meals all of Thanksgiving week and savoring how much less net WORK it was, it belatedly occurred to use that we could just do some version of that all the time. Now they cook for us every Tuesday and we cook for them every Thursday. We both have babies with fluctuating bedtimes/evening routines so dinners are usually just dropped off hot on the doorstep, but just pooling our labor in that one little way has made such a difference to our respective lives. We formed the pod in part to share childcare and to have backup "covid safe" caregivers in case of emergency but it's become so much more than that, and as vaccinations ramp up, I'm feeling weirdly mournful about The Death of the Pod, even though I think we'll keep up the Tuesday/Thursday dinner swap long past covid.
Thank you. “I’ve figured out how I’m most comfortable, and I’m unaccustomed to bending my desires towards others.” is something I've been trying to articulate for the last few years. The best I could do was "people want community, but they don't want to do the work to create a community" which wasn't quite it. This shows up in the large ways you mention but in small ways as well. For many years our shop at work threw a giant all school holiday party. The shop provided some basic dishes (a turkey, a ham) but mostly it was done by pot luck via a sign up sheet. Then slowly over a few years people didn't bring as many dishes, so we started subbing in catering which had budget limits, and students started coming in, piling up giant plates and leaving immediately. Which, fine they are poor students looking for a free meal but part of the joy was interacting with members of the community you might not spend time with regularly. Eventually it was such a stressful burden we stopped doing it entirely much to everyone's disappointment. I'm still not entirely sure how the attitude changed from "a community event organized by our shop" to "a party thrown by our shop" other than people not wanting to inconvenience themselves. And hey, I get it. I definitely tossed down a plate of cookies at the last in person charity Holiday Bake-Off with an attitude of "Here's your goddamn cookies. Quit bugging me." It's just a shame we all seem to be in an I-don't-want-the-inconvenience headspace as opposed to being able to take turns with community labor. Which despite being a hermit, I am usually down for.
Maybe I'm reading this at a time of the day when I'm particularly prone to melancholy (6am in the morning), but something about this feels very heartbreaking to me. I used to regularly organize pub nights and dinners as socializing opportunities with coworkers and classmates, and I have grown to realize that people didn't actually think it was worth their time. There wasn't even an element of labor in it, really, apart from just showing up and not being a dick, and yet... the vibe I got was that they'd rather spend time with the friends *they* had made of their own volition than expend any additional effort.
I don't know, I have just never felt like it was a burden to to try to get to know people you were already going to spend time with in some other way. Like, we're all stuck here together; why not play nice? To me that doesn't even feel as radical as the idea of consciously relying upon and sharing space meaningfully with others, and yet it still felt like I was asking too much.
I get how you feel, but actually, depending on the people/situation, expending that kind of social energy can be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more labor than doing a thing someone needs. I'd find regularly cooking/delivering some meals for a neighbor/coworker/&c. who couldn't a lot less exhausting than being stuck in a public place having to make small-talk with them for 2 hours, for instance. Like, a LOT less.
That's a very, very fair point! I guess it's also a matter of figuring out what kind of engagement makes sense for different people as well (i.e. what they actually find engaging!). Thank you for sharing your perspective on this - it's given me more food for thought!
I’m excited to read this and more of Jezer-Morton’s work. I think graduate student married student housing has come the closest to commune living in my life and it was wonderful. Living in cinder block one and two bedroom apartments on the outskirts of campus, sharing playgrounds, community center and gardening plots. I depended so much on my neighbors for help, entertainment and friendship.
This was a great piece and I do really love thinking about communes...I went through a phase where moving to The Farm was a dream of mine.
But one thing that’s left out of most narratives about communes is how your worth is tied to your ability to work.
You do bring up childcare and eldercare which makes sense in commune ideology...children WILL be able to work one day and elders DID work so now they get care. You also bring up how it’s can function as a safety net if you get sick but to me that reads as a temporarily disabling sickness.
But in reality communes just aren’t set up for disabled people. I think the sticker for me comes in this resurgence (thanks to the pandemic and work done by you, AHP) in realizing our worth is not tied up in our productivity but communes are set up in exactly that manner.
So I don’t know, just some things to think about!
This is something I’ve thought about a lot. Pre-pandemic, my close friends and I discussed a "someday" pooling of resources so that we could make a life together as we got older.
Then the pandemic hit. I was alone in my studio apartment, separated from my fiancé by a closed border, and it seemed natural for my best friend and her husband to ask me if I wanted to stay in their spare room for the duration. So for the first time in ten years, I had housemates. And...it was easy, well, easy-ish (there was a pandemic and we took turns having depressive fall-aparts).
There are always enough people to split up the household work, in ways that no one has to do too much or things they hate. (I do most, but not all, of the kitchen stuff, and never have to touch a vacuum cleaner, and for me that is the best and happiest of divisions of labor.)
I think it helps that all three of us are introverts; that the house is big enough that we can have space when necessary; that we are all people who try to choose kindness; that my best friend and I have been friends for twenty a couple of decades and have worked through mutual exasperation and periodic incomprehension and come out the other side into abiding affection.
As I think about the future one of the things I fear is losing that sort of community. I don’t necessarily want to live with them forever (see the aforementioned fiancé in Canada), but losing that interconnected intimacy, where there are always enough hands, and the sense of safety that comes with it,
thanks for sharing
I'm someone who feels more comfortable one on one and in small groups, and often feel like when I'm in larger groups, it's harder to form genuine connections without feeling like you're excluding other people, or feeling excluded when other people do. An idea of a commune sounds good in theory, but I don't think it's so easy to shake the dynamics that come into play.
I can't read this and not think of Rutger Bregman's book, HumanKind, which deals pretty extensively with the dissolution of mutually beneficial societal fabrics (and the subsequent birth of cultures of violence) as part of the rise of property rights.
Thanks to Chris La Tray's urging, I upped Nick Estes's book "Our History is the Future" on my TBR list, and the way he addressed violence against Indigenous people as a direct result of Europeans' need to turn land into private property was one of the best articulations I've read of the damage that private property causes. (Also I can never recommend enough Andro Linklater's book "Owning the Earth," which is all about land as private property and is way better than Simon Winchester's recent book on the subject.)
We've seen over and over and over again the mindset (and corresponding actions) that property rights supersede human rights. Arkansas just passed a Stand Your Ground law that - in part - further codifies this mindset. I'm not really sure where we go from here either, and I usually have a half-baked idea how to fix the world.
I read a very interesting thing a few weeks ago about changing the weight of the legal system to focus on systems of interconnection rather than the enclosures of private property. Can't remember where I read it but will try to find it! I think it'll just take a lot of focus, attention, intention, and at least two generations.
I would be incredibly interested in that piece, if you come across it again. A couple of months ago I came across some policy in France that absolutely shifted my paradigm on this. There are several factors that have to be met for this to work out, but essentially an unhoused person can take up in a vacant property because the human right to shelter outweighs the owner's property rights to leave a building vacant. Again, the actual policy is more nuanced but the balance test is weighted towards human rights and against property rights, when those two rights are in conflict. I'd say that our system at best treats the two things as equal and at worst weighs property rights over human rights.
Found it! https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/interconnected-law-paradigm-shift-legal-thinking/
Vancouver has an empty housing tax (forget what it's called) that I think cities like Los Angeles have been batting around. Places that have high rates of absentee or part-time ownership combined with difficulty accessing affordable housing could benefit greatly from that if executed correctly. It's not the best fix, but it does at least begin to acknowledge that people's right to housing is greater than rights to unfettered private property ownership. Those rights have really become so destructive (and this publicly stated opinion is one of the reasons I can never run for public office in Montana!).
That is a really interesting piece, thanks for sending it over! One thing in that I really wanted the author to get into was the difference in regular logic vs. the difference in legal logic. You and I could have a conversation about this stuff, and it is likely that we would be talking about problems that began within the lifetimes of people we know (ourselves, our parents, our grandparents, whatever). But the law began codifying this stuff centuries ago (I think the earliest case we dealt with in Property Law was in the 1600s), and the subsequent case law, holdings, and legislative actions have created this massive Gordian knot of legal logic that is resistant to "common" logic because of 1) inertia and 2) monied interests. To make any real change, it'll require just massive amounts of communication efforts (comparable to Koch levels of investment) and real coordination to take back statehouses long abandoned to Republicans. And I feel you on electability, this post alone is enough to keep me off the ballot in Arkansas :)
I think I have the audio version of this one. I need to look into it. I dig Bregman. Thanks for the reminder.
As an economist who isn't totally disassociated from humanity, Bregman is certainly a rare bird. Get into it, it's an interesting read (or listen)!
I love this piece so much. I have long wished to set up quasi-communal living with close friends. I live in the Bay Area where housing is prohibitively expensive and it always seems to be a natural solution to the problem. It surprises me that families haven’t taken on this solution but I think it’s largely that the existing infrastructure doesn’t supported and new construction is so expensive. Thanks for sharing this perspective!