I’m sometimes not sure if current neighbourhood communities are all that better. People are mean in real life as well, and you can’t just block real people, so the internet is a welcome escape for many misfits of today’s dystopia. Plus, we are having this very valuable discussion here, on the internet, and I couldn’t really find anyone outside to have it with instead - not even in the next town.

But you are right, most people have bad internet habits and are quite zombified as a result, and far from even noticing anything emotional going on in their surroundings, I was fully immersed in this shit myself not too long ago.

Shame is something I still find hard to understand, even in me. It’s very deep trauma stuff where you just cannot hold your own center and commit to where you really stand. It makes the abuse possible, and not constantly falling back into those patterns requires constant work. It’s like a reflex of wanting to ease back into pleasing everyone and being nothing but nice and likeable - a constant erasing of oneself.

I think trauma is something we have to work on to reach a better society - work on it in ourselves and on a community level, especially intergenerational - and that doesn’t mean you should be forced to interact with your family by all means. Just that we should be very purposefully mix up people of all ages again.

For example, children are not raised by a village or community anymore, but by a pair of frightened parents (frightened, because of the pressure of everybody’s expecations around the child) and then by school. School is an industrial construct and resembles prison in a lot of unfortunate and intelligence-hindering ways. First to have to go in a solarpunk society would be school as we know it, and it would be one step towards a better neighbourhood community.