Note that communities doesn’t just refer to the hippie variety. Community is also: your family, your village, your online friends, your class. Community are the neighbours next door. When I moved into my new home my neighbours came and brought food - and I realized that I really didn’t know enough about communities anymore, so I’m here to learn.
A village community is different from an online community. You cannot just change it from one day to the next. Not every expectation in a village might agree with you: there is a soft pressure from some people to join some of the religious festivities and have the priest bless your house, not so much my thing - but it limits full integration and makes that I remain foreign.
I moved into the first community of the hippy/punk variety when I was 17, and even though it appeared a continuous failure at the time (all the conflict, all the people arriving and leaving) it did keep me alive and sheltered and in good spirits for 4 years and the place is still in the hands of a group, not one person, till today, yay.
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A small community without some visible conflict makes me suspicious it might be a cult or so 😅
You’re right, maybe I should have been more specific and call it ‘unskilled in handling own emotions’ and ‘unskilled in handling conflicts’.
I did visit a few places where conflict was replaced by common singing and dancing and submitting to [someone or something who knows better than you] , and it felt extremely off. The smiles of people are all off in that case.
Is this a place I could bring some worldbuilding questions to? I think solarpunk presents these wonderful opportunities to depict societies with very different structures, kind of demonstrating what might otherwise only be explained in fairly dense academic texts. But I struggle a bit with imagining far outside the box/the society I’m living in.
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I did reply here, didn’t I? There’s a reply loading, please let me know if it appears for you?
Sorry, nothing so far
Nevermind, but just ask away in here!
Thanks!
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The last two years were quite the opposite, just me and bf and occasionally my kid, without plans to change that in the next years. I guess my way of thinking about community has changed in the sense that I feel we humans are all kind of disabled, community-wise, and that it’s a result of living in authoritarian societies and of so many of us being traumatized already in our families. When I was younger I believed I could just move into a commune kind of thing and just leave all problems behind, but as we all bring our baggage into the commune we still have to know and use strategies to deal with whatever comes up. I guess it will take several generations of work to create more healthy communities from what we have now.
The commune as it’s usually imagined or as it usually happens has its limitations: often there’s only younger people, or only people with kids. I have started thinking about how should the elderly be integrated into a healthy community, not locked away separately and away from everyone. As I age, I might get back into a commune lifestyle and explore new ways of multigenerational living, who knows.
I feel that for those who try and start a commune (small as an alternative family or large as an alternative village) there’s so much more helpful material available than we had then, but the only groups I have seen who survive longer are the culty ones, unfortunately.
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I guess it’s more often than not a mix of both. My first commune experience happened in Germany, where lack of resources wasn’t really a thing back then. We went dumpster diving (because we were too young and urban to know how to garden), did some jobs, got some money from the state … The communes I see happening now are mostly young people moving out to Southern Europe and wanting to homestead. A lot are very disappointed with their first commune experience and give up after a short time. And in that case it’s often a mix of all of those things: lack of resources, the steep learning curve of handling a homestead in an unknown climate, learn a new culture, handle the difference between expectation and reality, and then get on with others you maybe only just met through all these problems.
But also, more resources are available (back then in my commune days there was no internet or we were too Luddite to start using it). Online you can find dire warnings like my paragraph above, but also information about when to seed carrots, how to milk a goat, how to organize and moderate a community meeting etc. So you do have more and more places succeeding and doing land restoration, permaculture and agroforestry.
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In this case, working on festivals.
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