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n the very first episode of “Friends,” Rachel flees her wedding to find her high school friend. Monica invites Rachel to move into her spare bedroom and helps her get a job. Her brother Ross and their friends help her cut up her credit cards and learn to live independently.
I was in fourth grade when that television show debuted and in college by the time it ended. By then, these characters were ingrained in one another’s lives, and mine. Rachel stumbled into a community of friends, like Phoebe who teaches her how to run more freely, Ross and Joey who became “nap partners,” and Monica who puts a turkey on her head to cheer up Chandler.
This tight-knit group lived in the same apartment building or very close to it, they were in and out of one another’s homes and lives. They may have been fictional, but they idealized friendship for a generation.
A generation that might be our most socially isolated yet.
Desiring a return to this kind of close-knit community, the modern tech set have come up with a very technocratic solution: Create groups of likeminded friends online, then build villages for them in-person. A world of so-called “Network States.” Cabin has created a network of them, Nico Shi has visited and made a map of them, and Supernuclear has documented the co-living movement, where individuals pool together to buy or rent a house together.
But these groups aren’t creating communities of “Friends,” they are creating communes—“intentional communities” where “likeminded” people can co-live with one another. Many of these communities are agrarian or “off-grid.” They often describe themselves using pseudo-spiritual language and feature high levels of self-governance with chores divided between participants and decisions made by vote.
These organizations often position themselves as the future of communities, but they look a lot more like the past, a sort of romanticized feudalism. Shi thinks this is a course correction from the stressors of modern life. “I wonder if choosing off-grid living implies an abandonment of our current world, instead of integrating with existing systems and trying to make them better,” she asks me. “The off-grid lifestyle seems to invite people to actively leave society with the assumption that since this is not working, there must be a better way out there.”
There isn’t. Houses were invented for excellent reasons, indoor plumbing drastically improved public health, heating and air conditioning made life less dangerous, refrigeration made food safe to eat, electricity led to advances in education and wealth generation, and agricultural advancements made it so that we didn’t have to work back-breaking labor in the fields, increasing our life expectancy. It’s probably the fallacy of modern living that we need to go without it every now and then to appreciate it, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with choosing that life if we want it, but retreating from society altogether isn’t the ideal, nor is it realistic.
“There's this meme that everybody and their friends want to fuck off and buy 100 acres with their 10 best friends and build houses and do regenerative farming—the whole thing,” Cam Lindsay, a community steward in the Bay Area, tells me. “But like, you're a tech bro at fucking Google, what do you mean?”
Rather than retreat from modern life, Lindsay advocates for engaging with it where we are. That’s why he is part of Cohort Zero, a new initiative from Cabin.
“Some people really enjoy living out deep in nature and cultivating community there, so we've put some effort into supporting that shape,” Savannah Kruger, community lead at Cabin tells me. “Now we're like, okay, there's also a really large group of people who want to live in cities and have rich community and be able to co-create things and build things with the people that they gather with.”
She points to Fractal NYC as a good example of this shift. “They wanted to bring as many of their friends to come live in their apartment building with them and basically have the TV show ‘Friends,’” Kruger says. “So they did that—in two years, they got about 30 people to move into their building or live within a five-minute walking radius of them.”
That “Friends” ideal was exactly what Priya Rose and her husband were going for when they created Fractal. Their website is clear: “Communes are cool, but we’re not all that: we’re ‘just’ a friend network that shares spaces, manages projects, and raises each other’s aspirations.”
Rose and her husband Andrew were very over the co-living thing by the time they created Fractal. They tried it in San Francisco where they shared a five-bedroom house with five to seven people. It was the whole thing: “There were assigned chores, and we would have house cleanings and house meetings. We were trying to act as this democracy where we would vote on things together,” Rose tells me.
It didn’t work. Once the pandemic hit, everyone wanted different things. “The democracy fell apart really quickly because me and my husband and our friend were on the lease, we were financially liable. All of the roommates were leaving San Francisco because the city was shut down and people were losing their jobs. Then other roommates were being really picky about who they wanted to live with, but they didn't have any financial incentive on the line to be flexible.
“Andrew and I were like ‘We will never do democracy again—we don't believe in it.’ We believe in a ‘many sovereigns’ kind of thing. Basically, it's just this idea of living near your friends.”
When they moved to New York, they didn’t want to get into another co-living situation, but they still wanted to live near friends so they invited them to rent in the same building. This time they had something more like the “Friends” ideal: Close community, but everyone could govern their own lives as they saw fit. “It takes away all of the overhead and all the negotiating of a commune while giving you all the good stuff, which is that you live near 40 friends, you have a shared social space,” Rose says.
When my husband and I moved to Salt Lake City, we had something similar. We intentionally rented an apartment with a community pool and rooftop patio where we quickly met some of our best friends. We spent summers grilling on the rooftop, inviting everyone to bring their own food as some played guitar around the firepit. We knocked on each other’s doors to invite friends over when we made extra food. We held pool parties on the weekends and met in the lobby to go on bike rides together.
We weren’t “likeminded” apart from being among the age group that rents apartments, but it’s worth asking: Do we need to be surrounded by “likeminded” individuals? Or are “nearby” individuals enough?
Or maybe, as I suspect, are they even better?
The group on “Friends” certainly weren’t likeminded. Each of the characters were drastically different—there’s the artist, the eccentric masseuse, the actor. This is not a group of Ross’s paleontology friends or Rachel’s fashion friends. Phoebe isn’t palling around with a community of turquoise-wearing eccentrics. They are friends of proximity: a brother or sister, a high school friend, a college roommate.
And maybe un-likeminded friends are the better thing to cultivate. If Ross only hung around with academics, might that group have become elitist and insular? If Phoebe had gone to Burning Man every year with her beatnik friends, might her eccentricities have been sharpened to a point, no longer the kind of person who would hang out with a more materialistic Rachel or a corporate Chandler?
Lindsay thinks it’s a detriment that we are splitting off into “likeminded” communities when we should be engaging with one another. “Civic participation, discord, and discourse inside of a country is entirely based on how well people know their neighbors and how deeply people are involved in their local organizations.,” he says. “As a culture, we have heavily amplified this narrative of hyper-individualism.”
He’s right. In a 2020 update to his famed book Bowling Alone, Robert D Putnam documents our decline in civic and organizational involvement since 1950. Since then social trust has deteriorated, close personal ties with others have declined, and “the average size of Americans’ core discussion networks contracted by about one-third after 1985.” People have much smaller networks outside of their families than they used to, and even smaller networks within their families.
We went from getting married at 20, having kids at 25, going to church on Sundays, celebrating Independence Day in the cul-de-sac, baking pie for new neighbors, and joining neighborhood rotary clubs and bowling leagues to something much more fragmented. We moved away from the suburbs, we stopped attending church and joining local organizations, we took different jobs in different cities and had kids at different times. Families contracted into themselves, spending time with one another rather than as part of a larger group.
The advent of the internet only continued the divide we were already creating, reinforcing the things we liked and de-emphasizing things we didn’t. While Putnam sees a lot of benefits to social media, the detriments became social and political polarization. Our algorithms separated us into “likeminded” groups—kicking people off Facebook and Twitter only sent them to Truth Social, further alienating us from understanding one another. When we secede to our separate groups, we sharpen those qualities and become antagonistic of those who are not.
We separate ourselves into “us” and “them.”
But the world we are creating online should not be replicated offline. Building a world of Network States, grouped according to interest, would only recreate the tribalism we have worked so hard to overcome. “In the last 100 years, our world has gone through transformative progress on human rights,” Shi says. “The result of these events created rules and regulations for businesses, property owners, and government officials to make sure they operate within the bounds of reason.
“Once you opt-out from the ‘default world’ and join any form of alternative living, you also opt-out from the guardrails of equality that is provided by the ‘default world.’ Events like this happen all the time, from cult-alike communes like Wild Wild Country to commonly apparent emerging abusive leadership structures in Utopian communities. Opting out from the guardrails naturally provides opportunities for failing.”
Societal segregation is the problem, not the solution.
“It’s the dance of inclusivity/exclusivity,” Kruger says. “We're trying to build a microcosm of the larger world, but if we box people out at this scale, it is just going to continue at higher and higher scales.”
Rather than build new communities for the likeminded, we should engage our existing ones. As Kruger says: “You can either bring the friends that you already have into your neighborhood, or you can make friends in your neighborhood, and they're already there.”
And maybe that second option is vital, not to mention the way we’ve been doing things for eternity.
When Kruger decided to cultivate community in her apartment complex in Boulder, Colorado, she met several likeminded people, but several weren’t. That’s kind of the point. “There are some people in my building that I absolutely adore and I want in my life for the rest of my life,” she says. “There are also people in my building that I'm kind of like, you're lovely. I'm glad you exist. I don't want to spend every waking hour with you.”
That was true on “Friends” too. Mr. Heckles was the downstairs neighbor who always pounded on the ceiling with his broom when they were too noisy and showed up at their door in a robe to reprimand them, but he was so much a part of their life that the friends mourn him when he passes. From the window in their apartment, Monica and Rachel can see “Ugly Naked Guy,” the source for so many of their jokes, but also an elaborate attempt to poke him with taped-together chopsticks when they are worried he has died. Even the landlord plays a role in the gang’s antics—Joey teaches him how to dance for a date.
Ancillary characters play a big role in our lives. When we moved from our apartment to a neighborhood, we met many of them. There’s the family with matching bowl cuts who run together in jeans every night after dinner. There is the guy who walks his dog and tells us inappropriate jokes as we eat dinner on our porch. There is the guy chain-smoking cigarettes while his dogs bark at every passing car. There is the mysterious house where no one ever comes in and no one ever comes out.
I would be sad to miss out on all of these people because I lived in a “likeminded community.”
And I think we would become less tolerant of the un-likeminded if we did.
Wouldn’t it be better if we lived next door to the people we disagreed with? And were able to be friends with them? In my neighborhood, many people have very different ideas about the world than I do, and yet we still get along. We are friends. It softens our edges and allows us to be more understanding of those with differing opinions.
To get there, Rose says we should return to “neighborhoods.” Supernuclear’s Phil Levin advocates for “mini-hoods.” These aren’t new concepts, they are entirely old ones. In fact, they are what we had in the 1950s when America was at its social peak. “The story of social capital in America during the past 125 years turns out to look like an inverted U-Curve,” Putnam says. “Starting the century at nearly the same low we experience today, growing until roughly the mid-1960s, then declining again.”
Maybe then, we shouldn’t be trying to create network states of likeminded people, but rather recreating the 1950s cul-de-sac where we got to know the people around us.
“It is not either/or it is yes/and,” Lindsay says. “It’s: Make friends with the neighbors and let's have a couple of best homies over here… That makes all of the difference.”
It takes cultivation, and a lot of the recommendations Rose, Kruger, and Lindsay give me feel like common sense: Host a weekly dinner party or monthly game night and invite everyone in your building or neighborhood to join. Start a text message thread or WhatsApp group for everyone on your street. When one of Rose’s friends moved into a Brooklyn skyscraper, she did just that, inviting everyone she met in the elevator or mailroom to join her WhatsApp chat. “Now there are 400 people or something and she has a number of best friends who live in the building who she met because she had this Whatsapp group where people organize yoga and book clubs and all sorts of stuff,” Rose says.
When we moved to our new street, we hosted a block party that first year. We went door-to-door asking every neighbor if they wanted to attend, and they did. Mormon neighbors in their 70s smoked brisket while 20-year-old neighbors played in a band. A retired democratic district attorney had drinks with a republican city council member, and childfree couples made cotton candy for families as their kids played in the street. It’s how we all met, and now we are constantly hanging out on one another’s porches whenever the weather is nice.
This kind of local community building isn’t rocket science. It’s a formula we’ve been following for hundreds of years. When Emily Post published her book Etiquette in 1922, it was the standard. “If strangers move into a neighborhood in a small town or in the country, or at a watering place, it is not only unfriendly but uncivil for their neighbors not to call on them,” she wrote. “Two ladies of equal age or position may either one say, ‘I wish you would come to see me.’ To which the other replies ‘I will with pleasure.’”
When I ask why this isn’t common knowledge today, Rose wonders if we have fallen out of the habit. “I think there’s this dominant thing that people don’t see social skills as skills,” she says. “There’s this sense that if their social lives don’t just happen for them they must be weird or something. People feel permission to do really well at their careers, but people just don’t take charge of their social lives the same way. Then when you tell them, ‘hey you can do this thing,’ they do it.”
We don’t have to go to church or join bowling leagues, but we shouldn’t secede to a commune either. We can create cycling clubs and host poker nights and plan get-togethers on Sundays. We can cultivate the “Friends” ideal in our neighborhoods with the people who are already living close to us. We can meet likeminded friends but also become friends with un-likeminded people. When we do, we create something that’s so much better than a likeminded community. We create a united one.
“When shit goes down nobody gives a fuck about Trump or what their abortion policies are,” Lindsay says. “It's like, ‘Hey, are you good? Do you have a family meal that you want to cook up because we have some extra fuel over here and we have some rice.’”
We can create that no matter where we are. And no matter what we want for our lives.
Rose and her husband eventually decided to move away from Fractal. The community attracted people who were typically younger, on sabbatical from work, and were into wearing “crazy clothes.” It was fun, for a time, but she said it was kind of like being at a festival all the time. Rose and her husband wanted to have children and didn’t want to keep bumping into their friends every time they walked out their front door.
“As soon as I got pregnant, we were like, ‘okay, actually, this isn’t where we want to raise our kids. So let’s experiment with something else and see how that works.’ So we moved to Fort Greene, which is a really amazing neighborhood, and we did something really similar to Fractal but instead of being in the same apartment building, we helped our friends start a number of co-living houses, and then we also helped our friends move into studios nearby. Now we do run into people on the street, but much less. But also it's still really easy to coordinate because my friends all live within a 10-minute walk. You get the best of both worlds.”
They call their new neighborhood Fractal Two.
Listening to her story, I couldn’t help but think about the final episode of “Friends,” where Chandler and Monica decide to move out of their iconic rent-stabilized apartment to raise their kids. It’s a bittersweet ending, no more Joey stealing lasagna from the fridge, no more Rachel rushing in with a dating emergency. They each have different desires for their lives and that means living them out in different ways. But that doesn’t mean they can’t still be intentional about being together.
Even as they are teary-eyed, leaving that apartment and that time of their lives, the implication is clear:
I’ll see you at coffee tomorrow.
Thanks for thinking about the future of community with me, and for supporting my work! As always, this piece contains my thoughts in process and I welcome further discussion in the comments. Treat this space as our literary salon on the topic!
I’ll be on vacation for the next two weeks—my husband and I are currently traveling in Portugal!—but I will be back with some fun stories when I return in mid-June.
As always, thank you for reading,
Elle Griffin
P.S. If you enjoyed this post please share it! That’s how I meet new people and earn a living as a writer.
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Thank you so much for sharing your story Jasmine, this is very beautiful! There are a lot of ways to live in community, and it's worth examining all of the ways that make sense to do that!
A bit like the spice girls! Something about them not being in matching outfits with matching personalities gave them their mass appeal maybe...
I've been thinking a lot about Dunbar's number, the concept that we can only really know and feel comfortable around 150 people. I've lived in big cities (Los Angeles) and in small towns, specifically a town of only two commercial streets and a dozen locals and expats from around the world in Costa Rica (Playa del Coco). In LA I had my tribe of poets and writers who I made time to see. They were a small little estuary in a big ocean of anonymous faces. But in Coco the whole town felt familiar. We didn't all have the same political background, or nationality, but we were all fairly cordial because we knew we were going to see each other over and over. I found myself feeling so much more relaxed about social situations there, but at the same time I also felt limited. I had very few writer friends in the community and I missed having my writer tribe, but at the same time, I learned way more about the views of people I didn't agree with, and I learned to be friends with those people. Then I would connect with my old LA writer friends via Zoom, so I kind of had the best of both worlds.
The best of both worlds makes sense to me. I have also craved more likeminded friends throughout my life! But that doesn't mean I want to run off and join a commune with them. I can't imagine that going well 😆
A commune of like minded friends, that is a sitcom I want to see!
Thanks for sharing about your block party. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and reading about your experience renews my desire to do it!
Oh you should! Highly recommend....
Elle,
Have a great trip. One of the criticisms of Friends was that the lifestyle they lived was unrealistic, i.e., beyond their means. I wonder whether there's a correlation between community/isolation and socioeconomic class. I'm not sure if there is.
I actually really loved the episode that addressed this, when Phoebe, Joey, and Rachel confront Ross, Chandler, and Monica for not understanding that they aren't as well off financially. Any TV show is unrealistic, sure, but I think we overlap more than we think. In New York, there are absolutely wealthy people living next to not as wealthy people. Even on my own street, where all of our houses look the same, some purchased their home $30,000 (30 years ago), some purchased for $80,000 (10 years ago), some purchased for $400,000 (5 years ago), and some purchased for $900,00 (in the last two years), and some are renting for $1000/month. There are college students renting and sharing a large house, and wealthy tech executives purchasing and renovating homes. We all still hang out with each other and that doesn't even feel like a thing.
My experience in NYC is not the same as your experience where you live. We've always lived in co-op apartments where you have to pass a completely irrational financial test to be accepted by the co-op board. The more expensive the apartments in the building the higher the financial bar. And it's also my experience that your neighbors rarely turn into your friends. Instead, you tend to make new friends through your children's school, which is another sorting mechanism.
It may be that wealthier urban neighborhoods are the antithesis of communities that develop among neighbors. There are many other ways to develop community, of course, but you have to be intentional about it.
My daughter (36) also has an encyclopedic knowledge of Friends and I'm sure would know the episode you're referencing. I liked the show as well!
Hmmmm yeah, that sounds very different. It may be true that neighbors rarely turn into friends, but they could (and they have historically, as well as during America’s social peak). It takes cultivation for sure, and always has, but I would imagine you wouldn’t have a lot of financial diversity in your specific neighborhood. Have you (or your daughters) ever wanted to branch out and find more diverse community?
Substack is one way I've met a more diverse group of people IRL.
I joined a co-working space that’s really helped cultivate a missing community in my life. Sure there’s more of a “like-minded” tone of the group, but mostly it’s geography specific because of the neighborhood it’s located in.
I’ve always said that co-working in-person is the best type of work because you have the energy, accountability, and creativity that comes with human interaction but none of the pressures of a work building. Plus, we’re able to build friendships outside of 9 to 5 much easier.
Yes! This is a great way to cultivate that!
I have found that men who play recreational sports together tend to have much stronger bonds to one another than men who don't sports. I think it relates to our jock childhoods where we spent so much time on teams—and were indeed being purposefuly teammates. My group of basketball friends range in politics and other hobbies but our epicenter is basketball—played, watched, and endlessly debated.
I wonder if men can also build community through creative writing. I recently had a young poet say he felt scared to let anyone in the community know he was a writer because he didn't think the men he knew would understand. Is that still the case, or is it becoming more normalized for men to bond over the arts?
I have writer friends, some very close, but I'm not part of anything that could be defined as a writer community. I think a friendship group comprised only of people who work in the same business might naturally become insular and exhibit the same sort of negative qualities as the intentional communities that Elle points out in her post. But I can also say that my social independence as a writer has sometimes caused problems for me.
Thanks for replying. I think the issue for this friend of mine is more that he feels he cannot be a writer because he doesn't see enough men in his peer group writing. I sent him a list of male writers around his age who openly share their writing (i.e. public authors), but he doesn't know any in his town. He's in no danger of becoming insulated at this point. If anything, he's too insulated by people who look down on the arts and needs a counternarrative to break him out of it... On a similar topic, I once had a young male student who didn't like reading, partially because he had some learning challenges and partially because he told me he hadn't read any stories he could connect with. (He didn't put it that way, but I think that's what he meant). I had him listen to the audio version of "The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" and his mom told me it was the first time in a long time he was excited about school. Just thought I'd share.
Ah, yes, the artistic male who feels like a freak. I understand that. I felt the same way in my youth. And thanks for the kind words about True Diary. I love most when my books appeal to reluctant readers.
Tennis has become a friendship hub for me, both men and women. Doubles, especially, is a very social sport that seems to lead to friendship.
That's great. I imagine pickleball might be creating friendships, as well.
Yes, unless you build a pickle ball court next to your neighbor. An extremely noisy sport.
hahahahah! What if they build a pickleball court and a chicken coop!
I do think that has replaced the bowling leagues to some extent. There is a big roller skating community by me, and sand volleyball courts with leagues! I think that's a great place to meet and have local community!
If I had enough friends to make it work, it would be cool.
I've been missing the sense of community I once had.
While I certainly agree that off-the-grid communes aren't the solution for everyone and that intentional communities can have problems, I also think these communities can work out and have a lot of value beyond people living next to each other. Intentional utopian communities have long been met with criticism that they don't "work" or are always "cultish" as ways to discourage people from trying any sort of alternative living arrangements. There are plenty of examples of these communities that have worked out and I highly recommend the book, Everyday Utopia for an in-depth discussion on this topic.
"Likeminded" and "diversity" can mean many different things. I certainly agree that we don't need more polarization and that many people have lost the ability to deal with others with different viewpoints. With inequality the way it is, then the people that can afford to live next to you are going to be very similar in demographics. Making friends with your neighbors is not necessarily going to make for a more diverse community than creating one where everyone has a specific goal in mind.
Also, many people value a likeminded community on certain aspects because they have a stigmatized or marginalized identity/status.
Living off-the-grid does not mean rejecting all of modernity. Very few intentional communities are actually off-the-grid. Almost all off-grid ones have indoor plumbing, fridges, and some of type of heating/cooling system. It is not a turn to the past and it's certainly not feudalism because there are no peasants working to maintain the land.
For me, I have been living in a small intentional community (co-own a house with 5 people) and am interested in something more involved in the future. I want this because I want to live a more nature-focused life. I also want to have a lower cost of living so that my community and myself don't have to work fulltime jobs that we hate. I want the freedom to be choosy and the ability to provide that opportunity to others. I still plan to be engaged with the outside world and have the hope that if more people do something like this then people will be able to be more choosy with everything.
If I can help others to not live paycheck to paycheck or to quit a job that has poor benefits, all while living a more sustainable lifestyle, then its worth it. If enough people do this then companies and structures will have to change to deal with a workforce that can opt out.
You are very right, there are a lot of ways these communities can still remain part of modern society, and be very beneficial to participants. There is certainly no "one size fits all" model when it comes to community, and I think we can all benefit from being part of the one that is right for us. I just wanted to present an alternative to those intentional communities being "the future" when there are others worth considering!
Very interesting article. I read with interest a while ago about those people living in communes with friends or like-minded people. I dream of living close to my friends, but more like a fractal version where we still have our independent homes very close to each other. Back in Malaysia, even if we weren’t within walking distance, we still met up spontaneously all the time. I think that’s also due to our culture. It was okay to just show up at a friend’s house unannounced, or with a WhatsApp message saying, “I’m coming in 10 minutes.” I miss those times, but now my good friends and I are scattered all around the globe, making “inviting friends to come live nearby” almost impossible. Your point about making a community where we are got me thinking, but I still feel unsure about how to navigate that here in Germany, even though I’ve been here for eight years now; being an introvert doesn’t help, I guess.
You bring up a really good point. I am also an introvert with friends scattered across the globe. And I travel a lot so I am not always home to engage with community there, and thus a lot of the community I hang out with on a daily basis is transient. But even working at a coffee shop, it’s fun to talk to the person next to me who is also working at a coffee shop to see what we’re both doing. And sometimes that leads to plans together later in the day. It requires a moment of being more outgoing for sure, but I can always retreat back to my introversion at the end of the day.
That sounds like fun, talking to our "neighbor of the moment"! Thanks for the inspiration, I'll try to be more outgoing when the opportunity presents itself. I can put on my backpacker hat, cause in my travels, I took effort to connect with many fellow travelers, and like you say at the end of the day or in between days, I also retreat to myself.
Yes! The neighbor of the moment!!!! I love that framing. It does feel much easier traveling doesn’t it? Maybe because everyone else is too. Same concept going to college I think. We are more open to those next to us.
This is so interesting. I heard somewhere the term “like-hearted” community, for exactly the reasons you say. We need our differences, and we to be able to get along. We don’t need to agree on everything. But like anyone who’s been in relationship with a narcissist knows, if we aren’t starting from a foundation of mutual respect (like-hearted), it can’t go anywhere happy.
As a fantasy writer, I’ve played with ideas of synarchy—all working/contributing for the benefit of all—like the ‘group of sovereigns’ idea, without coersion. One version came out as a village-centric collaborative gift-culture with semi-communal aspects, and a high value on consent. (What? You mean the story tension isn’t from a controlling patriarchy?) (Yes! It’s fantasy! If you’re going to imagine a new world, make it the kind you’d like to live in. We need examples!)
May there be many more ‘real world’ experimentations with creating healthy community!
Oh I am so with you on imagining better futures in fiction. We definitely need examples! I'm currently writing a utopian novel with a similar goal. That's how we will get to those real world examples...
This feels like a razor's edge allegory, Elle. While I agree that our collective social contact can't be limited to exclusively like-minded folk, the idea of tolerance toward 'un-likeminded' folk borders on centrism. It's easy enough to assert that when it's strictly limited to playing guitar on the roof or having apple pie bake-offs. But when stupid old sociopolitical constructs come raging in, and they always do, tolerating centrist views toward the extremes of non-likeminded folk....like racists, or really anyone whose beliefs marginalize populations lower on the class ladder...then that doesn't work. I don't think retreating to communes is the right idea, but rather...the perceptions of those who embrace the 'all is one' perspective, ought to be the ones guiding society toward a unified whole. The reason the world is spiraling the drain is because too few people want to become like-minded...in that spiritual evolutionary way required for advanced species to survive their adolescence of intelligence. We can retain our individuality without shoving someone else off the ladder while we do it.
I'm certainly not suggesting we should all just be friends with racists. But I do wonder whether racists are created by being part of an insular "likeminded" community of people who reinforce those beliefs. There's a reason we say that people become "radicalized" by those around them. Maybe they wouldn't be if they were exposed to more unlikeminded people (including the people they say they hate)?
Sure, of course racists perpetuate themselves and reinforce fledgling racism by joining 'likeminded' groups who've already established their long term lenses for life. Through the arms of pop culture itself, most of those insular fringes are already exposed to 'unlikeminded' folk - read: less racist folks - through their entertainments, usually. Most racists cherry pick when to be racist and when it's okay to overlook their supposed hard stance of white tribalism, particularly when it comes to consumerism and recreation time. I hear ya, I do. I just don't know if repeated exposure to the encouragement of emotional maturity has worked for Americans so far. A more direct approach would seem to be necessary to elicit true, sweeping change. I am of course uncertain what that new approach might entail, only that what we've tried so far hasn't worked to the degree it needs to.
It's hard to imagine being able to invite friends to rent in your same building or nearby, when apartments are so hard to find and competitive to get, here in Seattle and from what I've heard, in NYC. I wonder if the Fractal founders had bought their building and emptied it out, or how they did it? Sounds very nice.
From what it sounds like, their building was full when they moved in, but gradually their friends wanted to live closer and many tried to rent in the same building when various units became available. I think it helped that that particular building had a lot of 2-3 bedroom apartments (which participants shared) and had lower rent.
So cool that they had that opportunity and took advantage of it!
Totally!
It takes a village — not a bunch of only like-mined people who vote in a series of rules for every aspect of their lives, but a village of people who have private lives AND shared aspects of their lives, and are FRiENDS with each other. For sure, variety is the spice of it, too….
Yes!
The planned nature of modern life makes spontaneity so precious, a spontaneity stemming from a nearby community. I have just started to rent together with a friend, and it’s almost the best thing that has happened to me this year. It reminds me of the novel My Friends by Hisham Matar (have a book review on my substack) - the protagonist Khaled had his friend Hosam move into the apartment below his, and felt for the first time that his life in London was part of a family, “where a drink, a meal, a coffee, a walk” could be shared spontaneously. Despite the anxiety about living so close to someone he knew and being witnessed at home, the excitement of having a friend right downstairs prevailed, an excitement of childhood.
Sometimes we are too afraid of being witnessed, being entangled in someone else’s life, but friendship is actually a flexible space, unlike familial bonds and obligations. We only need to learn the skills to navigate this space, without assuming that social lives will naturally happen. Armed with these skills, we will be able to see our other, more defined relationships in better clarity.
I love this, thank you for sharing your experience!
Thanks for the read! Makes me very grateful for the Commons in Hayes Valley and the community it's generated in SF :)
I had a chance to visit last time I was in SF. Such a cool zone!
A lot of comments here are saying that we shouldn't make a point of grouping with like-minded individuals and should instead "seek diversity". NOPE. THIS IS THE DOWNFALL.
We are not talking about ethnicity or "background" or music tastes here. We need to focus on finding people who also know what is right and wrong. Who agree about what those things mean and how important they are. It also helps to get with people who are interested in living in similar ways: more simple agrarian? More tech-infused? Business-minded and seeking investors for projects? Etc etc.
You will NEVER succeed while including people who say things like "There's no such thing as objective morality". Include them, and set yourself up to be screwed over.
"Communes aren't the answer"...? They can be. Nothing wrong with a commune, and smearing that arrangement is a suspect position. Communes work best on a completely free market (so, in capitalism), ie, without government involvement/existence.
"'Andrew and I were like ‘We will never do democracy again—we don't believe in it.’ We believe in a ‘many sovereigns’ kind of thing. Basically, it's just this idea of living near your friends.'”
Democracy is mob rule (like in majority voting), which necessarily marginalizes the minority via violence/the threat of violence. So they are right to eschew it.
Just trying to "get the logistics/arrangement right" is not the answer - and of course, some arrangements are simply too cramped or resource-scarce to work no matter who is involved. The *only* solution to making it work with others (in any capacity) is finding people who share your values. Can values be evil or good? Absolutely. And those with objectively good values are the only ones who will be able to work together successfully to thrive indefinitely, given a fair amount of space and resource availability.
There's no way to say "let's unite" if you don't all hold the same fundamental understanding of what is true and right, because without that alignment, arguments will break out quickly upon approaching issues or problems.
A critical mass of people coming to the conclusion that right and wrong are objective and based on the "Golden Rule" will be the undoing of the ruling bloodlines. Such a huge decentralized alignment will liberate us from bondage. The rulers know that full well, and have kicked their subjectivist/anti-realism propaganda campaigns into overdrive lately.
This is right in line with where my head's been at lately. My family and I are currently living in Columbus, but we have close friends and family in Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maine, California, Texas, Montana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia. My default is always to move toward a life where we can all be close by each other -- we often joke (or not?) about buying a huge plot of land and building dozens of tiny houses all over the place, so we can all be with each other forever. It sounds like a dream, like exactly what I want. I would only have to deal with the people I already know I want to deal with, and my kids could grow up with all of their best friends nearby, and our families wouldn't be so fragmented. It feels so healing, to imagine it.
But your exhortation to find the community that's nearby (and not necessarily exactly in line with you) is such a beautiful one too, and leads to true community. In our last apartment, we had neighbors whose lives and backgrounds were dramatically different from ours -- but when the shit hit the fan, who do you think we called to help us? (And vice versa.) That life is (maybe, at least sometimes) so much harder and requires so much more *work,* at least for an introvert/loner type. But it makes for a truer, "stickier" community. And, spiritually, there's nothing better than to learn to love the people you don't already love or think you can't love.
I read this post a week or so ago and have been ruminating on it ever since. Thanks for writing!
(And I love your subtitle, by the way!)
I have the very same fantasies about moving close to my sisters, how lovely that would be! I've even had fantasies about moving closer to people that are more like me (is there a community of forward thinking artists somewhere that I'm missing out on???) But when I look back on my best friends in life they were truly friends of convenience and then became more. And many of them aren't like me at all! And how fun that has been! And yes, how much better for society at large!!!! Thanks so much for noticing my little subtitle and for taking the time to comment and engage with this piece. It means the world to me that it stuck with you in someway.
I lead a community/network of practice and feel these are so important for knowledge in niches, it feels it's gone a bit too fractal, but when it comes to do to day living, everything mentioned here is the way.
Also, sometimes you need these disperse communities to find your people. This is how my son's relationships have developed, first online, then exploring meeting together in different locations. In an ideal world you could find your people close by.
Too much sameness is often insulating. It’s important to view community as the entirety of humankind: this way, we safeguard everyone’s rights. Perhaps this should be expanded to include all sentient life?
Humanity has allowed itself all manner of horrors perpetuated against others in the name of perceived separation-religious, lifestyle, party, gender, etc.
Enjoy your travels!!! May they be all you desire them to be🌺
Yes, exactly! Thanks Nicole!
This is one of the best takes on present day community options that I’ve seen. I found my close friends and I would daydream about a perfect commune but wouldn’t want to live in the same state. On the flip side, choosing to commit to an area and start building a community of not necessarily like minded people, but still people who’d take you to the airport and vice versa, has been so so lovely.
My wife and I were huge fans of Friends. We bought CDs and DVDs and then subscribed to Netflix. When our kids got bored of NCIS, we rediscovered Friends for them, and they thoroughly enjoyed it.
Then Chandler died!
We had to stop watching Friends because it reminded us of Mathew Perry's tragic end.
After reading this article, we decided to discuss who we would invite to join our Friends' commune. We ended up with at most five people. None were family—all family members were deeply loved—but we needed to let them stay in the US, Estonia, and Spain. Our commune would be established in the heart of Bombay (a special nook called 7 Gardens), and we wouldn't want anyone to join us for a long time.
This is a far cry from the kind of communities we grew up in, where everyone in the neighborhood celebrated everything together. In a tiny part of the city with more than 2000 families, there were many "Friends" communes with 50 families or more.
I feel that cable TV and short messaging services did us in long before the Internet became ubiquitous.
I love this exercise so much! Your particular nook sounds lovely, and I love that it invites your closest friends to live nearby, but while everyone can still choose their own lives within that. Very cool!
I was also very bummed with Matthew Perry died. Such a tragedy. That show will remain his legacy for sure!
There’s a lot of truth here. The Costa Rican communes I visited were led by American “visionaries” with embedded inequities, loss of connection with the outside world, and social/psychological/financial challenges leaving. Many community creation startups have failed. Intentional = exclusionary and static.
There is value in the unplanned and chaotic. Exposure to diverse views and experiences creates balance and acceptance.
The challenge is lowering barriers to healthy communities rather than inventing a new wheel.
Thank you for you thoughtful piece of nostalgia. It does require effort and a little luck. Today's world needs this more than ever. Substack has been a source of community and the tolerance so far has been great for the opportunities. Kindness is definitely a skill that can be learned. 😊
Great article, Elle! Thank you for sharing. My husband and I purchased a home in a 55+ community last year. It is very socially active, providing many opportunities to meet and mingle with our neighbors. The residents organize the activities on a volunteer basis, with a chairperson heading an event or club. We are all from very different backgrounds and circumstances, yet we come together to maintain a modest clubhouse in the community. Like anywhere, there are neighbors we engage with often and those we wave to from a distance. One of our favorite activities is meeting at a local biker bar on Wednesday evenings. We arrive for an early dinner and pull together several tables to accommodate sometimes 25 or more of us!
Yeah. Everyone seems afraid of going into these typse of communities, but I'm looking forward to building bonds with people my own age again, like we did in college. Thanks for sharing this : )
Why do college students and 55+ communities get to have all the fun?! 🤩 Seriously sounds amazing! And exactly how we should be spending time with one another.
I'm so glad you've taken on this subject. I've been obsessed with community all my life. I don't think there are any answers as to what's best and what's no good--but at least you bring to the forefront this idea of Having Each Other. Capitalism's dominant narrative is that we don't need each other--all we need is a great job, even if it's on the other side of the world. But you're right. We do need each other. As the climate worsens, we'll need each other more & more. The top 1 percent won't need others, because they'll have the dough to feed & shelter themselves. But the rest of us will need to cooperate & lean.
Yeah. This is definitely something I learned from my time in Costa Rica. The whole country is built on this principle of sharing and caring for one another and it truly is easier to be happy there.
Thanks for sharing this nostalgic and insightful piece! 🏡 It's inspiring to rethink how we build communities today. And yea, I loved the first episode of too however lost interest with Ross's treatment of Racheal
Where do these fractal one or two new communities house their elderly or vulnerable dependents ? What happens when one of them loses their livelihood through illness or misfortune ? Who deals with any criminal actions that occur one against another within the group? The truth is that all societies are an interdependent grid that have developed a consensus to best protect the common good over many generations. That many of us want to ‘opt out’ of flags a breakdown in that society that can not be run away from for very long and is not even an option for anyone socially excluded from a shrinking higher educated middle class and increasing economic iniquities.
That's just it, it shouldn't be up to the individual community to come up with a way to protect those vulnerable dependents. This is why we have the larger one that (ideally) does. You are so right that our societies are an interdependent grid!