Modern comforts are great. It's absolutely wonderful that we live in a world of abundance. We can have almost any food we want from anywhere on the planet, and it'll taste delicious. In 1918 the US had to consider how many sets of sailors outfits to give to each sailor, because 2 sets of uniforms cost the same as 6 months of their salary. Now six months of income even for the lowest incomes in the US buys more clothes than they could possibly wear, and instead we have to worry about fast fashion, about having too many clothes, about the waste of the sheer amount of clothes that anyone can easily buy. I love this abundance, but it's come at a cost.

Historically you needed your community, if you had a health issue there's someone in your community (typically religious community) who you go to first, if you're moving you ask your community for help, if you're having a baby you ask your community for food and assistance. Now, we live in a world where so many people can easily get a doctor on the phone by paying money, get someone to move their stuff by paying money, get food delivered to their door by paying money. Because we live in abundance we no longer need eachother as much. This combined with the decline of religion which historically provided a curcial community third space has led us to a world where community is no longer the default, it's something that takes work. Unfortunately we aren't teaching people how to put in this work, and if anythign there are immense economic force that don't want people to have physical community. We are so abundant that large corporations can have entire departments dedicated to figuring out the best way to entice someone to put in that delivery order, or to pay for their tax help. On the other hand there are not in fact large well resourced corporate departments tryign to figure out how to help people find eachother, even dating apps are generally optimized for time spent on the app and dollar spend over making pairings.

All of this is to say I don't think community is a trivial problem, it takes work and consideration. So I hope you enjoy reading about my what, why, and how of community in this second quarter of the twenty first century we all find ourselves in.

Neighbors

There's the concept of how many friends you can maintain. And how many at a given level, I can certainly maintain way more acquantainces who I occasionally see at parties than deep connections. I generally think that human capacity for love is relatively unbounded, but human capactiy for time spent is extremly finite. S, I certainly believe that if I want to live the fullest life it's important to purposely set up my life to minimze activation energy and trnasition costs. For the same reason I want my gym to be really close to me, I want my friends to be really close to me. The best level of physical proximity is in the same house, this means that not only is the activtaion energy to spend time with eachother is effectively zero, but also that I get it by accident. I naturally see the people in my house without having to expend any time or mental energy to make a plan, it simply happens. Now, not everyone I like can fit in a single home (and not everyone I like is someone I would want to live with). The next level of ease of activation energy is neighbors (this is somethign I am currently working on, both imporving relationships with existing neighbors and enticing more people to live closer). When it comes to neighbors next door or sharing a backyard is obviously best, the same block is great, and a couple block walk is good. As soon as goign to eachothers house moves from being bucketed as oh I'll just pop by to oh this is a trip I have to make/plan for is the moment I would stop considering us neighbors. This is a genuinely difficult problem since getting many houses that are close together is quite hard. Fractal did a great job of this by turning a single large apartment building into the neighborhood community, making it maximally easy to add more people to this neighborhood community as new apartments became available. Radish did a great job of getting a couple adjacent properties in mostly one go and build ADUs where available. But the vast majority of people who live really close to you will probably start out as strangers and only have the chance to become friends and community if you put in concerted effort. Real effort: whether that be stoop parties, inviting them to events, going out of your way to chat when possible, it's real work and sure it's kinda unfair that we have to do it but also we want community! My experience has certainly been once people see what they were missing out on by living a more seperated life they will be excited to put in work too, they've just got to see what could be. Not to mention, the selection effect of people who want to be neighborly is pretty great.

Kids

I think kids should be raised by communities. There are so many economies of scale when it comes to kids. Taking care of 6 kids is no where near 3x the effort of taking care of 2 kids. Many kids want to spend time with other kids! My current (and it has changed so I can't promise in a year it won't be different) optimal is something like 6-10 adults raising something like 6-12 kids. You've got enough adults that people can pick up the slack, someone can go on a vaction and have no worries about their kids being fully taken care of and in good hands. You've got enough kids that they frequently want to spend time with eachother easing the burden on the adults meaning that realisticalyl you only need 1 or 2 adults keeping track of all of the kids at the same time. You're still small enough that mostof the subsets of groups of adults can have real relationships and genuine connection and care for eachother. You've got enough scale that 1 or 2 people can cook a very large batch dinner to feed the entire house, but it's not so many humans as to make cooking herculean (I regularly cooked for 30 people every other week for dinner parties, this is more like cooking for 12-22 people once a week).

And all of this also fully ignores the benefits for the happiness of the child! The kid can learn from many perspectives and be independent/exert agency at an earlier age with plenty of options of who to play with. The countries with the happiest kids on the planet are generalyl high GDP countries that are structurally set up to give kids independence sooner (ie they can walk or bike to things they choose). A large community both gives kids more independence and decision makign within the community sooner but also the higher number of adults means more friends of the adults with kids of their own for the kids to be with.

For a historical perspective this is slightly smaller that the typical hunter gatherer tribe which would have around 10-20 kids with 15-25 adults. Median agrarian societies typical had 10-20 people that would live under a single roof, but frequently children were somewhat communally rasied by the village as a whole which is more like a 50-400 person network. Luckily we live in a world of abundance where we don't have to work backbreaking full days of labor just to barely feed our families and can for example convert relatively small amounts of money into life saving drugs (ie antibiotics). So having a slightly smaller family unit doesn't carry the same risk as it used to.

Cooperation Over Competition

I believe our culture overweights competition and underweights cooperation.

Yes, markets work through competition and I certainly think competing to make the best possible thing has been extremely good for humanity. But, when it comes to community I think we have gone too far. I think this individualistic approach to the world where it can feel like there are no support networks and everyone is out to get you is caustic to us flourishing. Because everything is indivualistic, because most things can be gotten by spending money, we have taught ourselves to not do things that are positive sum for the community but slightly negative for the individual doing it. This is a classic place where competition/captilism struggles is dealing with disinsentivising negative externalities (we are quite bad at taxing polution or taxing catastrophic risk, whether that be from an unfathomably smart AI that doesn't care about humans or the creation of deadly viruses) and incentivising positive externalities (we are terrible at incentivising beautiful buildign exteriors that will be viewed by millions of people per year but the people paying for the building mostly only care about the interior which is what they will be looking at every day). We have mostly lost practice of the muscle of doing something that will be very good for others but slightly bad for yourself. Communities are to some extent all about aggregating doing things that are good for others. Hosting is hard but is great for youir community, organizing an event is hard but great for your community, inviting the strangers who live next door to you over is scary but great in expectation for everyone, and offering to help clean up someone else's event is annoying but leads to more total get togethers. I am not saying you should start doing this a bunch for strangers since that can feel extremely hopeless, I am saying if you start doing this for the people aroudn you, the people who you want to get closer to you might just find that after enough time it will start comign back to you. The only way to move to a prosocial equilibrium is to start doign it, the second thing you should do is talk about it. I make it extremely clear to people i care about why I do prosocial things, that they should do them too, and I am upfront about how they have also been individually (or not) good for me. But this is really just the generic life advice of "communicate".

Not to mention, I find that people are more able and excited to dive into the competitive capitalistic world we live in to create somethign great when they have the support of people around them. People who care about you and a safety net make risk taking easier.

Local vs. Global

Yes there are terrbile things happening in the world. Our brains were not designed to hear about (let alone see) terrible things every day. And to the extent that you can help in a way that feels good you should, whether that be money towards causes or your time. I however think that spending lots of time catastrophizing about something you aren't doing anythign about is a bad way to live. Doing things on a local scale to improve the lives of the people around you is tractable, you can see the results, and it is (at least in my experience) energizing! Instead of worrying about things you can't do anything about, think about things you can impact and then go do it. The more people you care about the more fun opportunities there will be to do things that improve the lives of people you care about in ways that are fun and fulfilling for yousrself. Obviously community is what I am specificalyl advocating for in this section, but you could also engage with your local government, or go to local organizing, etc.