This subject matter is 100 times more complex than everything else in this book combined, but it also has the potential to make the largest, most positive impact. The benefits of living in community are many. Oftentimes, the downsides to living in community are also many. We need to find a way to turn the volume knob up on the benefits and down on the drama.
Let’s start by looking at the benefits and imagine a community where the drama knob is turned way down.1 We have already talked in this book about how living in community can effectively reduce your footprint by as much as 60%. And we’ve also talked about how your living expenses might be cut in half. These benefits are huge! And there’s more.
Imagine what it would be like to share three meals a day with the people you think are some of the coolest people in the whole world. I figure you’d become a ten-times-better person (by your own standards) just because of the awesome people you’d spend all of your time with. It would be like allowing yourself to drift down the river after a lifetime of paddling upstream. Those people you don’t like – they’d be over in some other community with the people they think are some of the coolest people in the whole world.
When I lived by myself, 80% of my diet came from food that could be prepared in under a minute and was primarily a single course. I’m not a good cook. But I like a home-cooked meal made by somebody who knows how to cook. And maybe if I live in a house with twenty other people, some of them will be bonkers about cooking and make really amazing meals for the community sometimes. If cooking were divided evenly between all community members (which it doesn’t have to be), each person would only have to cook once a week. And since they only have to cook once a week, they might put in an extra effort to make that meal extra special. So each person would cook twenty times less often and the food would be twice as good.
Some people may be bonkers about gardening and choose to spend most of their time growing food for the community. Rather than spending money on groceries, the community could instead pay the gardeners in their community, either directly or through reduced rent. Others will love the career they are already in and might dabble in the garden but spend most of their time pursuing their career. That’s the beauty of community. In many ways it can allow you to live an excellent life (fresh food, delicious meals, great company, drastically lower expenses, etc.) while you spend most of your time pursuing what interests you the most.
Another aspect that intrigues me about community living is that because of the much lower cost per person, extra money can be set aside to make the space beautiful. Nicer furniture, nicer appliances, nicer decorations, nicer everything. It would be like living in a piece of art.
I like sharing meals with lots of people. I like to watch movies with others. I like to sometimes play cards/games with others. I like to hear jokes. I like to learn about stuff. I like to share.
And then there is the challenging part: How do I turn the drama knob from a 9.7 down to a 0.5?
The answers won’t fit in this book. In an effort of extreme brevity, here is a short summary of the top three things in my arrogant and obnoxious opinion:
“Obey or Else”
Most people NEED to hear their own opinion from all other people and are frustrated that they don’t have the might to make it “right.”
This can be summarized in three words: “obey or else.”
It is easy to destroy community. It is almost as easy to build community.2
In order to build community, everybody must recognize that all human beings are hardwired with “obey or else” and that this frame of mind is poison to community. The only way to have community is for every member to recognize this and choose to build community, every day, despite this. Just being aware that this is THE poison for community could go a long way toward mitigating the problem. We have to consciously try to keep things together. Let’s not have one person who is having a bad day destroy the entire community.
The Knives are in the Kitchen
My impression is that 90% of the problems in a household with several unrelated adults are rooted in the kitchen. If you come up with a food system that is dependent on people in the house being decent, you will learn the ugly truth: people are human.
I think that when coming up with a food system for community meals, you need a system where the foundation is that people are human. People will, by nature, seek the easiest path to put food in their belly.3 Hunger is a powerful, driving force, and a full belly makes a human rather lazy. It is simply nature. It takes a rare, noble being to be better than this. And even the rare, noble being will not be perfect.
I think that if people are in the regular habit of being good and decent, and they are surrounded by people who are good and decent, they will become even more good and decent. Even generous. Exceptionally noble. But if people start down the path of disrespecting even one person in the community, the whole community may unravel into ugly chaos. And the odds are stacked 200 to 1 for the latter scenario.
There are many different ways to reduce drama in the kitchen. At one house I lived in, we had eleven people living under one roof. There was one woman there who was “queen of the kitchen.” Basically, the policy was “it’s her kitchen” and the rest of us were allowed to use the kitchen as long as we didn’t upset her. And, since this was the expectation, there was much less drama.
Every once in a while, this woman pointed at somebody and said “you’re not doing your share of the dishes, so you’re going to wash everybody’s dishes for two days.” In other communities this could cause a major debate…but in our community it was her kitchen. If she said you weren’t doing your share, then you weren’t doing your share. It wasn’t up for debate. Plus, everyone respected this woman because she was so generous to everyone – so generous that contesting her just didn’t seem like a good idea because finding a better living situation elsewhere was not likely.
Dirty Cup CSI
When I first moved onto my land, we had what I call “the twenty-month party.” In those twenty months, I had hundreds of people stopping by for a stay at my place. Some stayed for a few days and some stayed for a few months. The idea was to move my permaculture projects forward ten times faster than I could have by myself.
Some really neat stuff got done during those twenty months…and there was also a lot of drama. This drama had many facets, but one of the most draining was this: some people will be tidy, and some people will be pigs. Resentments will build and, eventually, resentments will tear the community apart.
We had a simple rule. When you finished drinking out of a cup, you were supposed to wash it immediately and put it away. That way there wouldn’t be 20+ dirty cups in every corner of the house and none clean in the cupboard. This seemed like a simple rule that should be easy enough to follow and didn’t require a huge effort. Apparently not. I would find a dirty cup and then go around trying to figure out who left their cup out so that I could ask them to clean it up. Unfortunately, people often opted to deny that it was their cup…even though there were multiple eyewitnesses that said they saw this person drinking from that cup.
This was happening all the time. Eventually I started calling it “dirty cup CSI.” By the time I would finally nail someone and get them to confess and clean up the cup, they were pissed. I was pissed. Resentment built. In time, I came to see that dirty cup CSI did not fix things. No matter how much I tried to get messy people to be tidy, cups were still being left out.
There are a number of ways to solve this problem.4 I’d guess that in most communities the solution will be this: charge slightly higher rent and hire a housekeeper who will come in once a week and clean up all of the common spaces. That way, the house will remain in an acceptable condition and a major source of drama will be removed. Then we can sit back and enjoy all of the amazing benefits that community has to offer.