Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
Like everyone else, I've been real interested in doing a commune-style thing with some friends, kinda off-grid-ish, because "lil tribe in woods" is the ideal, right? And I still want it, but sometimes I wonder if we've been too permanently socially crippled to pull it off. 1/n
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
I would fail as a survivalist. I don't have the knowledge to repair tools, to forage, how to prevent mold, treat wounds, etc. I was formed in a 'civilization' mold, where the most I need to know about my own shit is how to hit the flush lever. Set me into the woods, I'd die. 2/n
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
I wonder how much something like this is going on with cultural tribes. Are our attempts at tribe building doomed to fail because we're trying to come at it through a 'civilization' mold? How much do we not know that we don't know about how to sustain this type of community? 3/n
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Like, did our cultural 'handle-conflict' skills get shaped by a world where you don't live near each other? Are we doing something fundamentally wrong for a lots-of-time-spent-together context? Do we have values like self expression that just don't work out in the "wild"? 4/n
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
The vast majority of commune attempts fail. Group houses have high turnover, and (tho low sample size) I don't know a single 'friend-family' attempt that's lasted more than 5 years. Given how much everybody seems to want a tribe, the high failure rate is a bit weird. 5/n
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
And normie stuff like jobs and housing don't help, but my guess is there's also a ton of default, invisible orientations we have to "how we are supposed to be with others" that are incompatible with long-term tribe success, and we don't have good ways of identifying them. 6/6
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Zac Mitton
@VoltzRoad
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
There are some interesting lessons here from the documentary Wild Country. They found a sweet spot of builders (of all kinds with the credentials) plus legal willing to get the permitting etc. Their failure seemed to be circumstantial, cultural, political, and bad luck.
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