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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
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
Replying to
@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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uɐᴉʌ∀ ʇɹǝʌuI
@Invert_Avian
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
“Modern culture” came about roughly on par with cars becoming truly widespread among the masses, so possibly But also the friend circles we wind up with are selected for survival on on-the-grid, and may just not be a set as appropriate for a little friend village or w/e