Fragmentation vs wholeness, alone vs community

[chelidon]

I'm attaching a mailing list post with some good points about how the choices we make impact our ability to live in ways which are truly sustainable, as opposed to following our cultural norm of being merely self-sufficient, in an ultimately illusory way.

This ties for me into a delightfully meaty conversation I was having with yezida earlier in the day, one part of which was about the accelerating fragmentation of life in our culture, as a part of our pursuit of "individualism" and "freedom" -- we went from living in villages and clans to extended families, from extended families to nuclear families, from nuclear families to individuals who rarely see the rest of their families...and now, even further. Each person, far from living as an entire, integrated person, becomes more and more fragmented, showing different small facets of themselves at each turn, becoming more and more divided and internally chaotic, masks piling on masks, with a weaker and weaker central holistic "I," a looser and weaker integration among the parts. It's no surprise people feel isolated, fragmented, search for external sources of meaning, overarching frameworks to provide some coherence to their lives. The search for meaning is nothing new, but the degree of dis-integration is rising, faster every year. Our frenetic, relentlessly accelerating culture is turning us, a bit at a time into dissociative psychotics.

One possible silver lining to the coming Peak Oil-related changes is that the amount of energy available and affordable to each individual will reverse the modern trend and become less with each passing year. With less cheap power accessible to individuals, we will be forced to again become more interdependent, or perish. People will clump into close-knit extended families, tribes, clans and communities, because they will have to. Those who cannot, or will not, are going to find it harder and harder to get by -- that's nothing to do with morals or theories, it's just the energy dynamics of it. No wo/man is an island. In our corner of the industrialized world, we've been able to fool ourselves that we are, but that illusion is going to start to get threadbare pretty darn soon.

On 1/5/2006 at 4:38 PM sharondownonthefarm wrote:

>Presumably I'm not the only person on this list whose personal
>preparations run up against a perpetual limitation of funds and
>time. Learning to find ways to get as much benefit out of our
>limited income and free time is one of my major projects.
>
>Thinking about the ways we (and other people in the American
>economy) use their resources has led me to think it might be worth
>pointing out to people how often what they have goes outwards, to
>feed the economy, rather than inwards, to benefit themselves, their
>families, their communities. To me, ensuring that my expenditures
>not only produce the optimal result for me, but also benefit the
>economies (household, communal, etc...) that I most want to serve
>seems like the basic goal of any human centered economics.
>
>Consider the contemporary model of family (btw, can we just skip
>ahead and assume here that family is whatever you call it - I'm
>going to use a nuclear one as an example, but I'm not making any
>major assumptions, other than that nuclear families of some sort
>constitute a significant majority in the culture). For purposes of
>simplicity, we'll imagine that Mom and Dad have a couple of
>children, and one set of aging parents, but we all know it gets more
>complex than that.
>
>Mom and Dad have a baby. They are comparatively young, and both
>work full time, so they put baby in daycare at 8 weeks, which takes
>up a large percentage of one household income. Meanwhile, Grandma
>and Grandpa have a house that is too big for them, now that Mom and
>her sibling have grown and moved out. They spend too much of their
>time caring for it, while Mom and Dad pay rent and try and save a
>mortgage payment.
>
>Eventually, Grandma and Grandpa decide to sell their house and move
>into a smaller place. They'd like to retire, but can't yet, so they
>go on working. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad are expecting baby #2, and
>they go into tremendous debt to buy a house surprisingly like the
>one that Grandma and Grandpa just sold, but, of course, closer to
>Dad's job (which is regarded as fixed and sacrosanct, even though
>he'll probably be laid off a couple times in the next decade).
>Grandma and Grandpa live to see their grandchildren, but don't spend
>as much time as they'd like with them, since they are still working,
>and it is a long drive to Mom and Dad's place.
>
>A little later on, Grandma and Grandpa retire. They'd like nothing
>better than to devote their money to their children's inheritance
>and their time to their grandchildren, but the kids are in
>school/daycare all day, Grandma and Grandpa can't make the drive too
>often, and they have to live cheaply so they can someday afford
>assisted living. Mom and Dad still work full time, with the kids
>attending school and daycare. They are deeply in debt, because of
>their mortgage and cost of living. They are also exhausted all the
>time, from home care, childcare and two jobs. If they ever have any
>spare income, they spend it on having others cook their meals
>(takeout), clean their house, mow their lawn, entertain them
>(cable), et...
>
>Move on a bit, and Grandpa dies. Grandma sells her house, gives up
>her familiar possessions, and moves into assisted living, which
>gives her the exclusive company of her peers. Her grandkids don't
>visit too often because it isn't very kid friendly. Mom and Dad are
>now constantly torn between the needs of their parents and the needs
>of their children, with neither being able to provide any benefit to
>the other. Just now, the children are teenagers, and begin saving
>money doing pointless labor completely unlike the labor their
>parents and grandparents are paying other people to do.
>
>Finally, grandma dies, her saved money spent on assisted living. Mom
>and Dad can look forward to a decade of frantically working to pay
>for college, until they start the cycle over again...
>
>Sound stupid. Sure. And yet, that's the scenario our culture
>endorses as the norm, in the name of independence. How many of us
>see ourselves in it? Changing it, and keeping our resources in our
>family and community, would both save energy in general, and also
>enable us to transform our lives. Families, biological and other,
>could easily transform the situation into the following.
>
>Mom and Dad have a baby. They move in with Grandma and Grandpa.
>Because they are sharing the house, they only need two full time
>incomes, so it is agreed that Dad and Grandma will work full time,
>and Grandpa will take early retirement. He helps with the
>childcare, and Mom and he do the housework together. They both have
>enough time to pursue other ways of saving money, such as gardening
>and cooking from scratch. Grandchild grows up intimately connected
>to his Grandparents.
>
>As Grandma and Grandpa get older, adaptations are made to the house,
>or another house is purchased for the extended family, but with
>minimal indebtedness, because they have the first house as a stake.
>Once Mom is done being pregnant and breastfeeding, she may go back
>to work part time, so that Grandma too can retire and devote herself
>to home and grandchild, or perhaps they will find a way to live on
>only a single income, with three adults caring for home and children.
>
>As the children grow, they take on domestic work too. If Grandma
>and Grandpa need help getting along, grandchildren can provide it,
>along with their parents. In exchange, grandparents provide help in
>funding education and other needs with their savings, knowing that
>they don't need to prepare for a long life in assisted living - they
>will be cared for by their family.
>
>Very little money goes out in this scenario - far less is earned,
>but total wealth is greater and indebtedness less. Moreover, the
>family is happier (which is not to say that they don't get on each
>other's nerves) and everyone receives more and better care, by
>virtue of it being done by people who love them.
>
>Are there problems with this scenario at times? Sure. Some families
>can't live together. Some arrangements would never work. Sometimes
>outside investment is necessary. But we could do far more to ensure
>that we retain what we earn, and everyone benefits than we do. And
>we can create these scenarios with others than our biological
>family - perhaps if daycare is truly necessary, a neighbor can be
>enriched. Perhaps family conflicts can be resolved. Perhaps if we
>change our patterns of thought, and create new models of the ideal,
>we can have what we need when things get hard.
>
>Those of us preparing for peak oil should probably think hard about
>ways to keep our resources in the right places, so that we can use
>them to create a security and wealth (mostly biological rather than
>monetary) that may last us into an uncertain future.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Sharon in upstate NY

Comments

[marys-daughter.livejournal.com]

This is good. I need to think about some of these concepts.

As most folks know, I live alone in a four bedroom house with an English basement apartment. I am using the apartment for the Reflections classes. One of the reasons I bought this house was to have space for my father to move in. But shortly after I bought the house, my father became extremely ill and subsequently died. I have had renters for the apartment. And my older brother lived with me off and on till he qualified for section 8 housing, then he too died after a long illness. So now it seems as if I have run out of family but I still have plenty of house. I guess part of the issue with me is that I am uncomfortable living with people period. I considered co-housing, but the experience a friend had with it locally did not sound too hospitable.

My niece knows she is welcomed to live with me, but currently she is attending college. Hmmm . . . Members of my Hard K club have always discussed moving together when we were all retired. I am already retired. This past Sunday, I reminded C that she was welcome to live with me, if having a place to live was the only thing keeping her in her job. It wasn't the reason, like most people it was healthcare. We agreed that if by sheer dumb luck that the US got universal healthcare, the next morning she would quit her job and move in with me.

So that is my niece and her future family plus the Hard Ks -- how is that for a family of choice?

Until then, I am enjoying the solitude . . . of hosting a school and a revolution from the same household.

Hah!

K

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Hey, certainly, it takes room to run a revolution!

I don't think there's going to be an end to people living alone, but I do think there's going to be a gradual process of consolidation of people, of housing, of resources. Your space may be classroom space, another person will have group housing, someone else does food prep. One way of looking at it is that we're all going to get poorer, and from one sense (energy access and quantity of material possessions), that's accurate. I prefer to see it, though, as a shift towards increasing interdependence and pooling resources. It's a more efficient use of resources overall, so is good from that perspective, but I don't think most folks will go there unless they have to...which, I suspect, most of us will.

I'm seeing it as a pulling back to a lower energy-state, a lower overall per capita level of resource consumption. Supply and demand...as demand outstrips supply (which it is now beginning to do), price goes up, demand drops back, and overall consumption is constrained.