Recently, I was away from home doing a series of book events on the East Coast of the United States. I came off a flight to a barrage of text messages. Back in Britain my husband was clearly drowning, exhausted from juggling two different school pickups and drop-offs, clashing after-school activities, major professional deadlines and moving furniture for building work. It was too late there to call, but when we did manage to connect the next day, I could immediately tell he was doing better. “The house canceled their plans and helped me,” he told me. “Ramsey lugged the wardrobes upstairs with me, Naomi took over my cooking slot and got the kids to bed, then they helped me prioritize and stop spinning out.”
I let out a long breath. “I love how we live,” I said.
I’m a married 41-year-old woman who lives with housemates by choice. Rather than trying to acquire as much space and privacy as we could as quickly as we could, my husband and I decided to do the opposite. Parenting in our mid-30s, bursting out of our small London flat, we rented and then bought a London home with another couple. It is a 1,900-square-foot terraced house, once four bedrooms, which, through the insertion of some extra walls and the splitting of bathrooms, now houses my husband and our two children, a couple who are soon to have a baby and another woman, plus a cat. We pool most of our money and distribute chores. One housemate is in charge of shopping, another finances and tech; another leads on D.I.Y., and I am the gardener and head of special projects (mainly parties). We eat together, pray together in a makeshift chapel and have 14 people over for dinner every other Monday. Whether you call it an intentional community, a micro-monastery or a commune, our home is unusual.
I don’t think it will remain so. Since I’ve started writing publicly about this way of living, I’ve received a stream of messages from people looking to do the same.
Housing shortages, a rapidly warming planet and the way artificial intelligence is transforming work should make us rethink our visions of the future. If humanity stays on its current trajectory, it’s likely the very rich will continue to hoard desirable space and resources. Even in areas where depopulation means space isn’t an issue, the systems we rely on for survival may begin to buckle. Some days, all this terrifies me, but I hold on to the possibility that this necessity might force us to remember ways of living that are actually more conducive to our flourishing.
If you’re feeling tense reading this, I understand. Those of us living in the industrialized West have outsourced more and more of our needs to the market, and increasingly avoid ties of mutual obligation in favor of frictionless transactions. The result is that we spend less time together, ask for and give help less often and find forming and negotiating social bonds more difficult. Sarah Stein Lubrano, a political theorist, compares the process to muscle wastage. The fallout from this “social atrophy” is a generation of humans who are more lonely, mistrustful and wasteful of our planet’s resources than any that have come before us.
You don’t have to move into a commune to fight off relational decay (though I think more of us should consider it). But there are a few practices my housemates and I have been forced to develop, which you too might find useful, whatever your home looks like.
The first habit is to loosen your grip on your preferences. Living with other people has taught me just how particular each of us is. I have absurdly strong opinions about the design of mugs (chunky, large), décor (maximalist, dark wood, vintage) and how to store cheese — all of which, incidentally, are a gold mine for the market economy, which reframes these preferences as needs and sells shiny, perfectly tailored products to meet them. (This is how we get $300 custom cheese grottos.)
Yet a community house does not seamlessly adapt to my desires. The friction arises over little things: Recently, I used leftover chicken bones to make stock for a slow-roasted tomato soup, leaving none for my housemate Hatty’s bone broth. We were both, briefly, pretty ticked off; I could tell from the way Hatty slammed the fridge door. In a million tiny ways, living with others means having to negotiate their preferences.
It has also forced me to confront just how powerfully our culture discourages compromise. Fighting for your own preferences is often framed as an almost moral act — a way to assert your autonomy or love yourself. After a long day of work and child care and cooking, having to clean up after myself immediately so someone else can use the kitchen can feel like an imposition. But with every passing year I live alongside others, I am increasingly able to call bull on that voice inside my head. I know now that the relentless enhancement of experience does not usually bring inner peace. Avoiding minor annoyances becomes addictive, and it can lead to a life perfectly optimized to our preferences, all alone.
The second principle is related, and is simply to prioritize relationships. Those lucky enough to be able to choose where they live often seek out more space, better public transit, a building or a neighborhood with charm. These things are not irrelevant. A terrible commute really will make you miserable. But proximity to friends and family often goes to the bottom of the list, especially in cities and in the first half of life.
Social scientific research indicates that this is the wrong way around. While more space and more attractive surroundings might boost your happiness temporarily, you rapidly get used to them. Strong relationships, however, are closely correlated with lasting satisfaction and well-being. Many of us know this in theory. But being the one in the friendship group or family to suggest some sacrifices to be properly involved in one another’s lives takes courage. You will come off as intense. You may also find other people longing to live another way.
Our third and final principle is this: Be radically frank. Our house works much better when we express hurt or irritation quickly rather than seething silently. Monks and nuns, from whom we can learn a lot, have always known this. St. Macarius of Optina said, “Do not allow the spark of discord and enmity to smolder. The longer you wait, the more the enemy tries to cause confusion among you.” You don’t have to believe in Satan to know the principle holds. When my housemate Ramsey lopped off an ancient branch of wisteria rather than carefully training it, as I would have done, we needed to talk about it. I hated it. I wanted to withdraw and ignore the tension, to nurse my resentment rather than risk seeming like a scold. But after we talked, we knew each other better and felt closer.
For most of history, humans lived in small, settled communities of people who relied on one another and had to figure these things out. Now that we can put more space between us, we have forgotten how to have healthy conflict, to compromise, to prioritize people over preferences. We would do well to remember those skills, not just for our collective survival but for our flourishing. It will be uncomfortable. It will feel, initially, like straining wasted muscles. The gain, I have learned in my own life, is being part of a group of people who rescue one another when we’re drowning.
Elizabeth Oldfield is a writer based in Britain. She is the author of “Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.”
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