As Millennials struggle to reach traditional milestones of adulthood, we romanticize & misremember a system that operated under rules we would never accept today
This. Every time someone mentions “the village” my brain looks like a multi tentacled eldritch horror.
As someone who grew up in a small town I know perfectly well what “the village” means. It’s “the village” that made me believe all my autistic traits were character flaws. “The village” super glued a mask on so tight it suffocated me and tore my skin to shreds when I finally prised the thing off.
The “village” was also powered by our moms having NO boundaries and driving themselves into the ground to people please the villagers and not get ostracized.
It seems like the villages we do have are more likely to be geographically disconnected, but still prone to exactly the same problems as traditional ones. Look at any successful GoFundMe.
I grew up trans in the 2000s, and boy did we ever have a village. Everyone was forming tight-knit little cliques of traumatized queer teenagers, both online and offline. And by golly, if you wanted the emotional support to self-treat your own PTSD, you were going to listen to every. single. rant. You were going to talk every suicidal kid out of their latest attempt, listen to every bad day (even when the kid was obviously making some of their own problems), keep everyone's secrets, offer help and advice at whatever godforsaken hour of the morning a traumatized kid was having a panic attack, be kind and gentle when someone got triggered and started sending capslocked death threats...
Eventually, just about everyone burned out and dropped out of these groups, and formed new ones not based on mutual trauma. It was the mutual support we needed at the time, but it was too damn much, and the minute someone got into a better place in their life - the minute they didn't need constant emotional support just to get through the day - the unrelenting need of the village drove them away.
It's one thing to talk someone down at 3am when you're up anyway - it's another to be awakened because Zoe is once again having an anxiety attack about her grades, especially when you've had this conversation almost word-for-word a dozen times already, and you need at least six hours of sleep to be functional at work tomorrow, and Zoe keeps sending panicked apologies every time you take more than literally five seconds to respond even though it's 4am now and you are barely keeping your eyes open.
The village saved my life. It also wrecked me. When I grew up, I drifted away just like everyone else.
Lord, indeed. It kinda seems to me that it's like this because we are being slowly ground into the dirt by free market capitalism. Or, being milked like dairy cows on the great big consumer plantation, a whole country run for the primary, if not sole, purpose of making sure people who are already unfathomably wealthy KEEP GETTING WEALTHIER, NO MATTER WHAT IT TAKES. We work our fingers to the bone for the privilege of surviving to get up and do it again tomorrow, while oligarchs swim around in the money we made for them like Scrooge McDuck, only without the vestigial shreds of redeeming human decency.
Since we're not quite at post-scarcity, I reckon, if the economy was optimized for human happiness instead, it would be like 'nobody has to work full time', not 'nobody has to work at all'.
> It kinda seems to me that it's like this because we are being slowly ground into the dirt by free market capitalism.
I had this conversation with my teenage son yesterday. "You absolutely live in a capitalist hellscape. But the grind itself is older than capitalism. If we brush it all away, someone has to hunt the deer and skin the deer and preserve the deer and turn the deer hide into actual clothes and build a shelter and do a hundred other things. And when the deer are gone, you get to find and eat fern roots. Nice things require someone, somewhere to grind. And yes, capitalism is often a terrible way of organizing all this." And so we talked about co-operatives and communism and the ability to walk away from awful organizations and robots and Skynet.
Oh, no doubt. We're still a ways off from being free from toil, completely. We are at a point where we only have to work as hard as we do, while some languish in unemployed poverty, because that's what the oligarchs want.
I have had anazing support networks of diverse women in my life. We help each other when we can, and there are enough of us that someone picks up the slack if we can't. And for me, neurodivergent and struggling, this has been an incredibly positive experience. I help when I can, and it doesn't feel like a burden.
Yes, it's always been other women, but the ones I have been lucky enough to find have been blessed with the ability to just accept each other where we are, with very little judgement.
I wouldn't like the traditional village you describe, but the friendships I have made in my life feel a lot like the most positive aspects of it. I think we can strive to be more communal in new ways.
(Full disclosure - my mom lives with us to help me with the children. I couldn't have managed without her. That's not always sunshine and roses, but no family ever is.)
My own personal experience is that I really like having kids over. We have one kid so I love to have them having friends over to play with, but I'm amazed at how hard I have to convince the parents that I don't expect anything back in return. I want to be the person whose house is open to all the neighbourhood kids.
We have children living either sides of us too and when they were younger I assumed, like I had when I was a kid, that the parents would boot us all out to get on with it. One kid is just obsessed with football and won't and play anything else (ours hates football) and only there half the time anyway as they're from a blended family. The other side never even lets theirs out of the house now. We used to be on good terms and see more of them but suddenly they withdrew. I honestly don't know why and I'm too shy to ask what happened.
I have slowly built up a small network of mums who are happy to be in a little group, and we are getting to the stage where we help each other and have playdates etc. You can build a Village on your own terms.
Insofar as all my anthrolopology courses where worth anything, all of this 100% correct. The village has always been a very mixed blessing, and plenty of people have always run like hell whenever the opportunity arose.
As for the division of labor, well, my mother says her (great?) grandmother always said:
"A man's work is from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done."
So you can put in 12 hours a day of non-stop dirt farming and cow wrangling (which is, you know, a pretty brutal way to spend age 5 to 75). Or you can change babies and sew and knit and wash clothes and cook meals and can food and still also wrangle the damn cows, because cow-wrangling is equal opportunity. And so yeah, "woman's work" was pretty much non-stop, right around the clock. And as any farm kid could tell you, it started really young.
I am *really* really getting a lot of munchy food for thought from these essays involving parenting. Thank you for writing. I'm early into the journey as a AMAB on parental leave and trying to take on responsibility and be a good partner and parent in a way my social training hasn't adequately prepared me for. Would really love to envision that pathway forward that doesn't mean people are sacrificing their lives to provide care - but yeah I'm kinda too exhausted too.
I am *really* really getting a lot of munchy food for thought from these essays involving parenting. Thank you for writing. I'm early into the journey as a AMAB on parental leave and trying to take on responsibility and be a good partner and parent in a way my social training hasn't adequately prepared me for. Would really love to envision that pathway forward that doesn't mean people are sacrificing their lives to provide care - but yeah I'm kinda too exhausted too.
I absolutely wish more people were talking about this, and I appreciate so much that you are.
I think cultures other than very broken, white western/ized cultures do villages *slightly* better that what any of us have experienced, but in so many ways this is just the truth of human nature.
Everywhere. Everywhen.
As is, sadly, the tendency to pine for the Golden Age that never existed, so we're 100% on brand for that too.
I don't know what the functional answer is to moving *forward* and not back - especially not sideways into a fictionalized NeverWasLand - but I know we'll never find it if we're not having the REAL ACTUAL conversation.
Thank you, always, for continuing to have the real conversation.
The problem is capitalism and the theft of the Commons. HR Clinton's version of The Village never existed, except for the rich. There shouldn't be any corporations, and government should be dismantled, then replaced by community assemblies engaging in direct democracy without politicians. We need a new Constitution.
The problem is capitalism and the theft of the Commons. HR Clinton's version of The Village never existed, except for the rich. There shouldn't be any corporations, and government should be dismantled, then replaced by community assemblies engaging in direct democracy without politicians. We need a new Constitution.
This. Every time someone mentions “the village” my brain looks like a multi tentacled eldritch horror.
As someone who grew up in a small town I know perfectly well what “the village” means. It’s “the village” that made me believe all my autistic traits were character flaws. “The village” super glued a mask on so tight it suffocated me and tore my skin to shreds when I finally prised the thing off.
The “village” was also powered by our moms having NO boundaries and driving themselves into the ground to people please the villagers and not get ostracized.
Do we need connection and support systems? Yes.
But “the village” isn’t it.
Thanks for writing this so I didn’t have to. 🔥
It seems like the villages we do have are more likely to be geographically disconnected, but still prone to exactly the same problems as traditional ones. Look at any successful GoFundMe.
I grew up trans in the 2000s, and boy did we ever have a village. Everyone was forming tight-knit little cliques of traumatized queer teenagers, both online and offline. And by golly, if you wanted the emotional support to self-treat your own PTSD, you were going to listen to every. single. rant. You were going to talk every suicidal kid out of their latest attempt, listen to every bad day (even when the kid was obviously making some of their own problems), keep everyone's secrets, offer help and advice at whatever godforsaken hour of the morning a traumatized kid was having a panic attack, be kind and gentle when someone got triggered and started sending capslocked death threats...
Eventually, just about everyone burned out and dropped out of these groups, and formed new ones not based on mutual trauma. It was the mutual support we needed at the time, but it was too damn much, and the minute someone got into a better place in their life - the minute they didn't need constant emotional support just to get through the day - the unrelenting need of the village drove them away.
It's one thing to talk someone down at 3am when you're up anyway - it's another to be awakened because Zoe is once again having an anxiety attack about her grades, especially when you've had this conversation almost word-for-word a dozen times already, and you need at least six hours of sleep to be functional at work tomorrow, and Zoe keeps sending panicked apologies every time you take more than literally five seconds to respond even though it's 4am now and you are barely keeping your eyes open.
The village saved my life. It also wrecked me. When I grew up, I drifted away just like everyone else.
Lord, indeed. It kinda seems to me that it's like this because we are being slowly ground into the dirt by free market capitalism. Or, being milked like dairy cows on the great big consumer plantation, a whole country run for the primary, if not sole, purpose of making sure people who are already unfathomably wealthy KEEP GETTING WEALTHIER, NO MATTER WHAT IT TAKES. We work our fingers to the bone for the privilege of surviving to get up and do it again tomorrow, while oligarchs swim around in the money we made for them like Scrooge McDuck, only without the vestigial shreds of redeeming human decency.
Since we're not quite at post-scarcity, I reckon, if the economy was optimized for human happiness instead, it would be like 'nobody has to work full time', not 'nobody has to work at all'.
> It kinda seems to me that it's like this because we are being slowly ground into the dirt by free market capitalism.
I had this conversation with my teenage son yesterday. "You absolutely live in a capitalist hellscape. But the grind itself is older than capitalism. If we brush it all away, someone has to hunt the deer and skin the deer and preserve the deer and turn the deer hide into actual clothes and build a shelter and do a hundred other things. And when the deer are gone, you get to find and eat fern roots. Nice things require someone, somewhere to grind. And yes, capitalism is often a terrible way of organizing all this." And so we talked about co-operatives and communism and the ability to walk away from awful organizations and robots and Skynet.
We did not solve the world's problems, sadly.
Oh, no doubt. We're still a ways off from being free from toil, completely. We are at a point where we only have to work as hard as we do, while some languish in unemployed poverty, because that's what the oligarchs want.
I have had anazing support networks of diverse women in my life. We help each other when we can, and there are enough of us that someone picks up the slack if we can't. And for me, neurodivergent and struggling, this has been an incredibly positive experience. I help when I can, and it doesn't feel like a burden.
Yes, it's always been other women, but the ones I have been lucky enough to find have been blessed with the ability to just accept each other where we are, with very little judgement.
I wouldn't like the traditional village you describe, but the friendships I have made in my life feel a lot like the most positive aspects of it. I think we can strive to be more communal in new ways.
(Full disclosure - my mom lives with us to help me with the children. I couldn't have managed without her. That's not always sunshine and roses, but no family ever is.)
My own personal experience is that I really like having kids over. We have one kid so I love to have them having friends over to play with, but I'm amazed at how hard I have to convince the parents that I don't expect anything back in return. I want to be the person whose house is open to all the neighbourhood kids.
We have children living either sides of us too and when they were younger I assumed, like I had when I was a kid, that the parents would boot us all out to get on with it. One kid is just obsessed with football and won't and play anything else (ours hates football) and only there half the time anyway as they're from a blended family. The other side never even lets theirs out of the house now. We used to be on good terms and see more of them but suddenly they withdrew. I honestly don't know why and I'm too shy to ask what happened.
I have slowly built up a small network of mums who are happy to be in a little group, and we are getting to the stage where we help each other and have playdates etc. You can build a Village on your own terms.
Idk what I'm trying to get at here but I'm
Pressed the send button by accident dammit. I was rambling anyway.
Insofar as all my anthrolopology courses where worth anything, all of this 100% correct. The village has always been a very mixed blessing, and plenty of people have always run like hell whenever the opportunity arose.
As for the division of labor, well, my mother says her (great?) grandmother always said:
"A man's work is from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done."
So you can put in 12 hours a day of non-stop dirt farming and cow wrangling (which is, you know, a pretty brutal way to spend age 5 to 75). Or you can change babies and sew and knit and wash clothes and cook meals and can food and still also wrangle the damn cows, because cow-wrangling is equal opportunity. And so yeah, "woman's work" was pretty much non-stop, right around the clock. And as any farm kid could tell you, it started really young.
Whoooofffff. That’s a lot. And true.
I am *really* really getting a lot of munchy food for thought from these essays involving parenting. Thank you for writing. I'm early into the journey as a AMAB on parental leave and trying to take on responsibility and be a good partner and parent in a way my social training hasn't adequately prepared me for. Would really love to envision that pathway forward that doesn't mean people are sacrificing their lives to provide care - but yeah I'm kinda too exhausted too.
I am *really* really getting a lot of munchy food for thought from these essays involving parenting. Thank you for writing. I'm early into the journey as a AMAB on parental leave and trying to take on responsibility and be a good partner and parent in a way my social training hasn't adequately prepared me for. Would really love to envision that pathway forward that doesn't mean people are sacrificing their lives to provide care - but yeah I'm kinda too exhausted too.
I absolutely wish more people were talking about this, and I appreciate so much that you are.
I think cultures other than very broken, white western/ized cultures do villages *slightly* better that what any of us have experienced, but in so many ways this is just the truth of human nature.
Everywhere. Everywhen.
As is, sadly, the tendency to pine for the Golden Age that never existed, so we're 100% on brand for that too.
I don't know what the functional answer is to moving *forward* and not back - especially not sideways into a fictionalized NeverWasLand - but I know we'll never find it if we're not having the REAL ACTUAL conversation.
Thank you, always, for continuing to have the real conversation.
The problem is capitalism and the theft of the Commons. HR Clinton's version of The Village never existed, except for the rich. There shouldn't be any corporations, and government should be dismantled, then replaced by community assemblies engaging in direct democracy without politicians. We need a new Constitution.
The problem is capitalism and the theft of the Commons. HR Clinton's version of The Village never existed, except for the rich. There shouldn't be any corporations, and government should be dismantled, then replaced by community assemblies engaging in direct democracy without politicians. We need a new Constitution.
Well said.
This is very acute and like much great writing, makes you realise something is obvious although you've never articulated it.
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