Earlier this year, I surfaced from sleep to a strange noise, a loud, human singing reverberating through our bedroom ceiling, then a low, almost animal groaning. My husband and I looked at each other. ‘I think Hatty’s in labour,’ he said.
The rest of the day proceeded in the usual way, getting breakfast for our children, dropping them off at school, meetings, emails, booking in the car for an MOT, but these activities were interspersed with opening the door to midwives, making cups of tea for Hatty, and finding towels to drape around the birth pool that had appeared in our living room. Towards evening, our eighth housemate appeared in a rush of fluids. Two ambulance-loads of paramedics stood around like a flock of green and yellow London parakeets, blessedly unrequired. At one point, there were nine medical professionals, seven housemates, two grandparents of the new arrival and a cat in our terraced London house. It didn’t even feel that full, I thought later, as I poured bleach on bloodstained towels and binned a discarded catheter that had been overlooked in a corner.
I am 42, and I did not expect to end up here. Like most of my peers, I was handed a vision of a home worth striving for with far, far fewer people in it and, to begin with, I followed that script. A middle-class 1980s child, I did well at school, moved away from my home county dormitory town for university, and never went back. London, jobs at the BBC, running a think tank all followed. I lived with good friends, and juggled seeing others between our clashing personal schedules. Then people began to pair up and procreate. I met someone, followed suit, and we clawed our way onto the very bottom of the housing ladder. It was a lovely life. A bit relentless, perhaps, a bit lonely around the edges, too, as the schedules got ever harder to tessellate, the work and care burdens heavier. But we had done it. Our little dyad, with dependants, was standing on its own feet, even if something felt decidedly unstable underneath.
More space, more privacy, more control – all are sold as natural, unquestioned goods to be sought in the unconscious script that most of us carry. For the nuclear family, they are tokens of success and maturity, whereas forgoing these ‘goods’ and living with people you are neither shagging nor parenting has an association with low-status, studenty seasons. Not for proper grownups. My husband and I began to feel the strengthening drag of this story. I sometimes saw it in my mind’s eye as a tide, washing young adults from their family homes into temporarily intertwined clusters (largely in cities), then out again, to the suburbs and beyond, in pairs or alone, in search of a garden, a bigger kitchen, storage space for the mountains of stuff we inevitably accumulate. Swept away from each other, everyone further and further apart.
Every policy issue we researched at the think tank led back inexorably to disconnection. It was labelled different things (overconsumption, fraying trust, the corrosion of democracy, crises of loneliness, mental health, care, climate, housing). But a thread linked them all: our inability to bear each other, to share (our stuff, space, skills, and deepest selves) was actively making the world worse. I came across thinkers who shared my intuition that something largely invisible but all-encompassing was getting in the way of our being together as healthier cultures remembered how to do. Some called it individualism or modernity. Others blamed ‘the machine’ of late-stage capitalism. I never settled on a name I liked, but I felt the disquiet of it. Still, all the intelligent analysis and critique never quite seemed to lead to progressive action, but instead to a conservative turn that half-appealed in its communitarianism and rooted localism, but not in its approach to women and ‘outsiders’.
The message seems to be that the price we pay for the freedoms of liberal individualism is loneliness. You can have personal autonomy, privacy and endless choice; you can outsource most of your needs to the market rather than navigate complex non-transactional relationships with other people that tie you into reciprocity; you can optimise your surroundings, appearance and experiences to your exact preferences, but what gets bundled in for good measure is a sense of existential weightlessness.
I rebelled. Surely there was something between atomisation – what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the ‘buffered self’ – and hierarchical, authoritarian community; between girl-boss and trad-wife. The final push to try and find it, ultimately, was fear. When my first child was born, the reality of the climate crisis moved from a theoretical policy problem to one that bubbled acidly in my belly, settled itself in my bones. I had brought this powerless being into a world on fire, and the idea that hard work and individual accumulation could keep her safe stopped making sense. The need to be part of a thick web of humans who would not play a passing role in each other’s lives but commit to costly mutual care felt urgent as the ground bucked and roiled beneath our feet. I wanted ‘a village’, as we say now, not for the golden Instagram images of laughing friends around a photogenic table, but because, in my bleakest moments, I thought it might be essential for survival.
It is a truism that early parenthood is isolating and relentless, but does it have to be? We started questioning accepted norms, not idly fantasising about building a commune but taking serious steps. I wanted to live this season of our lives up close with others, witnessing each other, supporting each other. Not uploading the tidied-up details into group chats, after the fact, or smoothing the misery into memes, holding back the joys for fear of sounding smug. This realisation cracked outwards, connecting with a deeper intuition: I wanted all of life to be like that. I wanted to see and be seen. It felt wrong that everyone didn’t live this way, like something important had been lost in the rush to accumulate stuff and protect our security, status and autonomy by disappearing behind our own front doors.
Whether you call the present a polycrisis or just a gigantic roiling clusterfuck, I became more convinced that the medicine for most of our ills is to actively and counterculturally move towards other people. To resist the powerful forces driving us apart. There are lots of ways of doing this, of course. But letting go of the idea that our homes must be private retreats from other people seemed a decent place to start. I believe that our homes can be places to relearn the habits of reciprocity, sharing and mutual care that for most of history (and, in many parts of the non-Western world, still) are the defining characteristics of a culture worthy of the name. A culture we are urgently going to need.
This sounds much, much simpler and easier than it is.
For us, it took years of intentional conversations, initial enthusiasm from others that then petered out, bureaucratic wrangling, and research. We eventually found people who were equally committed (who were not, interestingly, friends already), and rented together to test it. We learned to navigate sex noises and bathroom smells (sound-proofing and background music helps a lot with the first). We had tense conversations about kitchen storage, our different expectations around spending and cleanliness. It surfaced stuff from our childhoods, which we then had to be honest about and confront. The process (much of which happened during COVID-19 lockdowns, which I’m sure accelerated it) was challenging and exposing, almost unbearably uncomfortable at times.
As I held him at 4 am, my son asked: ‘Why couldn’t we stay in our flat, just us?’
We also practised rupture and repair, realising that, even as we saw the most ridiculous, fragile, defensive parts of each other, we were not running away. In his play The Real Thing (1982), Tom Stoppard aptly defined love as ‘Knowledge of each other … knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face.’ In the course of our building trust, it did feel a lot like love. Not love based on surface similarities or romance, but on a mutual commitment to each other. It felt like growing up. The existential emptiness, the unsteady sense of vertigo eased.
Having tested the concept, we embarked on a labyrinthically complex joint house-purchase. It fell through on the day of a long-delayed exchange, after we’d reached the end of the notice period on our rental. For months, we had no fixed address and scattered to the sofas and spare beds of friends and family. My youngest child began having nightmares. As I held him at 4 am, he asked: ‘Why couldn’t we stay in our flat, just us?’ The script glowed temptingly. If living with others was the answer, surely it shouldn’t be this difficult. We held our nerve.
To date, we have lived up close – bodily fluids close – with people we are not related to for nearly six years. We share all the space in our jointly mortgaged home except the bedrooms. We pool most of our money, cook, shop, pray and host hundreds of guests a year, together. And we manage countless petty conflicts, over the milk or the dishwasher or the crumbs on the side, conflicts that often mask deeper questions: who do I belong to? Where can I be really at home, be really myself? Who am I becoming, alongside these people? And are we able, when it comes down to it, to be each other’s safety?
There are very few models for what we are doing. Perhaps the most robust is the monastic tradition. Most orders of religious Sisters or Brothers see the proximity of living up close with each other as essential to spiritual growth. It is precisely in the discomfort of being witnessed, up close, at our worst, in being asked to compromise preferences, to share and serve others, they argue, that we really grow up.
Living with others has shown me things in myself that I would prefer to ignore
My policy-wonk brain knew there were systems keeping us apart. Not just social scripts but monetary policies, mortgage terms, HMO (house in multiple occupation) legislation. Yet living communally has taught me that it is also what is inside us that makes it hard to be together. My romantic ideas about cultures worthy of the name, marked by interdependence and mutual care, clearly also require certain kinds of people – with emotional skills, developed character, an ability to make lasting commitments. None of which my individualistic formation had gifted me an abundance of.
Living with others has shown me things in myself that I would prefer to ignore. How much of me is still a child, wanting my way, quick to cry ‘it’s not fair’. I have been learning all this as the world around us unravels. The contrast is disconcerting. If it really is the end of the world, at least as we have known it, then what kind of people will be needed? What would it take to be braver, more resilient and flexible, more joyful, creative and free? A person who could, at bloody least, wait patiently to go in the bathroom, or let someone else use a favourite mug. Someone able to sacrifice sleep to care for another’s child, and have the hard conversation about a failure to mop the kitchen floor, rather than avoiding it. I want to learn these habits. I have a hunch that much more than this might be asked of me. Of all of us.
This project finds faint echoes in the self-improvement, self-development, self-optimisation we are all constantly hectored into – therapy (or psychedelics, or stoicism) for the mind and Hyrox (or reformer Pilates, or yoga) for the body (with those who are not working on themselves in some way being the exception). Interestingly, the unconventional way our household lives is rarely recommended to those seeking self-knowledge or self-development. The standard advice is an inward turn in order to facilitate a private excavation of an authentic self, along with strong personal boundaries that draw distinct lines between that self and others. Porousness tends to be framed as deleterious to Project Self. Most monastic orders encourage periods of solitude and silence, to be sure, but much of daily life is spent in an exposing proximity to others, the very idea of which would bring most of us out in hives.
This difficult proximity, where we witness and are witnessed without our protective, polished personas is an immensely powerful change agent. You can see it in action in group therapy, the recovery movement and some short-term intensive self-development programmes, but this powerful ‘technology of the self’, to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, is vanishingly rare. This kind of witnessing (during my housemate’s labour, for example, I witnessed parts of her that only her partner otherwise sees) is effective because change requires us to be honest about who we currently are. Living in community is where illusions about the self go to die!
One of the phrases we use a lot in our household is ‘We are made for each other and we are made by each other.’ Marxists such as Silvia Federici call this ‘social reproduction’. Neurologically, this makes sense: human interaction shapes our brains from our very earliest moments. Every human comes into the world in search of a gaze.
The day the baby was born, while their mother was being stitched up and I was moving bins for the paramedics, my primary-school aged son was one of the first people to hold the tiny form. They’d wrapped the baby in a yellow foil survival bag, and he gazed down for long minutes with as much attention as if he was indeed holding a giant Quality Street toffee. This baby had moved from deep bodily entanglement, hidden in just one of us, to a less visible but no less profound interdependence. They have now been held by more arms than your average Western infant, and whether it’s mum, dad, us housemates, family, neighbours or church friends, we all adopt the same posture as my son. Face turned towards face. Eyes meeting eyes. The baby makes noises, and we make noises back. And as we gaze and gurgle, the mycelia of their brain are forming.
Dan Siegel, the clinical psychiatrist and founder of interpersonal neurobiology, says that our earliest relationships ‘shape the very neural structures that create representations of experience and allow a coherent view of the world: Interpersonal experiences directly influence how we mentally construct reality.’ The connections formed by the face-dancing we all instinctively do with babies help create the conditions that enable them to experience what is real. More than this, these gazes are where their sense of self comes from. Siegel says that, beyond these earliest experiences of connection, relationships shape, throughout our lives, ‘how we feel, how we think, how we remember things, how we tell the story of who we are, the sense of self … what gives you a sense of purpose.’ We become who we become because of who we gaze on, and who gazes back at us.
We talk a lot about exits, about the fact that we will probably not live together forever
The porousness of babies to their caregivers, and especially their need for face-to-face connection is widely understood. The neuropsychologist Allan Schore calls a baby an ‘open dynamic system’. What our house is helping me see is how much humans remain ‘open systems’, and how much mind/self/soul (all translations of the word ‘psyche’) arises within and between us. We are not closed selves, semaphoring information to each other and making free rational choices. We are always makers of each other – the act of mutual witnessing, or its lack, moulding us like wet clay.
One way of thinking about our unconventional living situation, then, is that it offers a way of choosing who we want to be formed by, as if consciously curating the powerful gaze of others. Our bet is that the real costs, in control, convenience and comfort, the exposure of being seen and known ‘with masks slipped from faces’, are worth it. I believe that it is a demanding but effective method of becoming the kind of people the world needs now.
I could be wrong. I am not rosy-tinted about the realities of experiments like these, how badly they can hurt people if done poorly. The way we live may not last. We commit, unlike monks and nuns, only in five-year increments. This season has been the most meaningful, the most beautiful and the most fun of my life, despite the challenges. It has made me braver, and freed up swathes of time and energy that I would have otherwise spent on home admin in a household of only two adults. It is working, really working, for now, but we are realists. We talk a lot about exits, about the fact that we will probably not live together forever. Perhaps we’re trying to have our cake and eat it, keeping one foot in the autonomy of liberal individualism even as we experience the benefits of rooted, committed mutual care. Our experiment is imperfect. My hunch, though, is that we are going to need more of them.
As a society, we are still largely in denial about the scale of the existential threats facing us, and against which individualism cannot keep us safe. In times of deep ecological, technological and political crisis, we may be forced to remember how to be each other’s safety. To unpick, laboriously, the conditioning of the weird, prosperous West and call bullshit on the lie that control, accumulation and a frictionless, precision-optimised life was ever going to make us happy. Though I know it’s a lie, a lot of me still wants it. However, as I learn every day how deeply the script of individualism has formed me, I also see how poorly it serves us.
Each day that I wake up in this house, I am choosing to enact a different script, one in which other people’s concerns are more real to me. My housemate’s labour pains, this baby’s cries, are my business. Conversely, my occasional existential terror or my children’s school struggles are tangible to a wider group of people than they would otherwise be. We have a stake in each other. There is a fierce tenderness in it that often brings me to tears. Iris Murdoch describes something like it in ‘The Sublime and The Good’ (1959) when she writes:
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love … is the discovery of reality … The exercise of overcoming one’s self, of the expulsion of fantasy and convention … is indeed exhilarating. It is also, if we perform it properly which we hardly ever do, painful.
Isolation allows us to maintain all kinds of illusions about ourselves and about others. In contrast, remaining tethered to a shared reality requires us to really see others, not in the refracted fun-house mirror of social media, but in regular, embodied ways. We triangulate the world via other people, taking readings from a range of perspectives to build a more accurate picture of things. My image of this process is of humans echolocating like bats, where the objects sounding back are the voices and faces of other people. René Descartes might have thought he needed to withdraw from society completely to find truth but, respectfully, he was wrong. Turning in, pulling away disorientates us. The social theorist Sarah Stein Lubrano argues that the more time we spend alone, the more prone we are to delusion. Communities like ours are often laughed at, written off as naive, but if our minds do indeed require a thick web of strong relational connections in order to grasp reality, then we weirdos are possibly learning to see the world more clearly.
Our community (and other lasting ones) hold together by turning attention beyond ourselves
Why, then, are experiments like ours so rare? Why do I, a public advocate, a recipient of the very real benefits of communal living, still feel conflicted about arguing more strongly for it to become the norm? It is partly that such a life is, as Murdoch says, painful. Decentering my preferences, letting go of my self-aggrandising illusions hurts. These are growing pains, every one worth it – but still. Inviting others into something this rigorous, and costly, is not in fashion.
There is another reason. The community we live in offers mutual witnessing, mutual recognition, increased capacity and care, and economies of scale, but this alone is not enough to hold us when it all feels too much. When people come to our home wanting advice about setting up something similar, we always tell them: community for the sake of community doesn’t work. Communes might be highly effective sites of self-formation, but the ones designed primarily to do that will likely collapse. My experience is that our community (and other lasting ones) hold together by turning attention beyond ourselves. The ability to locate the project in a vision of the good – political, ecological, philosophical or other – is an essential foundation.
There is something about our house I have not mentioned much. You may have caught that throwaway line about praying together. One of the arguments made by Charles Taylor and others about the isolating tendencies of modernity is that it is linked to secularity. He argues that pre-moderns had a much stronger sense of how porous they were, how bound up with each other, with nature, and with divine or magical presences. He links our increasingly boundaried or buffered sense of self to the loss of religion: we moderns are not made by and for god(s), by and for each other, but by and for ourselves. I have some sympathy with the argument, because without a robust, collective wisdom tradition, it is challenging to keep choosing to move towards each other. Despite believing in this way of life for policy reasons, emotional reasons, neurobiological reasons, even goddamn survival reasons, I am not sure I would be able to do it without a powerful, and in our case, religious, reason why.
When asked to sum up his teaching, Jesus offered two, interlinked commands. Firstly, love of the divine (Love the Lord your God ‘with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength’) then, love of the other (‘Love your neighbour as yourself’). No moral prescriptions or religious ritualism, but relationality as The Way. I have spent a lot of time sitting with the work that the word ‘as’ is doing in ‘love your neighbour as your self’. In the same measure you love yourself? At the same time as? Because they are yourself? Even when they have left beard clippings all over the sink?
The petty squabbles between early believers trying to share are there in the New Testament for all to see
Helpfully, Jesus had a lot of other less cryptic things to say about learning to bear each other and be together. The New Testament takes it as a given that humans are messy, dishonest, selfish, misguided, that we will hurt and anger each other. We may be made for and by each other, but it assumes there will be days when we wish we were not. This tendency to disconnect, this almost gravitational pulling away from each other led Martin Luther, building on Augustine, to call us ‘Homo incurvatus in se’: humanity turned in on itself. I find it one of the more useful definitions of sin.
The New Testament is largely a set of letters between what we might see as communitarian experiments, and reckoning with our inward-turning tendencies. The petty squabbles between early believers trying to share their lives and possessions are there on the page for all to see. The difficulty was part of the point, not a reason to avoid it.
This realism might be why, despite its very real benefits, this is not a full-throated advertisement for communal life. The costs are real, so you need a powerful story to hold you. A completely different script of what a good life looks like. I don’t think it necessarily has to be a religious one, but it does need to be powerful, and go beyond individual interest. Setting up my life for mutual care and reciprocity is the best thing I have ever done, but its chafing against the script I was born into still leaves blisters sometimes. On days when it asks more of me than I am receiving, it is the ‘why’ that makes me stay.
I hope that, collectively, we can (re)discover some big whys, that more people are inspired to experiment with moving towards each other. I think the upending of the world by climate change, AI and all their currently unforeseen effects will likely force us into it. It is, ultimately, soul work. Our household has had a few years’ head start, no more than a foundation course, yet it is getting easier as the vestiges of the old script become threadbare. I think – I hope? – that I am more patient and less petty; more steady and less resistant to sharing. More oriented towards a rigorous love, and so a tiny bit more of use in this hurting world. Whether that is in fact reality or self-delusion is a question you would have to ask my housemates.
