How Modern Communities Fall Short

And why it's important to address what's missing.

Photo curtesy of Unsplash.com

Community life has emerged as a recurring theme in the cultural conversation, especially among younger generations. Online search trends show rising interest in concepts like co-housing and intentional community, while a steady stream of books, articles, and essays explore what it might mean to rebuild something resembling village life.

Amidst a global loneliness pandemic, rising housing costs, and a sustained distaste for modern value systems that prioritize consumerism and tech-mediated social interaction, it’s no surprise that people are looking for meaningful alternatives.

From where we are now, it’s easy to look back on pre-industrial agrarian communities, or even farther back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors with a sense of nostalgia and romanticism.

Despite our longing for a more sustainable and connected way of life, many of us lack the resources and determination to make this happen. Dreams remain dreams, circulating around and around in theory and vision, rarely entering the realm of practice.

For some, the longing does ultimately lead to action. Young adults especially are leaving major metropolitan areas for small towns and rural areas. Since 2020, roughly three-quarters of population growth among Americans aged 25-44 has occurred in places with fewer than one million residents, reversing decades of trends that showed young people migrating toward large cities.

But despite our longing and effort to recreate village life in the modern world, the results often fall short of expectations. Homesteading in theory bears little resemblance to the grueling, overwhelming reality of maintaining land, animals, and infrastructure day after day. And community life, while appealing in the abstract, quickly becomes complicated when it involves sharing property, navigating disagreements, and relying on people who may not share the same expectations, skills, or commitment.

I’ve experienced this theory-versus-reality gap firsthand. While I still believe in and remain committed to recreating community life in the modern world, I’ve encountered several ways in which modern attempts fall short that I feel are worth sharing.

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1. Context matters.

Cultural Materialism, an anthropological framework developed by Marvin Harris, asserts that society’s practical material conditions, which include ecology, resources, economics, climate, and survival needs, shape practices, beliefs, and social structures. In other words, social structures don’t emerge in a vacuum, they emerge from local conditions, similar to how cacti emerge from a dry, sandy desert.

Among hunter-gatherer societies for example, the material conditions of mobility reinforced egalitarian norms. Mobility makes it difficult to accumulate possessions, and the unpredictability of hunting success encourages sharing. Hunter-gatherer groups enforce fierce egalitarianism as a means by which to repress attempts at dominance and sustain social order built around cooperation and shared resources.

Pre-industrial agrarian societies also depended on shared labor and cooperative access to land and water, which fostered strong expectations around reciprocity, communal work, and limits on individual accumulation. Acequias, a traditional community irrigation system brought from colonial Spain to Colorado and New Mexico, offer a perfect example. Due to water scarcity in arid environments, farmers agreed to collectively maintain shared irrigation ditches that flow during annual work days known as limpias, and to never take more than one’s fair share. The practical necessity of sharing water helped produce cultural norms centered on reciprocity, shared labor, and limits on individual control of resources.

Creating egalitarian, non-hierarchical communal structures within late-stage capitalism is not impossible, but it is far more difficult than doing so in a context that materially supports those values.

Without the necessity of relying on one another for survival or access to food, it becomes too easy to opt out of the structures and value systems that sustain communal life. Nowadays, you can in fact live in a village without being a villager, which leaves those committed to contributing overworked and overwhelmed. Modern community life allows us to come and go as we please, and opt in and out of shared responsibilities as we see fit. This creates a lack of mutual dependability and a system that lacks a stable, reliable foundation.

I wrote extensively about this challenge in the following essay…

2. No shared way through.

Another challenge modern communities face is the absence of mutually agreed upon values and clear processes for navigating conflict and repairing social rifts. While conflict and disagreement are inherent to community life, many of us lack the skills necessary for navigating such disagreements. Whether in hunter-gatherer bands or small agrarian villages, shared norms were not only taught and understood, but actively reinforced. Expectations around cooperation, reciprocity and acceptable behavior were mutually agreed upon, and there were established cultural mechanisms for addressing them. Maintaining harmony wasn’t optional; it was a matter of survival.

In modern day communities, people arrive with vastly different worldviews, personal histories, and expectations. While many share aspirations around connection and mutuality, the values that shape day-to-day interaction are more frequently assumed than explicitly agreed upon. When disagreements and conflicts inevitably arise, the lack of a shared framework makes navigating even small conflicts exhausting, painful, and often impossible.

Without shared norms around accountability, reconciliation, and responsibility, tensions linger unresolved, repeat ad nauseam, and fracture trust and cohesion.

Modern communities often operate with extremely limited human and financial capacity. Even under the best circumstances, keeping local governments running and organizations functioning smoothly can pose a significant challenge. Persistent conflict compounds these difficulties. Large amounts of time and energy are spent attempting to resolve disputes with people who are unwilling or unable to work together, thereby putting excess and sometimes unresolvable pressure on the systems and infrastructure needed to keep even the most basic of systems functioning.

In these situations, setting clear boundaries often becomes essential. Without them, communities risk getting stuck in cycles of conflict with individuals who either do not know how or do not wish to engage in collaborative problem-solving. Unfortunately, while such boundaries are often necessary for sanity and self-preservation, this autonomous act of self-protection can undermine the collective mindset that healthy communities depend on.

3. The collective consequences of individual freedom.

Modern culture places a tremendous emphasis on personal autonomy and individual sovereignty. While these values play an important role in protecting personal freedom, they often clash with the principals of communal living. Community requires compromise. It asks individuals to accept limits, share responsibility, and sometimes place collective needs above personal preferences.

In many modern communities, however, the expectation of complete personal autonomy remains intact even within shared spaces. People often seek the benefits of community while still maintaining the right to operate entirely on their own terms, and the right to come and go as they please. When every individual sees themselves as fully sovereign, it becomes difficult to establish shared norms, enforce agreements, or make decisions that meaningfully bind the group together.

Historically, communities functioned because participation came with widely understood obligations. People were expected to contribute labor, follow shared expectations, and accept certain forms of collective decision-making. Today, these obligations are often interpreted as constraints on personal freedom rather than the very conditions that make communal life possible.

The result is a persistent tension where communities attempt to operate collectively, while individuals remain deeply committed to personal sovereignty. Without a shared willingness to accept limits and responsibilities to one another, communal structures struggle to hold together over time.

Inevitably, modern communities and the individuals within them face a double bind, attempting to protect personal freedom and sanity through boundaries and self-protection, while also striving to preserve cohesion, cooperation, and the possibility of repair.

4. We don’t respect our elders (perhaps for good reason).

Another challenge we face is the absence of a culture that respects elders as communal leaders. In traditional communal life, elders played an important role in maintaining social cohesion. They carried cultural memory, mediated conflicts, and helped guide the community through difficult decisions. Their authority was not simply based on age, but on experience, wisdom, and a demonstrated commitment to the well-being of the group. Elders often served as stabilizing forces, helping communities navigate disagreements and maintain continuity over time.

In modern communities, however, the role of elders is often unclear or entirely absent. Many people resist the idea of authority altogether, preferring social structures where everyone’s voice matters equally. While this impulse is understandable as a reaction to the widespread abuse of power, the result can be a vacuum of guidance when conflict arises or when difficult decisions need to be made. Without trusted individuals widely recognized for their wisdom and judgment, communities can struggle to find clear direction.

Skepticism toward elders is not without reason. In many cases, those who hold power in modern institutions have not demonstrated the integrity or wisdom that would naturally inspire respect. This has left us wary of authority and reluctant to defer to anyone claiming greater experience or insight. The result is a complicated dynamic where communities require the stabilizing presence of elders, yet lack widely trusted pathways for recognizing and cultivating them.

Also, with the world changing so rapidly, what wisdom and experience do elders have that is truly pertinent to our current situation? In today’s hyper-globalized world, many local issues like community energy projects or adapting to new legislation exist in contexts unlike anything elders experienced in their own lifetimes. While they bring historical perspective and long-term thinking, their knowledge often lacks the hyper-local specificity needed to sustain community cohesion.

Without respected elders or similar figures who can help hold the broader perspective of the group, communities find themselves repeatedly navigating the same challenges without the benefit of accumulated wisdom. The absence of elderhood leaves modern communities floundering without a concrete mechanism for maintaining cohesion across generations.

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Despite these challenges, I don’t believe the desire for community is misguided or hopeless. Humans evolved and survived for most of human history within communal, interdependent groups where cooperation and shared responsibility were expected. The impulse to return to and recreate this way of life reflects a deep recognition that something essential has been lost, and our awareness of this is not naive or romantic.

That said, if we want modern communities to succeed and flourish, we have to be honest about the conditions that once made them work and the realities that now stand in our way.

Acknowledging and understanding human nature does not eliminate the work of turning knowledge into practice. Cultivating shared values, clear processes for repair, a willingness to navigate the conflicts between personal autonomy and collective cohesion, and the presence of respected elders are not optional to a well-functioning community. All are part of any successful communal social infrastructure. Without acknowledging what’s missing, our attempts to recreate a communal existence will continue to fall short.

Rebuilding community begins with ideas, but it ultimately depends on people willing to do the work of inhabiting them.