What is community life?

Deciding to live in a community is becoming an increasingly available and popular option – a tendency that maybe stands as a response to the flaws of our dominant individualistic culture. If you are curious about what it is like to live in a community, here are 10 elements of community life that you might find surprising – drawn from the collective (wink!) experience of our 50-year-old Community in Denmark.

1. It’s in our nature

If you have ever heard of that interval between 2 millions and 12 thousands years ago when humanity was organized in communities of hunters and gatherers, it might not be new to you that we have evolved to thrive in community settings. Today, a large body of research confirms that tight, long term social bonds improve our health and overall fulfilment.

2. … but it’s a cultural shock

As much as it is natural and fulfilling to live in a community – for most of us making the switch can be quite a cultural shock. In a globalized but rather homologated western world, becoming part of a community might be a bigger cultural shock than moving to a different European country – it will feel alien and uncomfortable, at first, as you challenge the deepest, subconscious convictions of what life is supposed to be like.

3. It doesn’t matter if you are “social” or not

When I first moved to a community, I was worried that this kind of lifestyle would show to be incompatible with my introverted personality. To my surprise, I found that community life is not about being over-exposed to other people at random – it is rather about building deeper, longer lasting connections with a stable group of people.

4. It can be comforting

Knowing to be part of a group of people – that they know you and count on you, even – is quite reassuring. Feelings of loneliness and anxiety fade away when you realize that the people around care for you and are there to support you if something were to go wrong. For many of us, this feeling came by as an unexpected but pleasant byproduct of community life.

5. It will change how you look upon “normal” society

As we were saying: community life will challenge your subconscious convictions of what life is supposed to be like, which were formed by growing up in an individualistic world. While doing so, this experience will also reveal your convictions – leading you to question the postulates that lay at the very base of our societies. A simple example: what are families? Why have most of us come to base our social security on the possibly smallest nucleus in our society?

6. You can achieve more

It sounds simple, but it continues to surprise us: living in a community will allow you to achieve things you couldn’t possibly dream of achieving alone. The power of a committed group of people, united by a common vision or goal, shows in its accomplishments – our community, for example, regularly organizes large scale events we are very proud of.

7. It’s not just about living together

Community life is not just about living in the same place – it is about spending time and doing things together. Not only that – most importantly, it is about looking outside of the community itself, staying in contact with the changing world, reacting to external dynamics, while holding onto a common vision of togetherness.

8. You share common responsibility for your life together

Community life makes it possible for people of different mindsets to be together about how they want to lead their lives: sharing tasks, too, is a decision to be taken in common. This gives space for a mindful distribution of work: it is not necessarily the “practical people” who always take care of “practical things”, just as it is not only the “political people” who always do the politics.

9. It creates a surplus

Living together creates a surplus in different dimensions: an economical surplus, in the first place, but also a surplus in time, workforce, and capacity to achieve ambitious goals, as mentioned earlier. This makes every community a powerful, independent agent inside a bigger society – able to look outside of itself and act on its world according to the will of its members.

10. It enriches everyone’s lives

Deciding together how to distribute tasks, disposing of a surplus, feeling supported… it doesn’t sound too bad, right? At their best, communities can truly be brilliant, democratic and comforting ways of organizing people – which do good to their members and to the bigger society at large.

Conclusion

With these 10 unexpected aspects of community life, we hope to have cleared your ideas on what living in a community can feel like. Of course, it is worth mentioning that there is no ‘one type’ of community, and the information given above is drawn from the specific example of our community in Denmark. Dropping all positive or negative connotations, though, we believe these features can be associated, one way or another, with most experiences of communal living.

What was unexpected to you? And how did you imagine living in a community yourself?