Thanks, Jonas! One thing we did was live further out from the city, in St. Louis. As a result, we have to drive further to a lot of places, and we’re further from a lot of the people with similar intellectual interests. We live in a walkable, new urbanist development, but Christian school and good church are both 30 minutes or so away. We’ve had hopes of creating our own Christian community out of the pieces of this, but have to accept that starting a Christian school or founding a church is not really in our wheelhouse. We also tried homeschooling temporarily over the summer, and found that my wife and I didn’t feel good at it, or desire to do it ultimately.
Chickens and generally having a suburban homestead all was not quite the way we wanted to spend our time in the end either. Doing our work that we enjoy and caring for our children without getting too stressed or angry is top priority. As opposed to trying to do everything ourselves and pretend to be self-sufficient. The main thing this taught us was that that model just doesn’t work for everyone, even if it does work for some.
And in terms of expectations, we end up expecting community, church and school to be magnificent Christian community, almost serving the function of family, and then are disappointed when they don’t. My take away is that people who do knowledge work or computer jobs would benefit in terms of community by being in a city, even though technically we could live anywhere. This has tempered my sense that there’s a clear Personal and Home-based solution to our political problems.
Super interesting, Joel. In another life, I lived in a Zen monastic setting. There were families and kids that lived there, too. Livability was superb for everyone largely due to shared labor, shared ethic of contribution and care, and shared resources. As you describe the life above, it sounds rather like more obligation and separation without more shared labor and community -- and that sounds really hard.
Thank you, Joel, for sharing. Can you be more specific about the struggles? What specifically were the burdens? Thank you! Jonas
Thanks, Jonas! One thing we did was live further out from the city, in St. Louis. As a result, we have to drive further to a lot of places, and we’re further from a lot of the people with similar intellectual interests. We live in a walkable, new urbanist development, but Christian school and good church are both 30 minutes or so away. We’ve had hopes of creating our own Christian community out of the pieces of this, but have to accept that starting a Christian school or founding a church is not really in our wheelhouse. We also tried homeschooling temporarily over the summer, and found that my wife and I didn’t feel good at it, or desire to do it ultimately.
Chickens and generally having a suburban homestead all was not quite the way we wanted to spend our time in the end either. Doing our work that we enjoy and caring for our children without getting too stressed or angry is top priority. As opposed to trying to do everything ourselves and pretend to be self-sufficient. The main thing this taught us was that that model just doesn’t work for everyone, even if it does work for some.
And in terms of expectations, we end up expecting community, church and school to be magnificent Christian community, almost serving the function of family, and then are disappointed when they don’t. My take away is that people who do knowledge work or computer jobs would benefit in terms of community by being in a city, even though technically we could live anywhere. This has tempered my sense that there’s a clear Personal and Home-based solution to our political problems.
Super interesting, Joel. In another life, I lived in a Zen monastic setting. There were families and kids that lived there, too. Livability was superb for everyone largely due to shared labor, shared ethic of contribution and care, and shared resources. As you describe the life above, it sounds rather like more obligation and separation without more shared labor and community -- and that sounds really hard.