How to Build a Village: Relying on Each Other in an Unreliable World

From bestselling Substack author and journalist Rosie Spinks, an exciting new look at how the key to our survival in a changing, chaotic world is caring for, and about, one another.

Never in human history have so many of us tried to live without the place-based web of cooperating people that has nourished and sustained humans for millennia. Whether we’re new parents, single urbanites, elder folks living alone, or young adults embarking on adulthood in a new place, the way we live today is a vast, bizarre social experiment. The truth is that human beings are an interdependent species designed to take care of one another in extended kin-based networks. And yet we’re operating in a society and economic system that incentivizes us to retreat into ourselves and pretend we’re doing just fine alone, without fully realizing it often comes at a price. Exhaustion, loneliness and anxiety have reached peak levels, and while we may have a phone full of contacts, who can we really call on - whether for a moment’s help or at a time of crisis?

We may neither be able to nor want to recreate the conditions of our ancestors, but when it comes to increasing the amount of connection and support in our lives, there is a lot of room for improvement, which is where the practical element of HOW TO BUILD A VILLAGE comes in. It’s full of suggestions for everyday actions that prove we don’t need to wait for policy to deliver us some hope. Because the village is is built from the ground up, by people at different life stages, with different priorities, who all share a sense that being in a sustained relationship with other people is central to how we thrive. The village is deeply wired into our brains, biology, and spirit. We know how to do it. It starts with us remembering the profound degree to which we need one another.