Have realistic expectations, stay where you are, tolerate who you’re with

People used to live together in a place.

Until the modern era (which, for the context of this discussion, we can date from the start of a generalized global-scale domain of experience with the expansion of travel and communication facility about 400 years ago) the vast majority of people, living in tribes or villages, spent the vast majority of their time within 50 miles of where they were born, relating to a community of a couple of hundred other people.

So people knew each other.

That’s one reason why the divorce rate was low (not the only reason, but a significant reason): Spouses had realistic expectations of each other.

They had realistic expectations because they were aware of what human beings are like.

I’ll conjecture that they were more aware than we are.

* * * *

The behavior of most fauna and flora is fairly straightforward as per genetic programming. People are relatively complex. It’s due to more consciousness and self-consciousness . . . which induce anxiety and neurosis.

People do all kinds of things to comfort and assuage; all kinds of complex cultural and personality things, some manifesting as psychological or sociological pathology. It’s disconcerting, not easy to deal with.

One way pre-moderns handled their frustration was to idealize what things will be like in the afterlife. But they couldn’t so much idealize what things were like in the current life because it was immediately evident.

We moderns tend to idealize immediate reality.

How is it possible to idealize something that’s right in front of your face? It’s possible because we live with our head in the clouds. In fact, we’ve done so more and more as modernity has “progressed.” We now live with our heads in the clouds of cosmopolitan urbanity, mass media, and cyberspace.

For that reason we tend to have less perspective, higher expectations, and less tolerance. Less tolerance of the behavior of other people and of our own behavior. The latter partially explains the epidemic of depression in our time, especially among teens. Having little in the way of life-perspective, they gauge their stature, attractiveness, and self-worth in relation to ideals seen online. They obtain their standards of success from hagiographies. They learn about sex from online pornography. Pretty depressing.

If they personally come up short, well, the behavior of their family members falls into the category of being idiotic. Teenagers can’t wait to get away.

Where do they think they’re going?

Their family members seem like idiots because they’re human beings. What the seekers will find in the next town or in the big city is human beings. They should lower their expectations, make a commitment, and stay where they are.

Emigrants and ex-pats can’t wait to leave and get away. Where do they think they’re going? Some other place is more wealthy or more cultured? The other place is full of human beings.

The plight of refugees is one thing. They’re driven out. The situation of voluntary emigrants is something else. If they have skills or talents, then they impoverish their homeplace when they leave. They should make a commitment, stay where they are, improve the situation.

The fable about the grass being greener . . . we moderns tend to be that way. We go over the hill with hopes that are too high.

* * * *

I see it all the time in regard to new members of the Green Party. People think, ah, I’ve found a superior group: peaceable, mature, enlightened. It takes six to twelve months to recognize that they’ve found a group of other human beings.

But this is especially significant when it comes to creating or moving in to a cohousing community. “Ah, I’ve found a group of progressive, mature, enlightened communitarians.”

In the case of the Green Party . . . it’s just a club . . . easy in, easy out. The process is usually: Ninety percent of new members get disappointed within a year. Half of those just leave. They go on to another group or club or Meetup. The other half get reconciled, their expectations get realistic, they stay.

In the case of a cohousing community, you’ve sold your house and you’ve moved in “for good.” And it’s not quite as good as you expected. It’s almost invariably not quite as good as you expected. People are not all so tolerant, people fight, people are idiosyncratic, some are nice but some will drive you nuts. In all cases: Their shit stinks.

I wish a clause of the introductory material presented to potential members said: “We welcome you to join our community, we hope you do. We want you to know that we strive to treat each other in a communitarian way, but none of us succeeds at that all of the time and it would be best if your expectations were fully realistic.” Best if you lower your expectations, commit to us anyway, stick around, and tackle the difficult, prosaic work of making things as good as possible. There’s no better place to go to.