As I read, it was easy to generate many examples of this process unfolding in my corner of the world. Some deeply personal examples and some more communal. Thank you for helping us to see and say it more clearly. Namaste.
There is a paradox here. Embededness is deeply a part of the 2.5 Stage,/Blue. Collectively oriented. Yet People often left their villages for greater freedom. (Old German saying: city air makes free). Robertson Davies Fifth Business illustrates this village tone well.
The next stages (Expert and Achiever) are primarily individually oriented. As people develop, the old groupings of church or clubs hold less appeal. Feel old fashioned.
Perhaps we are at an in between place where the old traditional groupings are stale and the new ones, with subtler expressions aren’t yet robust.
I do observe that both my daughters have strong local neighborhood connections based on their young kids. Female based. Wondering what communities the women are creating?
Meg — this is the good kind of pushback, the kind that makes the thing truer. You've named a paradox the piece glides over, and it deserves to be sat with.
Because you're right: embeddedness was never simply lost to people — it was also fled by them. Stadtluft macht frei. The village held you and the village watched you, and those were the same hand. Davies catches it exactly — Deptford is warmth and surveillance in one breath, and Dunstan spends a life half-escaping it. So the dis-embedding wasn't only a wound inflicted; it was, in part, a liberation chosen. Any honest account of the empty rooms has to hold that the door was opened from the inside too.
But here's where I'd push back gently on the stage framing, or at least complicate it: I'm not sure the individually-oriented stages transcend embeddedness so much as they postpone the bill. The Expert and the Achiever can run a long way on their own fuel — career, mastery, the project of the self — and the old groupings do start to feel like a coat that no longer fits. But the need underneath doesn't develop away; it goes quiet and comes back later, often in the second half of life, often as the ache the piece is about. So maybe what you're calling an in-between place isn't only a sociological gap between old forms and new ones — it might be a developmental one too: a whole culture spending its Achiever energy, individuating brilliantly, and only now arriving at the bill for what individuation costs when nothing was built to catch it on the far side.
And then your last observation is the one I can't stop turning over, because I think you've spotted where the new tissue is actually growing. Your daughters' neighborhood connections, formed through young children, female-based — that's not nostalgia for the old grouping and it's not the thin digital substitute either. It's embeddedness re-forming around the one thing that still forces it: care that can't be done alone. You cannot raise small children on Achiever fuel; the self-project breaks against it, and people are thrown back into mutual dependence whether their stage prefers it or not. So the question you end on — what communities are the women creating? — might be the most important one in the whole conversation, because it suggests the new robust forms won't be designed or chosen. They'll be conscripted by necessity, around children, around illness, around age — the places where the sovereign individual hits the limit of his sovereignty and needs his neighbour again.
Maybe that's the quiet answer to the empty rooms: not that we'll consciously rebuild the village, but that the parts of life that can't be done alone will rebuild it for us, whether we planned to or not. The women may already be doing it while the rest of us theorize.
As I read, it was easy to generate many examples of this process unfolding in my corner of the world. Some deeply personal examples and some more communal. Thank you for helping us to see and say it more clearly. Namaste.
Namaste, Sister Om Namah Shivaya
There is a paradox here. Embededness is deeply a part of the 2.5 Stage,/Blue. Collectively oriented. Yet People often left their villages for greater freedom. (Old German saying: city air makes free). Robertson Davies Fifth Business illustrates this village tone well.
The next stages (Expert and Achiever) are primarily individually oriented. As people develop, the old groupings of church or clubs hold less appeal. Feel old fashioned.
Perhaps we are at an in between place where the old traditional groupings are stale and the new ones, with subtler expressions aren’t yet robust.
I do observe that both my daughters have strong local neighborhood connections based on their young kids. Female based. Wondering what communities the women are creating?
Meg — this is the good kind of pushback, the kind that makes the thing truer. You've named a paradox the piece glides over, and it deserves to be sat with.
Because you're right: embeddedness was never simply lost to people — it was also fled by them. Stadtluft macht frei. The village held you and the village watched you, and those were the same hand. Davies catches it exactly — Deptford is warmth and surveillance in one breath, and Dunstan spends a life half-escaping it. So the dis-embedding wasn't only a wound inflicted; it was, in part, a liberation chosen. Any honest account of the empty rooms has to hold that the door was opened from the inside too.
But here's where I'd push back gently on the stage framing, or at least complicate it: I'm not sure the individually-oriented stages transcend embeddedness so much as they postpone the bill. The Expert and the Achiever can run a long way on their own fuel — career, mastery, the project of the self — and the old groupings do start to feel like a coat that no longer fits. But the need underneath doesn't develop away; it goes quiet and comes back later, often in the second half of life, often as the ache the piece is about. So maybe what you're calling an in-between place isn't only a sociological gap between old forms and new ones — it might be a developmental one too: a whole culture spending its Achiever energy, individuating brilliantly, and only now arriving at the bill for what individuation costs when nothing was built to catch it on the far side.
And then your last observation is the one I can't stop turning over, because I think you've spotted where the new tissue is actually growing. Your daughters' neighborhood connections, formed through young children, female-based — that's not nostalgia for the old grouping and it's not the thin digital substitute either. It's embeddedness re-forming around the one thing that still forces it: care that can't be done alone. You cannot raise small children on Achiever fuel; the self-project breaks against it, and people are thrown back into mutual dependence whether their stage prefers it or not. So the question you end on — what communities are the women creating? — might be the most important one in the whole conversation, because it suggests the new robust forms won't be designed or chosen. They'll be conscripted by necessity, around children, around illness, around age — the places where the sovereign individual hits the limit of his sovereignty and needs his neighbour again.
Maybe that's the quiet answer to the empty rooms: not that we'll consciously rebuild the village, but that the parts of life that can't be done alone will rebuild it for us, whether we planned to or not. The women may already be doing it while the rest of us theorize.