Why I Left Utopia
An actual view of the utopia I left behind.
Author’s note: This essay was originally published in Open Review Quarterly in the Spring of 2014. After my TEDx Talk was released, during which I briefly described living in an intentional community, a lot of people asked to hear more about what it was like and why I’d ever choose to leave. The essay below answers some of those questions. My choice to leave the intentional community I lived in doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to intentional communities as a whole. In fact, I recently hosted a group conversation at Connection Club about options for living in intentional communities. I also invited the Co-founder of Conscious Coliving to share advice on this blog for folks who want to try coliving. The essay below simply gives you a peek into what it was like for me at one particular intentional community, and why after spending a year in a blissful and beautiful utopia, I chose to come back to the city. The original title of this essay was “A Farewell to Palms.” 🌴
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A year ago I left Seattle to live in an intentional community on an island in the Pacific. I’ve had roommates for most of my adult life, but this was the real deal: over a hundred people living together, an hour away from the nearest real city, surrounded by jungle and ocean with internet speed that could only be described as excruciating. We had each other, though, and our common values.
The Fellowship for Intentional Communities defines “intentional community” as ecovillages, cohousing communities, residential land trusts, communes, student cooperatives, urban housing cooperatives, intentional living, alternative communities, cooperative living, and other spaces enabling people to collaborate with a shared vision.
To those of us who flock to the unusual world of communal living, it fulfills a long-awaited dream of experiencing something we have only known in fleeting moments. We’ve sporadically found the feeling of belonging and the sense of living life fully, though we’ve usually just felt it one week at a time while taking a break from the rat race. We found it at the one-week vacation, one-week Burning Man, one-week yoga retreat, one-week meditation retreat, one-week dance festival or one-week music festival. For many of us, we’ve saved our most expressive, truest, freest selves for “that one week of the year.” So it’s understandable that we want a way to “get away” for real — to spend an extended time away, fully immersing ourselves in those rare vivifying experiences.
Communal living fulfills a long-awaited dream of deeply experiencing something we have only known in fleeting moments.
I know this because, in this community, one of my privileges and responsibilities was to interview people who applied to join it. In the majority of these conversations, I repeatedly heard people say that they wanted to be surrounded by others who shared their beliefs and values and who enjoy the same activities they do. Due to its remote location and expressed purpose, this community was a highly self-selecting group. Most people don’t just trip on the sidewalk and fall into the jungle, suddenly living with a bunch of yoga-posing, om-chanting, quinoa-eating, nature-loving hippies. These things don’t happen by accident.
Many applicants said they hoped to be in a group of kindred spirits — a place where they’d feel like they really belong. Their yearning was palpable, and is perhaps, universal. The promise of intentional communities represents an ideal: being a part of something that supports your highest vision for yourself and the world. In its intentionality and self-selecting nature, it is a space and experience that reinforces the individual beliefs of its members, usually without fail. There is nothing wrong with wanting that — especially if your normal life makes you feel like a perpetual outsider. Craving that sort of constant belonging is understandable and perfectly reasonable. But for me, after nine months of living inside my echo chamber, something surprising happened.
Without realizing that “echo chamber” is the formal term for what I was experiencing, I observed that indeed, I was living within a Twilight Zone that parroted the majority of the community members’ viewpoints back to them, and back to me, over and over and over again.
The realization snuck up on me slowly, with a series of small, uncomfortable noticings:
I noticed I was having the same type of conversation repeatedly.
I noticed others were having the same type of conversation repeatedly.
I noticed the community was becoming more and more homogenous: physically, mentally, spiritually, politically, financially, aesthetically, and socially.
I noticed many in the community like the same things, do the same things, want the same things, and complain about the same things.
It would be beautiful if it wasn’t kinda weird. These noticings were not unique to me. Community members who saw it too commonly referred to our life there as being “inside the bubble.” For a lot of people, inside the bubble is the best place to be, and they never want to leave. But for me, not so much. The bubble provided one type of belonging, but it’s not the only kind. In the end, the bubble proved to be too small and too repetitive for me.
No matter how much you like what’s being said, no matter how much you love the people saying it, one thing will happen with too much repetition: just like listening to your favorite song so many times that you can’t stand it anymore, your feelings about it will change. Similarly, when everything happens according to the same weekly schedule, preselected structures, recurring menus, and strict mealtimes — all of this propped up by a set of unchallenged assumptions about how things “should be” — life starts to feel less, well, lifelike. It’s like eating nothing but coconut ice cream every day; it’s sweet and delicious, but it doesn’t provide all the vitamins and minerals the body needs to survive. At a time when the internet makes the diversity and depth of the world and its peoples more accessible than ever before, I found it luxuriously limiting to live in a bubble with such homogeneity of mindset, opinion, activity, political belief, and stylistic leaning. It was like a mashup of Lost and the movie Groundhog’s Day.
After nine months of living inside my echo chamber, something surprising happened.
Once I realized what was happening around me, “difference” in any form became endlessly appealing, just for variety’s sake. I began to crave difference in almost every possible way. I wanted to rebel, just for the sake of bucking all this beautifully manifested conformity. I wanted choice. For example, the kitchen crew (of which I was not a part) decided every meal and mealtime, and they managed everything associated with eating. For an entire year I never had to do dishes — but I also never got to choose when or what I ate. Out of frustration, I sometimes waged in a tiny rebellion by skipping meals, or just eating an apple with peanut butter or a bag of chips in my room instead of going to the communal meal. On the rare chance I could get a ride into town with one of the few people who had vehicles, I leapt at the chance to eat something different, something of my own choosing. I didn’t always make easier or healthier choices, but what I needed were options, variety, and some semblance of independence. And this was just about the food. My wish for freedom of movement and the craving for stimulation and choices started to permeate every other aspect of my life in utopia.
The majority of my time in an intentional community was beautiful and positive in so many ways. But it was also kind of like living in a manicured garden or a monoculture, and that left me craving the neverending diversity of a rainforest. So I set my sights on moving back to the concrete jungle, departing from my echo chamber just ten days ago. I never intended to leave so soon but a sudden offer in the big city beckoned me and I jumped at it. I was ready. There are many great reasons to stay here, and many more reasons to leave than just the ones I’ve described here. But the list of reasons for leaving wins. It’s time.
I know that coming “back to society,” will mean being annoyed, pissed off, perplexed, and irritated by the opinions and behaviors of people with whom I don’t see eye-to-eye. But I also know that it holds the juicy possibility of being surprised, probably even pleasantly surprised by unscheduled, unexpected things I can’t see coming. Being met with positive surprises is one of the things that gives my life meaning and a sense of magic. I miss it. Life is safe and lovely in the bubble, but it’s far too predictable. Echo chambers give a remarkably comfortable sense of safety, but I found that safety blanket to also be a bit numbing. I’ve learned that I’d rather feast on life as an unpredictable smorgasbord than all-you-can-eat coconut ice cream.
I know that coming “back to society,” will mean being annoyed, pissed off, perplexed, and irritated by the opinions and behaviors of people with whom I don’t see eye-to-eye. But it holds also the possibility of being pleasantly surprised by the unexpected.
I learned a lot about myself, others, community, and communication from the experience. I made some incredible friends that I’ll have for a lifetime, and I learned a ton about how I want to live my life in the future. I appreciate the acceptance and encouragement that I received from being a part of such a validating, generous, beautiful, supportive, encouraging intentional community. It’s easy to live when you’re surrounded by people who reflect your highest ideals, behaviors, and values back to you. I needed those things, but I also need more than that.
In order to fully feel like I am growing and developing as a person, I need to be exposed to new and different ways of thinking and being. I’m the kind of person who grows the most when I’m exposed to new ideas, and when I’m pushed or challenged. Trials and tribulations aren’t pleasant, but they’re effective for producing growth and learning. I want to learn and transform through my exposure to things that I don’t fully understand and can’t predict. I want people to say unexpected things that puzzle and delight me. I’m addicted to learning, and that happens best for me in environments where I hear and see things that I know little-to-nothing about.
I also want more diversity. For most of the last year, I was the only Black person I saw. I tired of feeling like the only one pushing for more diversity in our community. Humans have 250,000 years of evolutionary diversification under our belts, and I want to experience more of it. I also welcome the challenge of an intelligent debate with someone who disagrees with me; both of our synapses get a workout by going through mental sparring. It’s fun. Adapting to, negotiating, and integrating difference gives richness to life and human connections. It deepens perspective and delivers subtlety, spontaneity, choice, and contrast. My utopian echo chamber gave me friendship, palm trees, and lots of coconut ice cream, but it didn’t make my life feel more lifelike. Only differences can give me that.
P.S. To hear more about how this experience informed my journey as a writer and the work I do now, check out this 4-minute video on my IG. And to see a picture of my housing at the community described above, check out the first few minutes of my TEDx Talk.