Why isolation is the enemy of the vow — and why the community that forms around it must be built with eyes open
By Futurist Thomas Frey
Part 5 of 6: The Community
There is a specific kind of loneliness that the statistics don’t fully capture.
It is the loneliness of a woman who has made the most consequential decision of her life — to bear and raise children as her primary vocation — and who finds that the world around her was not designed for what she’s trying to do. Her professional peers have followed a different path. Her neighborhood was built for commuters, not caregivers. Her extended family is scattered. The civic organizations that once created the connective tissue of community life in her grandparents’ generation have atrophied. And the social infrastructure of her daily life — the coffee shop, the group chat, the open-plan office — was designed for adults without young children, for whom she is now, in some quiet and unacknowledged way, a different category of person.
This loneliness is not incidental to the demographic crisis. It is one of its primary causes.
Before we can talk about what the Vitalist community is, we have to be honest about what it’s responding to — because the community is not an amenity added to the Vitalist vocation as a quality-of-life enhancement. It is load-bearing infrastructure. Without it, the vow is isolated. Isolated vows break.
Continue reading… “The Vitalist Community”