What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal
About this episode
The central question is what history's radical experiments in living together — communes, kibbutzim, co-housing — reveal about care, loneliness, and the good life. Kristen Ghodsee, drawing on her book "Everyday Utopia," surveys two thousand years of communal experiments and argues they expose the costs of the modern nuclear-family model, especially the care burden concentrated on mothers. These communities tested collective child-rearing, shared domestic labor, and intentional friendship networks as answers to isolation. The conversation connects those experiments to today's loneliness crisis and asks which lessons can be adapted to contemporary life — shared care infrastructure, deeper community — and where the utopias broke down through conflict or coercion. Ghodsee's case is that rethinking how we organize care and kinship, not just romantic partnership, is the key to broader flourishing.