Ordo necessitatum for Community Renewal
Instructions for deciding to live in a countryside yurt or a 20-story skyscraper.
I’ve often been told I am very passionate/idealistic because I am both young and filled with big ideas. How true that is or how much that is innate to me or my Instagram reels algorithm I cannot say.
What I can say for certain is that as a single, 25-year-old fully remote worker in America, I have grappled with my future as a homeowner/landowner/city dweller. I yearn for both the walkable, dense city filled with fun restaurants, trendy stores, and strangers to encounter, and the yurt on a 10-acre wooded lot with a vegetable garden, trails to explore, and animals to encounter.
Like many, my competing desires (or as zillenials would say - the two wolves inside of me) feed into the expanding surburban sprawl that has spread as a plague throughout the countryside. To combat this, I have decided to try and create some rules for ‘ordo necessitatum’ (Orders of Necessity) to determine what I should or should not advocate for.
What Do We Desire?
A common question that can take us a lot of different directions. Let’s subdivide our desires into several categories that will make it easier for sorting.
Community
Safety
Fun
Logistics
Convenience
Community can be viewed as a spectrum of living in total isolation outside of your family unit to living in a dense neighborhood surrounded by friends/family/strangers. A common refrain amongst zoomers is the desire to live in a commune or farm surrounded by their friends and family, but are largely unable to because of a lack of liquidity. The inverse can also be true with gen X and boomers as they age and find themselves lacking in meaningful friendships or estranged from their children/close relations. We are communal animals (for better or worse) who are more properly oriented towards meeting after church for Sunday dinner than we are to be monks on Mt. Athos (not that there is anything wrong with that!).
Safety is a calculation of risk tolerance. In a denser, diverse neighborhood, the chance of crime goes up. While rural populations can have some really weird crime metrics, the odds are significantly lower that you will face issues from your neighbors. The wildlife are a bit more unpredictable.
What do you like to do for fun? Are you a fan of climbing Colorado 14ers in your Subaru Outback on the weekends? Or do you prefer trying the latest culinary sensation you saw on Tiktok before you go see the latest Marvel movie? Neither is inherently better than the other, but the desire to have every culinary style known to mankind + low density developments are not exactly good bedfellows.
Logistics feels like an odd inclusion, but the logistics of our day to day life cannot be ignored. If you are adept at: carpentry, raising/slaughtering animals, growing vegetables, and anything else that requires dirty hands, you are more likely to thrive with your only trips to civilization being by a 30 minute drive to the nearest town. If your only encounter with the outdoors is via YouTube or Netflix, the traditionalist supply chain would be a massive shock and extremely detrimental to your existence.
Convenience! A pasttime as American as hot dogs and baseball. For some, climbing into the car and having everything built around cars within a 20 minute drive is considered convenient. For others, having all of your essentials within a 15 minute walk (the dreaded 15-minute city of woke-right nightmares) is the ideal for a polity. In America, the dance of urbanism requires having enough space for cars and “good urbanism,” but oftentimes the compromises leave a lot to be desired leaving everyone a little bit miserable.
With our parameters set, I will go about ranking what I find most important to me at this stage of my life.
Convenience - Call me George Costanza because yes I do live with my parents and their needs means I would prefer being able to only have to spend 25 minutes in the car one way. Living in a semi-rural area means that’s frequently not possible, but as our area grows that is rapidly changing.
Logistics - I have a small raised bed in the backyard and I’m semi-competent at fixing things, but I am more city slicker than redneck.
Safety - I have no desire to worry about my neighbor’s intentions and prefer to feel safe on walks in the park or downtown.
Fun - How fun can a guy with a Substack be? (I kid.) Upon moving from Charleston, SC back to Upstate, SC , I decided to get into mountain biking which has become a pretty big hobby now (and investment) which means I would hate to move somewhere without good trails and would prefer to see investment in trail infrastructure where I live.
Community - While I thrived in college in a very community driven context, I am happy to limit my interactions with others as much as possible.
Based on this ordo necessitatum, my desire of avoiding people and living in the yurt would be squashed because it would not be possible due to my lack of off grid logistics and needs for convenience. Likewise, my desire to live in a fun city would be outweighed by needs of convenience and safe.
Understanding Human Behaviors Via Conflicting Desires
I hope this was helpful in navigating how we might want several things, but when you lay them out side by side, you realize that they are in massive conflict with each other. It only takes 5-10 minutes of reading Facebook comments to see all of the different things people want and how truly unworkable they are. For example, desiring, "'more fun, new restaurants” is impossible when the cost of living is higher than possible on a line cook’s salary (staring at you, Mt. Pleasant, SC).
The inverse is also unfortunately true. Downtown Charleston has prioritized building hotels to cater to tourists, but has done this at the expense of doing anything fun downtown that isn’t drinking, ghost/history tours, eating, and shopping (RIP The Alley).
Did you find this interesting or useful? Please let me know and hopefully I will have another Substack coming out next weekend.
But what if your desires are not what is good for you? What is Good for you?