There's a ton of great quotes in this piece, so it's hard to pick just one, so I'll juxtapose two.<p>> We love the narrative of rugged individualism, the freedom to help ourselves out, choose our own way, and make a future.<p>> When we choose to go through a life transition without the help of others, we steal away from those around us the profound joy of building up a future – real acts of hope, faith and love in the world.<p>As someone who started out on a major life transition just a year ago with the explicit advice to deliberately form a supportive network, this rings resoundingly clear. Most people want to do good by helping, but sadly the opportunities to do so are abstractly detatched from day to day experience. I know there will be people who will want to respond with, "you know you can just volunteer," but the emotional texture of volunteer work is qualitatively different from being asked, "I'm going through something hard. Can I count on you for support?"<p>The individualism described in the article contributes to the atrophy of emotional vulnerability and forming support networks is an antidote. I hope in some small way the article inspires someone to do the same.
This is the correct link.<p><a href="https://www.inaliminalspace.org/blog/barn-raising?rq=Barn" rel="nofollow">https://www.inaliminalspace.org/blog/barn-raising?rq=Barn</a><p>Also for those who know about barn stars on Wikipedia, barn raising and the particular idea of barn stars is the concept that inspired it.<p><a href="http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BarnRaising" rel="nofollow">http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BarnRaising</a>
This works well for problems like the one described: blameless and fixable in short order.<p>The people helping can come in, help for a period of time, and leave feeling good. The person getting help likely feels no shame in the situation.<p>Would the community have a frolic if a man was an alcoholic with depression and his wife divorced him and moved away from the community? What if the farmer was injured in the tornado, say paralyzed? Some things aren't feel good situations when you come help for a week. Some things don't get better, they're just endured.<p>The advice in this article is good, but applies to a narrow set of situations that, honestly, are easier to deal with. A barn can be rebuilt.
I guess there is implicit cost involved; you are supposed to help next time somebody else’s barn gets destroyed, and you can only go through community approved projects with this kind of approach.
This is just normal behavior of people in regions, where government do not interfere into normal life too much, and where not too much strangers.<p>In regions, where government interfere much, like ex-communists countries, and where population changed fast, this behavior becomes counter productive.<p>Because for this need long term relations with neighbors.<p>Only one nuance, to have such relations, one must be enough similar to his neighbors, at lest don't consider them extra-terrestrials, have similar everyday behavior, similar income, similar education, etc.
But in long term communities this happen automatically.