This Household Obsession

Haven't been able to get the concept out of my head. For quite some time now I've been looking at groups of people as well as humanity from a macroscopic view. At this point, every one of lose our individuality and become as seemingly insignificant as single cells in our bodies. Groups and even communities of people can be looked at as a single organism. Now, let's review what organisms do. They consume energy, resources, they grow, reproduce, excrete wastes and are influenced by their internal and external environment.

So now I've been placing households under the same lens. You see the same workings here but things are still very different. For starters, household members do normally compete with each other for access to resources and things get organized in a way that can be considered relatively more voluntarily. In a healthy family, social cohesion is what keeps the family unit together with coercion being a niche occurrence when it comes to keeping the household functional and alive. What we see in the real world is people competing for jobs, for profit and what is inherent in all competitions is that we can't all be winners. If one is to win, others must be defeated. No way around that in a competitive environment. However, the household seems to lack this property.

While this isn't exactly the idea I had when I proposed to my IRL friends that we should live under one roof as we like to call it instead of in isolated families, it's something I've come to see as the whole concept has been taking shape inside my head for almost two years now. As I did research into topics relevant to the project, it only seemed to get a little more valid as I piece things together.

Having a realist attitude, I do not ignore the potential pitfalls and since I don't quite have a pessimist attitude, I don't give up on the first sign of difficulty. Instead, I try to find ways to make things work. If there's anything I learned about reality, it's that little things can have a significant effect on outcomes which is why I try to put every aspect I can identify under analysis.

What I believe to be the most important aspect to the integrity of this extended family is our cohesion; how well we stay together. This is possibly the key thing that we'll want to improve and maintain, I dare say just as much as corporations want to improve and maintain their profits. Social cohesion is a nice thing to strive for, actually. People belonging in their community and feel like they're a part of something that matters. This isn't to be maintained through coercion, I want to avoid that as much as possible but more on leadership later.

Money... It's been known that families can go into a frenzy over this. One aspect of living together under the same household ends up in the household members splitting the costs, reducing the burden on everyone where they can save more than if they had chosen to live separately. After all, no matter how few people live in a household, it's still going to need a lot of things. Sharing make more efficient use of space, energy and resources. That's not the end of the story however. The less money becomes a burden on us, the less the chance there is for financial disputes to erupt. Efficiency through sharing and organization only gets us so far so why not take it a step further by investing in producing our own food, water and electricity? As an electrical engineering student with an aspiration in the field, I will do my part with the energy aspect, but I digress. The point is, slashing our bills will make the burden of splitting the costs much less stressful.

Labor. Because there is less space and appliances occupied per person, the burden of labor also takes a hit at the individual level. Not only that, we have to communicate what is it we need to get done and when so that we can help each other out more often instead of everyone doing something by themselves. Not only will it get individual tasks done more quickly, it'll also make us grateful towards each other for lending a hand, improving cohesion. To help with this, we talk about a communications hub but that might turn out to be overkill as using the internet right might be enough. With this we could know what is being done and when so that we don't bump into each other as much as we would with everyone being disorganized. I've been thinking about applying Building Automation to the extent that it is relevant, which we haven't yet figured out completely. It's clear that a current sensor could be connected to the power supply of laundry machines so that we could know in advance as to whether or not they are in use and even figure out how long they'e been in use.

Leadership and Decisions. There is no formal leadership. People choose to listen to you or they don't and it is our common interest to remain cohesive so that we may continue to live a life less tainted by uncertainty and financial grief as it may also give us a better opportunity to express ourselves and flourish the way we want and we all want to get it right. We all need to identify the problems we face and solve them effectively. By effectively I also mean by minimizing side-effects. In order to identify problems, we need to communicate about it effectively and here's how that gets done (at least on paper); text-based public discussions are held, much like forums. Public discussions don't go into depth very much since everyone has a different perspective but in the process, a lot of points get brought up. Some of us may choose to discuss something privately to really get into the depth of specific things and many aspects of a problem get explored by scanning the surface and depths of different aspects in sequence by alternating between public and private discussions. A consensus can be reached once everyone understands what needs to get done and understand why it needs to be approached in the way given. By the logic of common interest and effective solutions, we cannot afford pigheadedness. The scientific method will also do us a great service in the process.

The Building will not be constructed whole at the very beginning. We start out small with apartments that get shared and only as we grow will we start adding central utilities.


Can a single household unit continue to grow in population and size for as long as social cohesion is maintained and the challenges met through proper organization realized by technology and ingenuity?