Where and how do we set up camp?
#campcrafting 007: How understanding your camp culture can help you determine where to live
To have a good life, you don’t need kids or a husband or a picket fence. You just need to find people who matter and keep walking toward them.
~Many Len Catron, 2018
1. How to measure your primal camp culture
You’re well on your way now. You have founded a strong and resilient “meta-family” — an Honor group to share the challenges and joys of the campcrafting quest. The goal of this article is to give some tools to determine where to build this new intentional community so that it thrives!
In the world crafted by our baby-boomer forebears, if you wanted to pursue economic and professional opportunity, this de facto meant leaving your tribe, band, and camps behind. In the Global North, social relationships have the tendency to be subordinate to professional and financial success. In a twisted incentive structure, the institution you work for can be the source of your social relationships, instead of your social relationship being the reason for your job. Yet, never before in modern history has there been a greater opportunity to regain geospatial autonomy over our lives.
If you ever wanted to live closer to the people you care about by adhering to the Principle of Intentional Proximity, now is the moment to capitalize. To this end let’s explore your options as you and your campmates attempt to decentralize away from the institutions that care little for your wellbeing and focus on the centralization of your campmates to each other.
Moves are expensive, and take time and energy to coordinate, so it’s worth putting some up-front legwork into the project. Whether co-locating in the same neighborhood, or cohabitating in the same house, there are many ways to potentially geo-spatially link with your camp. Let's explore a template that allows you to evaluate individual and group preferences when considering different geographical regions for your new intentional community. You want the final resting place of your camp to be characterized by elements that reflect a little bit of each member. Therefore, let’s consider some best practices as you take each individual into account and collectively determine the final destination of your camp.
Everyplace you could potentially live has a culture. But how do you know if, as a group, you’ll gel with it? Here is where deep diving the primal template of human culture — that is The Tight-Loose Culture Continuum — comes in handy.
2. Is your camp Tight or Loose?
A dash of social science science can help. It’s time to get a pulse of the culture of your camp. The primordial template for all cultures — described aptly in Michele Gelfand’s Rule makers, rule breakers: Tight and loose cultures and the secret signals that direct our lives1 — is cultural “tightness” versus “looseness.”
Tight versus loose is the primary mechanism by which cultures shape the norms that the people that live within it monitor, observe, adhere, obey, or break.
In general, a tight culture has little tolerance for deviance, whereas a loose culture has weaker, more permissive social stances. On the individual level, people with a tight mindset have keen sensitivity to signs of disorder. They pay a great deal of attention to social norms, possess a strong desire to avoid mistakes, exhibit high levels of impulse control, and relish structure, order and routine. In contrast, people with a loose mindset are characterized by low sensitivity to disorder. They are less attentive to social norms, more prone to risk taking, are more impulsive and thrive in novel environments where ambiguity and change are the norm.
For example, in 1998 Chrysler Corporation and in Daimler-Benz underwent a massive merger. Millions of dollars were at stake, but what they had not considered was the cultural differences that underscored what made them successful as independent companies. The German Daimler-Benz was top-down, heavily managed, super bureaucratic and rigidly governed; Chrysler had a more relaxed business culture and way less red tape. Their corporate room was brainstorming rap sessions, whereas their new partners were buttoned up, hands on the desk, and a watch and listen meeting style. After years of dysfunctionality between their attempt at teaming up, their would be union ended in divorce.
To ward your camp from divorce scenario, it’s time to get a pulse on the individual and camp Tight versus Loose scores; you and your camp should take Michele Gelfand’s Lab Tight versus Loose quiz. For example, the Atlanteans partook and I broke down the stats. In summary, the Atlanteans average as a group is a moderately tight culture. Although there was pretty hilarious variation (that neatly fell into the stereotypes we had cultivated towards each other over the years) around these scores. Consider the graph below. As a group we scored 64, and as you can see the bar plot (with the X-axis blue bar plot representing the group average) and a standard deviation describing the variation around it (this is the group variance in the orange error bars). Notably, Turtle scored tightest (84), and Wolf scored lowest (47) with Bear (59) and Stag (54) falling into a moderately loose category, and Horse (70) and Lion (71) falling into a moderately tight category.
How can we interpret these scores? Importantly, for when you score your quiz, determining who is outside your group average helps you understand extreme outliers in your group. These can serve as starting grounds for deeper considerations about how to mitigate and potentially prevent conflict between extremes amongst the group. Recall, the general insight of tight versus loose cultures, is that the former has little tolerance for deviance, whereas the latter has weaker, more permissive social stances.
Since the template is so fundamental, the same tight-loose logic that explains differences across nations and states and also explains conflict or cooperation in the classroom, boardroom, bedroom, and the negotiation table of your camp.
Your camp will create its own culture – and understanding how this mechanism can be applied to strengthen your camp will be an important tool in your campcrafting quest. Using this knowledge wisely will do much to reduce conflict and increase cooperation.
As you can, there’s a good amount of variability amongst our members. This is really important to quantify and talk about because each person has a different inherent expectation about how camp life is negotiated. In the Atlantean case study, Turtle and Wolf are the extremes on both, falling outside the group cultural norm. Therefore, it’s especially important to keep individuals in mind when considering expectations with respect to camp governance (a topic explored in a previous article).
Our aim is to find a balanced Goldilocks zone between tight and loose cultures, combining elements of both for our camp's culture. In other words, danger exists in the fringes — both excessive freedom and excessive constraint — can damage the campcrafting quest. For individuals that are on the polar extremes, careful consideration should be taken to ensure open and clear communication about how to establish and enforce norms. Especially important for cohabitating camps, this occurs by negotiating clear boundaries around tight domains, and clear contexts when looseness is desired. Domains can even be associated with spaces, where the more public the space, a living room or kitchen, the more structured tightness may be beneficial. Bedrooms, on the other hand, are places where individuals can behave in their most unguarded manner and most norms are relaxed. If conflict exists, it likely is happening in this dimension. Target the specifics, and outline social norms that the whole camp can agree on.
A helpful exercise, now that we have the shared terminology to express cultural domains, is to have a camp meeting where you:
As a group, what are your camp domains? List them.
As individuals, list your highest priority domain, and your least priority domain. Why is it so important to you personally?
As a group, what is the most important public domain? How can we develop norms around this domain to keep everyone happy?
For us, with the initial move into a new home, with three huts and six members, one of the first issues to boil up was how food is stocked in the refrigerator, how to deal with messy dishes, and when the child was born, how to deal with the toys that are left out in the living room. Here, tight versus loose terminology was extremely useful in our negotiations of social norms. We tightened up the public space of the kitchen, but loosened other areas of the house. Because the goal is the Goldilocks zone of ambidexterity, we knew that this is should be a tradeoff, and if misapplied, with too many domains of tightness and control, that we would lose the fun, creative moments (that extreme tightness tend to repress) of living in a home together.
3. Houses, Huts, Hearth and Home
In OUR TRIBAL FUTURE an entire chapter is dedicated as an architectural guide to building a 21st century camp. Within, I describe four primordial co-living models, or options for readers to explore. Although this is beyond the scope of this article, it could still be a very helpful backdrop. Yet, it’s worthwhile now to consider how your camp’s culture can influence your dwelling space. In the book Life at Home in the 21st Century a team of researchers tracked thirty-two middle class Los Angeles families around their homes to see how people actually live within their house.
The image below illustrates what it’s like during primetime living as what was tracked was “the location of each parent and child on the first floor of the house of ‘Family 11’ every 10 minutes over two weekday afternoons and evenings.” The house is typical in size, if not a bit smaller than the average new home in the United States which in 2013 was 2,662 square feet – and radically more space than prehistoric dwellings. It should pop out to you that the distribution of activity is dominated by the kitchen. A key property of a camp is the hearth — which is where food is prepared and cooked. For many societies, especially nomadic ones, hearths can be either inside or outside. For post-industrial societies though, like the one where houses like this are common, hearths are typically indoors.
We can say people are cohabitating if they are sharing a hearth within a house.
Traditionally, houses crafted in post-industrial societies are comprised of several rooms with differing functions. For many human societies, the room and the house are identical — as shown in the figures below.
For our purposes, we will define a hut as a room where either an individual, pairbond, or mates and children reside. Cohabitation is a form of condensed colocation where multiple individuals, pairbond’s, mates and offspring share a house and hearth.
Hearths are important because they serve as a bottleneck of activity, and for many cohabitation scenarios the cohesion of the group and how much social pressure it experiences correlates with the number of hearths, relative to the number of social units within a camp.
Imagine, for example, seven roommates sharing a single stove and the conflicts of time, maintenance, and access. Now imagine how that pressure would shift if there were two stoves. With this in mind, you can calculate a cohabitation scenario with your camp. You can easily calculate the hearth-to-hut (HTH) ratio to capture and predict this core pressure.
Mathematically, the HTH is the proportion of the number of hearths (cooking stove and food refrigeration area) to the number of active rooms (huts) within the house.
For example, if you had a single bi-level house, with two hearths and five active rooms, the ratio would be 2 to 5 and the HRH would equal 0.4. The closer to one, the less pressure around this fundamental human activity. For the Atlantean camp, we didn’t know it but we had set our initial default settings at maximum, given we had several cohabitating huts, with only one hearth. We were sitting at a HRH of 0.25, which would prove to have its challenges.
If you’re cohabiting, like the Atlanteans choose to, then one of your most critical considerations will be the HTH. It certainly was the most critical point we did not perform due diligence on, with lasting consequences to the camp. If there are members that have extremely tight scores, this will be a place where many of the sticking points to cohabitation will arise.
For camp members just getting to know each other in a living context and shared space, it is recommended to keep the HRH as close to 1 as possible at first, until you learn to understand each other’s personalities and iron out governance strategies that will keep the camp cohesive. If you haven't had much experience living with roommates in shared spaces, it could be beneficial to try cohabitating in a low-pressure living situation to assess compatibility. You may have a very strong Honor Group, but going into a situation where you take out a loan on a house collectively without having any previous experience living together may be a recipe for disaster. Consider the trade-off (figure below) explicitly with your fellow campcrafters before choosing to either cohabitate or collocate.
Before sinking tons of resources into this end, there are lots of ways to get a feel for living with someone; for example, traveling and sharing rooms together for a prolonged period of time, or simply renting a space together as a trial run before purchasing a mortgage together are ways to vet your new potential living arrangement. This is especially important for those who are more introverted or who were raised as only children. Sharing space is a muscle that many of us in our mismatched societies haven’t exercised, so just like you would approach tweaking your running form or working on your mechanics for practicing a new lift in the weight room, take it slow and steady before trying the full range of motion with peak power in execution.
4. Geolocating the perfect spot for your camp
For the purposes of our aim of finding a location to move to and live, it’s also important to get a sense of how your group Tight versus Loose scores stack up when compared against other regions. This ensures that where you move ends up being in alignment with the group’s culture. For example, if mapped against the 50 states in the U.S. the Atlanteans fall in the top tenth percentile of tight cultures. That’s critical to know! As a thought experiment, if we ended up in California or Oregon (the loosest states in the Union) the campcrafting project may be doomed by nothing else than the fact that we just don’t vibe with the regional culture. Continuing this thought experiment of the Atlanteans seeking a compatible state, sticking to the orange and light green states would be a solid way to narrow the search options.
What about the Atlanteans on the international scene? We’d be somewhere between Japan and Norway in our tightness. Now of course, international options are tricky because you need to compare passports. Governments, in their top down centralized control systems, try to limit the options of their citizens, although as the technology of decentralization matures, this will become harder to enforce at the national level.
The second instrument to assess group preference for building an intentional proximity and community is a basic camp location survey.
I’ve provided the template the Atlanteans use, but your camp can customize its own.
This is a platform to generate incredibly valuable data. It allows a camp meeting where each member can justify their answers and give the less vocal members an opportunity to feel real ownership in the process of finding their new home. For example, even though many Atlanteans are vocal about loving urban environments and nightlife, we found surprisingly that the average was a 20-45 minute commute to an urban cultural center.
Time zones, neighborhood types, school districts, all these elements can be on the table for discussion. Most importantly though, may be the model of colocation your camp wants to invest in. For many, living on the same property may seem like too much of a hassle and too much loss of autonomy. But for the Atlanteans, we came to the strong conclusion that to us, this is only worth doing if we live on the same property, with multiple homes and both indoor and outdoor social and food preparation spaces by which our families can cohabitate. The data was clear and the discussion prompted a sense of resolution that we will accomplish this goal together.
The third and final step is to use the camp parameters explored in steps one and two to filter your search for a home location. One excellent tool we used was Nomadlist. All your top filters can be applied in a search that can narrow down and even help highlight places previously not considered.
My recommendation is to designate three to five locations that your entire camp will go visit to get a feel for the locations. This is “field work” that can be a perfect mix of business and pleasure. Most importantly, you want to test out the core attributes of what is your ideal camp location and ground truth your data with a real, live location. This should be the most fun process of all and prove to be a challenge that has the potential to also serve as a powerful bonding experience for the camp.
Another option is to consider cohousing communities that are rapidly growing across the United States and Canada. Two principal organizations that have spearheaded the North American cohousing movement are:
These resources provide directories of existing communities, online courses, classifieds, and ways to connect with other communities.
Using prior established cohousing communities as a foundation to build a camp comes with its distinct advantages and challenges. On the upside, you benefit from the experience of individuals who have already navigated the challenges of community-building, offering invaluable insights and tested frameworks. They bring with them an established sense of community, which can serve as a robust starting point for your camp. However, on the downside, this pre-established framework can limit your creative autonomy. With ingrained values, traditions, and structures, there may be less room to shape the camp culture uniquely, potentially restricting the organic development of a new communal identity.
The pandemic has been a period of societal upheaval. It has presented immense challenges, on multiple fronts.
Yet, as noted by Albert Einstein, “In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.”
Lockdown has been a bizarre opportunity for self-diagnosis. It’s been a moment to reflect on the state of our lives. Are we content with the status quo? Or, now that the rat race was suspended for many, can we consider the ways by which we can fundamentally change the nature of our day-to-day existence? When an entire society simultaneously experiences a norm change — as we did with remote work — you get emergent global economic trends. For example, the one witnessed in the beginning of 2022 known as The Great Resignation. This is the extraordinary exodus of employees voluntarily resigning from their jobs en masse. It’s my hope that the greater flexibility offered workers will only embolden more people to take on the campcrafting quest. Ultimately, stitched together by small, healthy, highly bonded and prosocial units — a decentralized society will thrive.
We’ve explored a host of tools now to help you and your fellow campcrafters. Now it’s time to figure out your camp culture, and scour the land for the perfect dwelling in which to live out your campcrafting quest. Timothy Miller once wrote2: “As long as people dream of a better world, some of them will try to create it.” Get after it, and create a world worthy of your camp’s legacy!
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Gelfand, Michele. Rule makers, rule breakers: Tight and loose cultures and the secret signals that direct our lives. Scribner, 2019.
Miller, Timothy. Communes in America, 1975-2000. Syracuse University Press, 2019.