I can’t find freedom lovers in my area…help!
What a plea for help!
And, unfortunately, we’ve heard this before.
We’ve met lots of people who’ve joined all kinds of online communities promising to help you find real community. Only for community wanting people to discover that these online people are just meeting once every few months and almost everyone is driving a great distance to the meet up point.
Then for the few who are brave to drive the distance to meet strangers, they discover that the group just wants to complain the whole time they’re together. Eventually, they become disappointed as the group fizzles out.
At that point some people will join what we call “freedom sororities” who will keep you busy, you’ll meet lots of people, but you’ll never get the laws you want passed and you never go past surface level relationships with any of the people in the group. It’s nice for a fun party, but it’s not good for when you need people you can depend on.
So what’s going on here?
Let’s break this problem down!
First, you need people who actually want to solve a problem together and work together. Creating online communities makes people feel like you can show up as you please…just like on FakeBook. Yuck.
Second, we’ve lost our sense of community. A lot of people in the US think that as adults we should meet someone and instantly become best friends. That’s a nice idea, but we’re adults, the world is complicated, and we need a minimum of 200 hours with a person before we can begin to feel like we know them. Community is a slow growth over time among people who all know each other.
Third, we’ve had to live so fakely out in public in order to ‘go along to get along’ for so long that we’ve forgotten who we are on the inside. This has translated to also forgetting how to parent since we’ve left parenting to the government schools for so long. And into not having the ability to be real amongst our “friends”.
How do we solve this problem?
Well, we need to get back to the basics.
We need to unlearn these bad habits we’ve developed over the years!
First, we focus on being kind to each other. That’s the only job. Be kind. Don’t speak negatively of others and try to do something nice for someone each day. If you want to dive deeper, check “The Kindness Challenge” out.
Second, we re-learn parenting in a community. How many new moms experience postpartum depression in the US and feel like that’s “normal” and they have to do it all alone and ‘suck it up’? It’s not normal. It’s not healthy. And you are supposed to have people around you so you don’t lose your mind. If you want to dive deeper, check “Hunt, Gather, Parent” out.
Third, we build our communities. It’s normal in other countries to have five close friends within five miles of your home that you can count on. The lone wolf statistically never survives a collapse on his own (despite all the Hollywood movies claiming you can). We’re heading for a collapse and it’s time we have a community we can trust around us. If you want to dive deeper, check “Find Your People” out.
If you’re ready to have a real community around yourself…check out our Build Your Community Challenge! We want to have lots of decentralized communities so we all make it through what’s coming next!
XOXO,
The Florida Freedom Family