About ten years ago, during a particularly dull stretch of my life, I began kicking around the idea of starting a commune for disgruntled, disaffected, and broke media professionals. We would call ourselves the Kang Dropout Commune, and we would live on abundant acreage, in some cheap, dusty part of California, where we would dig irrigation ditches, raise chickens, and foster increasingly strange political and religious beliefs. I was joking, but not entirely—a part of me has always wanted to exit society and spend my days feeding goats among a coterie of like-minded individuals.
Unfortunately, I am an irritable person who does not deal well with physical discomfort or neighborly annoyances; I am sure that I would get kicked out of my own commune, rightfully, within a matter of months. The other problem was that I could never figure out what the politics of the commune, its raison d’être, should be. Is dissatisfaction with modern life enough to bond a community? And, if we did not have more to go on than that, would we really be a commune, or would we just be ten or twelve roommates who happened to live about fifteen miles outside of Modesto? Then I had kids, and the idea of communal living went from an idle and mostly ironic fantasy into something that actually made much more sense.
In last week’s , I wrote about middle- and upper-middle-class parents vying for competitive spots in summer camps for their children. That piece sprang from a sense of alienation that I�.