In Reinventing Collapse, Dmitry Orlav talks about how those of us who live in the Western world have sacrificed meaningful relationships to the service economy. By living in a world where every thing that we need can be purchased, where politeness is part of the transaction, and money is the main currency, our requirement to create ‘need’ based relationships with people in our community is gone.

Most people only call on the people in their life now for fun and love. Few people call on their friends for true physical needs and its interesting to consider that something has been lost because of this. Not only do I not have a personal relationship with my supply chain — meaning I don’t know the farmer who grows my vegetables or raises the animals I eat, nor do I know the handyman who fixes my eaves, or the plumber who unclogs my drain. When I do interact with people to get these things, they’re just conveyers of service for money. Even their politeness and friendliness is part of what I’m paying for.

Dmitry’s point is that by being able to purchase services we have largely lost the requirement to cultivate real relationships and that this has even hampered our ability to *have* real relationships and to deal with real emotions and connection. He feels that this leaves us vulnerable should society collapse and money become worthless — as it has in many third world economies (and he postulates will happen here in the near future). By not having needs and need meeting within our circle we will all find ourselves on serviceless islands should things collapse and lack the skills to truly connect and create important need-meeting relationships.

Beyond planning for an economic apocalypse, I found this thought notable for our lives now. How has not having to ‘need’ each other impacted our ability to truly connect with people around us? It feels convenient that our needs are so easily met and in some ways are so few — I just need the job to make money, then everything else can be purchased.

It has me considering how to create a network of needing and providing within my own social and physical community. How might this draw us closer together and build more robust and authentic relationships? Where can I create this in our modern world? And what can I provide?