The Wheel of Life as a framework for communes
Communes have been founded for a variety of reasons: Cheap rent, friendship, sustainability, spiritual practice, hedonism, or surviving the next apocalypse. While I sympathise with some of these, my goal is a very simple, and somewhat selfish one: To live the elusive Good Life™.
I have some intuitions for why living in a commune would improve my quality of life but they are all pretty unstructured, overlapping, and with gaps. Just rambling about those here would leave both you and me confused and unsatisfied. What I need is a framework to help me structure my thoughts.
What makes a good framework? According to my two years in management consulting, a good framework should be MECE: Mutually exclusive and commonly exhaustive. In non-consultant-speak: The elements of our “Good Life Framework” should cover all elements of life without overlapping with each other.
Luckily, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel but can just use an existing one (bad pun, sorry): The Wheel of Life. The Wheel of Life is a framework commonly used in life coaching to get a holistic perspective of an individual’s well-being and life satisfaction. I use it for my yearly reflections and have a hunch that it could perfectly fit as a guide to analyse communities.
The Wheel of Life works by assigning scores to ten categories, arranged as spikes on a wheel, thereby visualising which areas of life need attention or how life satisfaction compares over time or between people. See below the version I will use.
For our Wheel of Life, I will use the following ten categories: Impact, Money, Growth, Health, Environment, Play, Social, Love, Intimacy, Spirituality. These are a merge of categories I found online, and I think they are pretty MECE. See the end of the post of a definition of each.
This framework could now be applied in two ways: By looking at the impact of the commune on the individual (e.g., how does living in the commune affect the individual financially), or by applying it to the commune itself (e.g., how healthy are the finances of the commune). As my goal is to get to the Good Life™, I will primarily use it to look at the impact on me as an individual, but I can already see how it could also be useful to look at how commune processes, activities, ownership structures, etc. affect the individual through these lenses.
In the upcoming posts, I am planning to tag posts with these categories to keep things structured, try to reflect how I experience different communities through these lenses, and hopefully summarise learnings in a post per category.
Below a brief definition for each term going forward:
Impact: My impact on the world, most likely through my career.
Money: My financial situation, both income and spending.
Growth: My development, both personal and professional.
Health: My mental and physical health, including fitness and stress.
Environment: The physical environment I spend my time in.
Play: My hobbies, creative passions, and all kinds of fun experiences.
Social: My parents, siblings, friends, colivers, colleagues, etc.
Love: My romantic life, partnerships, and potentially my children.
Intimacy: The touch, sex and physical intimacy I experience with others.
Spirituality: My spiritual practices, experiences, and states.