😵‍💫 Rules

A lot of communities and institutions work by imposing rules. However, in all the rules-based environments I was in, after an initial period of excitement due to novelty and then a period of tolerance, I eventually became more and more detached until I left, and it seems like this approach can’t really work unless the rules are actually a dynamically changing consensus.

Essentially the effect of rules is that one would do something, but then eventually remembers that there is a rule and so does it differently or doesn’t do it, which creates an inner conflict between the part that wants to do something else and the part that wants to follow the rule. For me, the reason I would follow the rules is that I felt there was something that I wanted (such as having certain experiences or living with other people), and the only way to have it was to follow the rules. At first this wasn’t a problem for me because the excitement of getting the thing I wanted would be much stronger than the unpleasantness coming from having to follow the rule, and sometimes I even sought the rule as a way to forcibly take me out of other patterns (e.g. formal meditation being useful to help me out of continuous thinking). But eventually this excitement wore off, and the exciting and rewarding things became just everyday life, and then the rules started becoming harder and harder to follow.

For example, I used to live in a group in a house which had a developed system of rules with the goal of helping people free themselves from conditioning and also create harmony among the members. At first this was exciting to me because it was the only place to live together with other people easily available to me, and because the process they had seemed to be more personalized, as they would try to determine and help you work on your own conditioning, and even intimacy was guided in a personalized way, which seemed much better than other approaches where there is just one transmission or system for everyone. However, eventually the novelty of the environment wore off, the learning seemed to plateau, the intimacy became more routine (and the organized aspects were no longer so interesting, while the more limited spontaneous intimacy felt more limiting), but the whole rule system was still there, and instead of being a useful compromise it turned into a burden, harder and harder to adapt to as time passed, and eventually we parted ways.

The underlying reason seems to me that this rule-following essentially happens out of fear of losing something perceived useful, in conflict with some other part wanting to do something else, and this system of inner conflict, fear and perceived scarcity is the opposite of what is for me the most joyous thing, i.e. a state of loving childlike spontaneity and playfulness, and prevents the latter from fully expressing itself as the rule essentially redirects it into fear.

So it seems to me that the only way to have a lasting environment is to not have a conflict between what each of the people would like to do and imposed rules, which means that if there are rules they need to match what everyone would do anyway and change when that changes, and in this case they don’t really behave as rules anymore, but rather as a dynamic consensus, which I talk about in the consensus section.

🤔 Independence

The simplest strategy to not be in conflict with others is to have everyone be fully independent (e.g. living in their own mobile home, capable of providing materially and emotionally for themselves), so that there is no need to have rules or have people otherwise aligned together.

However, for me interactions with other human beings (in the sense of nurturing and intimate interaction in an environment in which one feels safe) add a lot of richness to lived experience, so it seems like it makes sense for a human experience to include them. It seems like this may come from human beings, and their closest relatives chimpanzees and bonobos, being innately social animals, so it looks like this is probably not something I should try to change about me.

To have intimacy, it seems to me that some level of alignment is helpful or even necessary beyond a certain point. One reason is that otherwise I tend to either perceive the other person as a potential threat or be afraid of being perceived as such: this seems partly driven by society having rules that essentially interpret various aspects of joy, intimacy and connection as well as ways of being and living such as nudity as abnormal, and thus at least for me it is very helpful to know that there is an alignment toward being OK with not following socially conditioned customs. The other reason is that interacting requires being physically together and essentially doing similar things in the time one interacts, which is helped by being generally aligned.

In rainbow gatherings, consensus-based alignment is limited by the fact that the gatherings are very ephemeral, and I feel that this essentially limits the intimacy available to a sort of safe level rather than to what would be nice to have.

❤️ Consensus

Unlike imposed rules, the process of consensus is based on making all the effort that is necessary to harmonize all the different viewpoints rather than creating inner conflict by imposing a rule that not everyone is aligned with.

The way it works, as practiced in the rainbow gatherings, is that people sit in a circle and talk in turns, often with some issue or question where there may be divergent opinions (in rainbow gatherings, the main question is the geographical area where the place for the next gathering should be scouted or its precise location). As talk progresses, eventually it seems that there might be an agreement, so someone suggests that there might be a consensus on something. Then, the talking stick is passed, and everyone has to listen inside themselves. If any objection arises, it is voiced, the stick goes back and the process restarts from the beginning, usually with further discussion. Otherwise, if the person genuinely feels that no objection or worry or doubt arises, they pass the stick, and the process continues until everyone passes the stick.

The result of this process is that, if everyone expresses themselves without fear, all doubts are voiced and the stick passing with no objections eventually signals that everyone is aligned with regard to the question and no more work is needed on it at that moment. If everyone in the environment participated in the process, there is no need to make a rule or record it, since the people are already intrinsically in agreement on what was shared.

Consensus in the rainbow gatherings is in my experience unfortunately flawed due to two issues: the first is that usually only 10-30 people participate in the consensus circles (which mainly consist of the “vision circle”, and scouting and possibly task-specific circles) while gatherings can have hundreds or thousands of people (and if they actually all participated it would often be impossible to even hear each other due to the sheer size of the circle). This means that other people are not necessarily actually aligned: in the rainbow the idea is that they trust the process, but this unfortunately doesn’t necessarily mean there is no inner disagreement with the decision, which would then turn into conflict if the consensus is turned into a rule. I think the only solution for this problem is to live in relatively small groups, so that everyone can participate in the consensus.

The second problem is the massive amount of time that this process can take, due to the fact that even disagreements that appear small can be the result (or the “tip of the iceberg”) of much deeper belief structures, and it can take a ton of time to figure out which of the beliefs are useful, which aren’t, to figure out how to harmonize and then to actually have the patterns soften, address all sorts of objections, traumatized parts, etc. that arise. In rainbow gatherings, this is addressed by essentially limiting decisions to just the location of the next gathering, while most other issues are either handled by individual action, or by customs; however, this results, in my opinion, in limited intimacy, since alignment between people is only generic and surface-level (although this is partially compensated by usually very strong intentions to be loving to each other).

I think a possible solution to this is the usage of AI, which seems capable of synthesizing the thoughts of many people, figuring out what they can immediately agree on, and, assuming each of those people has done AI-assisted introspection so that there is text describing their overall main thought patterns, helping them find the root causes and harmonize the overall thought patterns that lead to the disagreement where it’s appropriate to do so.

Using AI this way has the advantage that it hopefully doesn’t require so much time and effort by humans, which is the major issue of reaching consensus, since often the time and effort required is so great that it exceeds the capacity of the people involved, resulting in an inability to achieve consensus.

AI-assisted introspection is quite effective for me, and while I haven’t tried it yet with other people, it seems a very promising approach.

😵‍💫 Houses and buildings

Lots of people live in unmovable buildings, and lots of communities start around one or more of them.

I lived in an apartment for most of my life until the relatively recent move to living permanently in my car and tent, so this initially seemed a reasonable approach, but I eventually came to the conclusion that it is unlikely that I could be comfortable with a group living in a building long-term.

This is because, both in places I actually lived in, and places I considered to visit or live in, the people living in buildings built complicated rule systems that turned out to be oppressive as I talked about in the section about rules.

Initially I thought this was the fault of the people living there, creating such a rule system unnecessarily; however, I eventually came to the conclusion that the presence of a building itself makes it very hard to not create such a rule system.

I think the root cause is that a building is generally hard to acquire, because it usually either needs to be built at great effort or acquired at great expense, and even if easily acquired creates an often irresistible pull to customize it and to become attached to the customized building, or even to become attached just from habit. Since the building itself (or the land it is fixed in) is shared, this in turn results in a fear of the building or surrounding environment (including the people living there) turning inhospitable for their inhabitants, which is a big problem since just leaving to another building is usually perceived as unthinkable or hard.

This results in the builders or acquirers of the building generally creating what is essentially a complicated rule system built around the building, with a complex set of rules deciding who can live there, how they should behave, under what conditions they are allowed to stay or are forced to leave, etc., which can eventually become oppressive.

Another issue with buildings is that, for people who grew up and used to live in buildings, they trigger all their previous habits and expectations, which may be different from other people’s (for example, expectations about cleaning, how one arranges their objects, etc.); this is exacerbated by the problem that in buildings a lot of infrastructure is needed and shared (bathrooms, kitchen, fridges, laundry, etc.) which means a lot of things to be aligned on which are ultimately unimportant for actual intimacy and interaction with others (i.e. they divide people, but aren’t really pleasant or very useful when solved).

Furthermore, buildings can’t be moved, reducing the richness of lived experience, and also making it impossible to adapt to changing conditions such as changing climate, weather and societal conditions around the place (with a mobile home, if there is any problem, you just drive away, but with a building you are stuck); it is possible instead to move to a different building, but generally very tedious and difficult due to the emotional attachment that develops around the previous building.

Fixed owned land can potentially have the same problems, but likely less than buildings.

One possible improvement can be to acquire the building effortlessly, for example by occupying an abandoned building: this seems to be perhaps the only way to have a building and avoid the previously described problems, but it still seems an inferior solution as it still has the problems of attachment and unmovability, together with risks due to the building being potentially structurally unsound, and the police risk.

The path I decided to pursue is to no longer seek to live in buildings and instead to live in mobile homes.

❤️ Mobile homes

The potential of mobile homes (such as campervans, converted vans, car+tent setups, or tent backpacking setups) is that everyone can live in their own home, while still living closely together, and that one is not tied to a fixed location.

I am currently living in my car and my tent (I share the technical aspects in my guide to my car+tent lifestyle); extending that experience to living with other people also living in mobile homes seems like the most promising path to me, and is what I am currently opening up to.

In such a context, if someone is unhappy with the environment, they can just easily drive away without their fundamental life-sustaining habits being changed (only the scenery changes essentially), and they can also leave with some of the people and continue living the same lifestyle trivially, thus allowing people to naturally and easily split should that become the best path.

Hence, compared to buildings, the need to control the environment is removed or greatly reduced, and there is no need to create rules or defend it.

A possible disadvantage is that since everyone is independent, the incentive to interact coming from the need for other people is absent or greatly reduced, which can result in no or reduced interaction, and thus reduced or no intimacy. I feel like the solution to this is to use a consensus process and, if there is a shared intent to live and be intimate together, to develop it into action.

Note that having multiple people living in the same mobile home can create the same problems as sharing a building, so I think it’s better to have a mobile home for each person, which is easier to achieve with cheaper and smaller systems such as the car+tent approach I use.

🤔 Events

After my childhood and adolescence, the first approach I used to interact with other people was to attend events: I first explored mainstream events such as dance clubs and then as I discovered those environments I explored non-facilitated sex clubs as well as lots of facilitated events, usually focused on a combination of intimacy and spirituality.

Events were very effective for me initially because they allowed me to try new experiences very easily and provided easily accessed environments where intimacy happened easily and was abundant; similarly they can be very useful for other inexperienced people.

However, as the number of workshops and events I attended climbed into the hundreds, they started to become harder and harder to attend, since the compulsory, repetitive and limited parts (logistics to get into the event, initial meditations, introductory consent exercises, preliminary practices) seemed more and more tedious, while the limitations of the main experiences were more and more obvious, and the usefulness of peak experiences without a lasting environment seemed less and less important as they no longer moved anything inside and the motivation to have them was greatly reduced, so they didn’t even happen very often anymore as I would pursue them less.

One cause of this is that fundamentally events require starting from scratch every time with a new set of people. If everyone is welcome, then a lot of introductions are needed to align people with possibly very different backgrounds and make them comfortable.

Attempting to only include people who are experienced or aligned in some ways can reduce this aspect, but usually doesn’t eliminate it because in practice there is a lot of variability of habits, beliefs, expectations, etc. even among experienced people (and also a lot of events are commercially motivated, which creates an incentive to prioritize having many participants over alignment).

Doing this successfully can be possible (although it’s still rare in my experience) but usually only on the single aspect the event focuses on, satisfying that but leaving a desire for broader interaction unmet.

Another option is to have the same or almost the same set of people across events, which leads to the environment being more similar to living in a group or limited relationships, but limited to only meeting at events, and that restriction eventually feels like a limitation.

😵‍💫 Limited relationships

Many people handle intimacy by choosing one person to be intimate with and interacting mostly or only with them.

This always seemed very limited to me, and the experiences I had, while interesting for a while, ultimately confirmed the limitation.

One of the main issues I encountered is that being with one person means that being unavailable for any reason (being tired, wanting to be somewhere else, being absorbed by some task, etc.) completely changes the social interactions available to the other person, who goes from one to zero other people available. This can create a big inner conflict, because on one hand one would like to not reduce the other person’s interactions so severely, but on the other hand one might want to travel or do something or just be alone, and so on. While the emotional aspect of this can be reduced by being less attached to interacting with other people and being with people who are also less attached, the only solution to the practical aspect is, I think, either living with more people, or having a lifestyle that includes easy intimacy with strangers (the latter of which however, if one doesn’t have habits that lead into that naturally, runs into the problems with events).

Another issue is that just being in two people doesn’t quite seem to satisfy my desire for a social environment: for me, two people doesn’t feel like being with a group, but is closer to “being alone but in two”. It seems this may not be something I can change, but rather to come from the fact that chimpanzees and bonobos (closest to humans) live in groups and not dyads like some birds, and this may be the nature of humans as well if there is no social conditioning on top.

Also, the relationships of mine that lasted more than a brief period actually lasted in part due to attachment to me on the other side, which motivated them to take a lot of action to stay together with me: while effective for a while at making the relationship last, this created a lot of suffering, since satisfying the attachment by being with the other person doesn’t solve the root causes of it (which in general can be fears, feelings of scarcity/inadequacy, not enjoying other things, etc.) and thus the attachment persists and eventually it becomes hard to satisfy once the novelty of the relationship fades, and the limitedness of it makes it hard for me to continue unless it evolves into a group situation.

The relationships evolving first to sexuality and intimacy with others and then into a group situation was my long-term motivation, but that can be hard or impossible unless the other person is also aligned with such a perspective, and unfortunately attachment is counter to this, since a group situation can be perceived as a partial loss of the person one is attached to, and the prospect of interacting with other group members might not be perceived as being enough compensation since it is perceived as uncertain and often is something that the person is not used to; at the time I was not able to solve this situation.

When I was a teenager instead I was the one who got excessively attached to other people, and this worked even worse, resulting in not even starting the relationships, and a lot of suffering as well.

On the other hand, without attachment, it can become difficult to take action to actually harmonize and stay together, since at least for me the prospect of living in two people is not compelling enough to make the effort.

❤️ Living with many people

I lived for about a year with about ten people, and while ultimately we drifted away mostly due to the presence of a rules-based structure that didn’t fit me and other things I was not aligned with that I was not able to solve, it made it clear that being immersed in a situation where intimacy is abundant is the right fit for me, and I believe it is also good in general for most people who are willing and able to harmonize with such an environment, provided that the additional complexity of the environment itself is successfully handled.

Living with many people helps solve the main issues of limited relationships: in particular, since many people are there, one person moving out or being unavailable doesn’t significantly affect others, meaning that people can feel free to do whatever they want. It also makes it natural to not attach to anyone due to perceived scarcity, since the environment provides an abundance of interaction, although it’s still possible to attach for other reasons, such as thinking that someone else is better than all the other people.

Note that here living with many people is intended as being intimate and interacting with everyone with no preconceived limits, i.e. without concepts such as some of the people being “partners” while others aren’t, or concepts of “primary” and “secondary” partners, and also with the intention of not considering immutable any differences in actual shared experiences or affinity.

To me, especially in moments in which I am most at ease with others, this also feels like having a tribe, i.e. a sort of “warm fuzzy” feeling of being with other lovely cuddly creatures, feeling at peace and in union with them and the situation. This probably happens because it is similar to the condition of other non-human apes; furthermore, it offers a wider variety of experiences and expertise and can thus better handle many situations than being alone or just in two or few people.

The main issue with this is the added complexity of dealing with many people and the quadratic number of relationships between all pairs which can unfortunately sometimes result in those interactions being mediated by a system, which can turn out to be limiting and ultimately a big problem. This complexity is however mostly not intrinsic, but rather exacerbated by the depth and variability of social conditioning that causes severe differences between people to exist that would not be there without it.

Here my hope is that AI-assisted consensus, as described in the section about consensus, can provide a way to mediate and align people and deal more effectively with this complexity, and potentially make it possible to achieve better results than the way people lived before AI assistance was available, which both in my personal experience and based on what is published about various communities, often didn’t quite achieve as much alignment as one would have liked.

Another issue is the formation of a group identity, evolving into a structure that takes on a life of its own, eventually becoming as limiting and unchangeable as mainstream society is: this is a big challenge, and I think the starting point to avoid this is to encourage everyone to think in terms of “themselves and the people they live with” rather than thinking of the people they live with as a group or as a concept in itself.

A related problem can be separation between those one lives with frequently and other people: this can be addressed by being generally open to other people joining you, and treating both people one has a lot of experiences with and strangers as uniformly as possible, basically seeing everyone as someone who one could potentially have complete intimacy with and thus not as distinct from people with whom such intimacy took place in the past, even though the intimate relationship has not developed yet and in a lot of cases will not actually develop.

😵‍💫 Spiritual frameworks and guru-based transmission

One of the most visible things that looks like something that would help with inner work is communities based on a spiritual framework (i.e. theories about how to free oneself from conditioning) that apply it as the main or one of the main purposes of the community itself.

While this can be somewhat attractive, I came to the conclusion that it’s very unlikely this can work in the long term; the most immediate issue is that usually those frameworks are applied by creating a system of rules, with the issues discussed in the rules section.

Furthermore, as I mention in my reflections on inner work, any system that helps to broaden one’s perspective seems to almost surely eventually start having the opposite effect, of limiting it to the system itself: if that system is practiced individually, then this can be avoided by simply dropping or otherwise reducing the importance one gives to the system, which can sometimes be very difficult, but in principle possible.

On the other hand, if the system has become a social norm of a community, then abandoning it is often impossible, resulting in the creation of a repressive, conditioning and limiting religion-like system, similar to what one was usually trying to no longer live in.

This can be observed as the outcome that all or most organized forms of spirituality have resulted in, usually in contrast to the initial goal, and so it appears probably unavoidable.

In case a guru is present, then there is the possibility of the guru themselves superseding the system: however, this tends to only work in some cases, and at any rate the change is generally done when appropriate for the guru, but instead it’s much more effective and appropriate for every individual to supersede or reduce the importance of the system in their view only when appropriate for them specifically.

At any rate, having a guru introduces a clear separation and distinction between the guru and the non-gurus, which is usually structured so that it is immutable.

😵‍💫 No inner work

Generally not doing any inner work results in people not being aligned, and is thus usually ineffective for achieving intimacy, especially in a deep and lasting way.

The process of consensus described above ultimately implies doing inner work, since the only way to come to a consensus when there isn’t one is for some or all the parties to dissolve some of their beliefs and thought patterns, which requires inner work deep enough to make that happen as a result of greater inner harmony.

❤️ Individual inner work with advisory help

I think that the best solution is the simplest one: everyone works on themselves, and help is offered spontaneously or when it is asked for.

The usual problem of this is that it can be hard to exit by oneself from a limited perspective one is identified with, since one might look at the situation from within that perspective, thus leading someone to seek external help, and the most visible form of that help often consists of people applying spiritual frameworks, with the issues described above.

However, the availability of AI for introspection seems to make individual introspection more viable, by having help that is truly unconditional, since AI will readily perform a lot of work with minimal conditions and compensation and most importantly is flexible and has no resistance to abandoning any framework whenever one feels like it.

😵‍💫 Having some people be the source of income for others

Often, events or communities are based on the model, coming from mainstream society, that someone pays for services offered by others.

This setup can be useful initially sometimes, but in my view the point of living together is to be intimate and align and dissolve unnecessary distinctions, and having someone who pays and someone who is paid, along with all the implications of that, is usually a huge distinction.

Instead, I think it’s much better to have an environment where people forego payment and simply don’t do things that they would not do unless they are paid, at least with regard to activities offered to acquaintances.

😵‍💫 Offering activities to strangers for money

Another recurrent model is having activities related to the lifestyle of the people be offered for money to strangers, usually in the form of intimacy-related or spiritual workshops.

In my experience, this is also quite problematic: in particular, offering them for money tends to distort the nature of those activities, since they are no longer offered because the organizer wants to participate in them, or to help others, but rather for monetary gain, which in addition to making those activities less appealing (at least after what is being taught has been learned), risks creating habits that are also carried into interactions not done for money.

Furthermore, such activities, when offered for free and for the purpose of enjoying them, can serve as a way to meet other people and possibly have them start living together with the people offering them; however, if they are done for money, then there is an artificial separation between the “customers” and the “friends/lovers”, which is quite unnatural, hinders meeting people and pushes away people who are among the most interesting: those who either don’t like commercial activities, or who simply have low need for others and thus are not motivated to jump through any hoops to interact such as payment or other formal obligations.

😵‍💫/🤔 Working together on unrelated business

Working together on things not related to one’s natural lifestyle can work, but can run into severe problems.

The obvious risk is that such work can become compulsory, effectively resulting in forming a company with its strict system of rules and hierarchy; or even if not compulsory, it may still become an engrained pattern, heavily conditioning most of the people and severely limiting the variety of the lived experience.

Another issue is that even if not compulsory, work could absorb most of the people, meaning that for a lot of the time, the people who choose not to work might not be able to find people to be with and be intimate with, which can greatly reduce the benefits of living with others.

🤔 Individual work/business

Having people sustain themselves with work or a business can work.

However, this often requires spending a lot of time performing the work and holding a lot of mental patterns required for it, and even worse having to enact socially conditioned patterns to be able to interact with other coworkers or customers, which might detract from abandoning those patterns with people with whom they are not needed.

Thus, it is not ideal, and significantly worse than being economically independent without having to perform significant work.

❤️ Individual monetary independence with minimal work

I think the best solution is to be able to not think about money as much as possible, which can happen if everyone is monetarily independent without also having to perform significant work, through a combination of minimizing expenses, and low-effort ways to acquire money, such as pre-existing wealth, social welfare or rents and interests on assets.

Obviously the feasibility of this can depend on the situation: it is much easier to achieve than in normal society, since once the conditioned desire to acquire expensive goods, buy or rent buildings, or invest in a career and other expensive things is abandoned only necessities such as food and vehicle/equipment maintenance remain, which are much less expensive.

😵‍💫 Interacting with strong attachment to specific objectives

Sometimes interaction with others is approached with the intent of achieving a specific objective, and of trying to achieve it if at all possible, with no or limited regard for the actual circumstances.

This is often learned, as was the case for me when I was young, from a combination of mainstream conditioning, and an attempt to fix a perceived scarcity of intimacy by trying to directly make specific behaviors happen that are highly correlated with intimacy (e.g. kissing or touching or sexual interactions involving genitals) as opposed to focusing more on the more complex process of cultivating the internal and external conditions that create the intimacy that can then, in some cases, make those behaviors natural and comfortable.

This is a problem if that objective is not shared by the others in an interaction (which can sometimes happen to an extent, but rarely completely), since such behavior generally makes one effectively a threat to the other person, as one is trying to pursue a goal and perform actions involving the other person that the other person doesn’t necessarily want to happen. Even if the actions are rebuffed or unsuccessful, the mere tendency to persistently attempt them makes it impossible for the other person to relax, since they need to do work to make sure the undesirable things don’t happen, and generally need to be in an alert defensive state, the opposite of what is generally desired in intimacy (at least as a default, outside of specific negotiated interactions where one might want to experience non-relaxed states).

🤔 Consensual interactions without inner work

The most immediate solution, which I witnessed and learned in the sex-positive and intimacy workshop scenes, is to introduce a consent framework, teaching people to check for consent (at least when, from an unbiased point of view, it seems necessary or useful) before acting and to check that the other person still consents as the action unfolds.

This greatly reduces the problem in the previous section, since the person who acts is now the one responsible for ensuring that they don’t do anything undesirable; thus, assuming that the other person trusts that one is acting in a way that respects consent, they are relieved from having to defend themselves and can mostly relax in the interaction.

However, if the consent framework merely acts as a filter over one’s tendencies, but a strong attachment to an intent remains, what happens is that the conflict is not resolved, but rather merely transformed from an external conflict between people to an inner conflict between the part that wants to achieve the objective and the part that wants to act consensually: as a result, as was the case for me, the consent frameworks can be perceived as not quite fully addressing the issue.

This conflict still creates suffering in the person, and tends to make their actions less fluid and enjoyable for others. While still not ideal, the inner conflict is still generally better because it allows and motivates the person to resolve it, rather than having an interpersonal conflict that can be unsolvable if neither person thinks they should change.

❤️ Loving interactions as a result of inner work

In my experience, what is ultimately the most fruitful direction is to additionally perform inner work so that the part who desperately wants to achieve the objective softens, and action no longer comes so much from having to fill an inner gap (which the inner work has effectively filled by healing the underlying trauma), but instead becomes an action coming from playfulness and creativity arising from the current situation and thus is naturally abandoned if the situation changes, for instance if someone else expresses that they don’t like the action.

As those objective-achieving parts soften, enjoyment comes more from a kind of blissful relaxation, enjoyment of playful spontaneity and creativity and a kind of tender loving intimacy, with both inner and external conflict greatly reduced or eliminated.

It is interesting to note that the previously described interpersonal conflict, in addition to an excessive attachment to doing things, also requires an aversion to them on the other side. If that aversion is unnecessary (e.g. the experience can actually be pleasant, but triggers previous trauma due to having previously experienced it in an unpleasant way), once the threat is removed, it can soften due to a natural curiosity for increased variety of experience, which can be expressed once there is a general feeling of safety.

❤️ Nudity as the default state

Being naked is indeed the default state of human beings, since they are born naked and would be naked in the original African locations before clothes became available and necessary.

Nudity by default has many advantages: first of all, not having to buy clothes, put them on and wash them. Then, there is the advantage of easier intimacy and not having sexual and non-sexual interactions being separated by the presence or lack of nudity, and finally not having all the patterns and habits from the time one used to live in clothing-required society trigger (for instance, judging people by clothing, emotional distance, etc.).

Clearly nudity is not the best choice when temperature is too low, when one needs to protect themselves from the sun or rain (although I prefer and recommend using a silver-coated umbrella instead of clothes for both sun and rain, unless both arms need to be free), and when performing work with risk of injury.

Of these, only temperature can be a persistent problem, and the solution is to make sure to always live in places with a climate such that it is possible to be naked at least during the day.

When living outdoors or partially outdoors in Europe, this means leaving the continent outside of summer for either the Canary Islands (reachable by ferry) or a more distant tropical or southern-hemisphere location (such as the Caribbean, South America, Northern/Central Africa, South-East Asia, India, Australia).

Living in a building with a heating system or a heat pump also solves the temperature issue, but has the huge downsides of living in a building.

Living in heated campervans in cold climate is also a possibility, but not great when multiple vehicles are involved since it makes moving between them very annoying: once one has a mobile home, I think it’s much better to just drive to a warmer climate.

🤔 Optional nudity, but not by default

Some contexts allow nudity, but nudity is not the default.

Clothes being worn while it’s not cold and protection is not needed can be a sign of either social conditioning about nudity persisting or people not being sure of whether others are comfortable with it, and in both of these cases improvement is possible.

😵‍💫 Forbidden nudity

Forbidden nudity is a rule with all the downsides of rules: I generally avoid places with such a rule for everyday life, since in addition to the tedium of having to wear clothes, it is a thought pattern that is relatively straightforward to give up as opposed to deeper and more complex conditioning, and thus its presence is an indication that most likely there is no intention to deeply give up unnecessary social conditioning.

😵‍💫 Solely different-gender intimacy (i.e. “exclusive heterosexuality”)

Intimacy solely with people of a different gender is widespread, but in my experience tends to work poorly.

The first problem is that, with more people than the number of perceived genders (which is usually two), it’s not possible for everyone to be potentially intimate with each other (since there will necessarily be two people of the same gender). This means it’s impossible to have everyone love each other in all possible ways and causes separation and fundamental differences in how others are treated. Furthermore, it makes effortless intimacy between many people impossible, because one cannot just close their eyes and be cuddled and nurtured in the middle of all the bodies, due to the constant need to check the gender of the people they are in bodily contact with and move away or lessen intimacy from the undesired gender.

This does not happen when the number of people is less than or equal to the perceived number of genders, but this has the drawbacks outlined in the section about limited relationships vs living with many people.

The other big problem is that different-gender intimacy empowers the concept of gender distinction (which can otherwise be diluted or eliminated), which creates separation between people. This, in addition to the effort needed to preserve any mental duality like this one, can easily create a significant practical polarization in experiences of intimacy. For example, one of the genders might view intimacy very positively but find it difficult to be in situations where others feel at ease and thus intimacy happens, while another gender finds it very easy to be in such situations but finds that they often don’t like the interaction or don’t feel fully safe. A sizable distinction like this can make empathizing with others of a different gender difficult, further reducing intimacy.

❤️ Non-gendered intimacy (i.e. “pansexuality”)

Non-gendered intimacy (even just as an intention, even if not completely realized) doesn’t have the problems of different-gender intimacy, and allows everyone to be intimate with everyone with no distinction.

Thus, it is possible to just immerse oneself in the middle of everyone’s bodies and potentially not really worry or think about anything, just enjoying the moment and situation.

Based on my own personal experience and observing others, for those starting from a different outlook, a non-gendered orientation can be achieved by realizing that the sensations one receives are only dependent on the touch itself, which is independent of the gender of the other person, that gender can be seen as a social construct and thus a habit of making intimacy with others conditional on one’s perception of their gender can be dissolved by deconstructing it, and that fundamentally humans and human bodies are the same, only distinguished by the effect of the SRY gene and related mechanisms, which is after all not so fundamental (and in particular, the genitals can be seen as equivalent, with the penis being an enlarged clitoris, and the vulvar labia an unfused scrotum). This, combined with loving intimacy practices to build a feeling of safety, can greatly attenuate or dissolve a gendered intimacy orientation.

🤔 Solely same-gender intimacy (i.e. “exclusive homosexuality”)

Solely same-gender intimacy where everyone has the same gender effectively behaves like non-gendered intimacy (in both cases everyone can be intimate with everyone), and so is generally much better than a solely different-gender orientation and shares the benefits of non-gendered intimacy in the single-gender situation.

However, that requires excluding people based on their gender, and also variety of interaction is diminished since only one gender is present, which is particularly going to be a problem for people who didn’t start with a same-gendered intimacy perspective. For people who did start with such a perspective, it has the disadvantage of not helping them broaden their perspective from their original intimacy patterns.

😵‍💫 No penetration

Some environments forbid penetration or allow it but the people do not usually practice it. This is a strategy that reduces the problems from those reactions, but also throws away the benefits, i.e. “throws away the baby with the bathwater”.

Penetration is a natural activity of animals (since it’s necessary for reproduction), and while one might potentially want to not give importance to such instinctive behavior or bodily sensations, sexuality has the same quality as them, so if sexuality is included, then penetration has in my view to be considered natural too.

In my experience, this strategy creates a perception of incompleteness, and for me it’s not really possible to consider an environment like this as anything other than a stepping stone to other environments where there is no such limitation.

😵‍💫 Pressured penetration

Another very problematic option, of the opposite kind, is making penetration compulsory or otherwise having people feel pressured to do it, either through rules, customs or judgement.

This is also very unpleasant, since whether penetration is comfortable or not is dependent on one’s state of mind/momentary desires and body state, and thus, like most things, cannot be assumed. Being pressured to have an erection and penetrate someone when one doesn’t feel like it is unpleasant, as is being pressured to relax and be penetrated.

While rules forcing penetration are fortunately rare and easily guarded against, the much more widespread phenomenon is feeling pressured to do it, coming from a default habit of giving a lot of importance to penetration, resulting in the other person feeling pressured due to not wanting to disappoint or not wanting to lose access to other kinds of intimacy.

❤️ Healthy approach to penetration

I think that the ideal is to have a healthy approach to penetration, which is the same as for any intimacy practice, i.e. seeing it as one of the activities that one can do, and something one can enjoy and do lovingly when both people want it, with attention naturally shifting to something else if anyone doesn’t.

This can require softening of various previous mental habits and patterns, as well as the willingness for the activity to look or feel a bit different than it felt before if the triggering of specific mental patterns was the predominant perception in the previous experience of penetration.

An unfortunately not fully avoidable (to my knowledge) issue of penetration is that it makes the kind of genitals possessed not totally irrelevant (like other gender-related traits can be), since usually penetration of a penis into a vagina is more comfortable, less tedious and more pleasurable for the giver than the other possibilities which are necessary when that genital combination is not the one present (i.e. penis in anus, strap-on in anus, strap-on in vagina) and, especially with anal penetration, even the size and form of the genitals and anus can sometimes be the difference between it being comfortable and uncomfortable, in a way that is much more likely to make it impossible or not enjoyable to do between two given people than penis-in-vagina penetration. However, as long as penetration is not given excessive importance and does not become essential or perceived as better than other options, I think this can be accepted simply as “how things are” without causing further problems.

🤔 Always using condoms

Always using condoms is relatively simple to implement and mostly effective.

The big disadvantage is of course that condoms are unnatural, and having to use a condom is effectively a rule with the downsides already discussed. Condoms also starkly separate non-penetrative from penetrative sexual activity, which can help reinforce pre-existing conditioning patterns around penetration.

Also, condoms do sometimes break, which, if taken seriously, may require a rapid trip to acquire emergency contraception and HIV PEP, both of which are unpleasant and tedious.

🤔 No condoms with acquaintances, condom usage with strangers

Not using condoms just with acquaintances, but using them with strangers can be a possible compromise.

If anyone is fertile, this obviously requires a contraception strategy: copper IUDs seem the option with the fewest side effects. Initial STD tests are also required.

However, it is not ideal: if using condoms with strangers is required, then that’s a rule with all the downsides previously examined.

The other possible approach, popular in some non-monogamy scenes, is to say that one is free to have condom-free sex with anyone, but must later disclose they did so, letting acquaintances decide whether to continue condom-free interaction, or use protection or not interact at all. However, while in theory this sounds fine, in practice it requires people to make a very difficult mental decision in a spontaneous context in which they don’t really have full information to make it, which is not so great.

Both approaches require relying on other people behaving in a certain way or telling the truth, which can trigger uneasiness if anything makes one suspect that they don’t, and I don’t think there really is a guaranteed way of avoiding that.

❤️ Medical prevention and barrierless sexuality

The best solution in my opinion, and the one I implemented on myself, is to use medical technology to essentially prevent the serious downsides of condom-free sex and then either use or not use condoms, generally not using them with acquaintances, and using them with strangers if required by the other person or if the activity is considered at especially high risk.

Generally, risks can be divided into curable diseases, incurable but preventable and incurable and unavoidable ones: fortunately, the ones in the latter category are thought to be mostly harmless and are anyway hard to avoid even with a less sexually promiscuous lifestyle.

Curable:

• Anything caused by bacteria, curable by antibiotics: e.g. syphilis, gonorrhea (also partially preventable by MenB vaccine), chlamydia
• Anything caused by fungi, curable by antifungals: e.g. candida

Curable but best prevented:

• Pregnancy, preventable with various contraception mechanisms, the best of which seems to be copper IUDs

Incurable but preventable:

• HIV, preventable by taking daily pills of HIV PrEP
• HPV, preventable by the HPV vaccine

Usually self-limiting but preventable:

• Hepatitis A, preventable by the Hep A vaccine
• Monkeypox, preventable by monkeypox and smallpox vaccines

Sometimes incurable but preventable:

• Hepatitis B, preventable by the Hep B vaccine

Incurable and unavoidable, but thought to be mostly harmless:

• Herpes HSV1
• Herpes HSV2

For pregnancy, copper IUDs prevent it with just a one-time setup without affecting hormones, while other options seem to have more downsides.

Hence, a good solution can be this:

1. Get a prescription for HIV PrEP and take it daily (I take daily supplements anyway, so adding a pill is effortless for me). This generally requires initiating a procedure with the health system that will guide you through the other steps, but I include them for completeness
2. Take all possible vaccines, in particular HPV, Hep A, Hep B and also ideally Mpox, MenB, as well as the flu and COVID and other vaccines recommended for the regions you live in and travel to
3. If fertile, set up a contraception system such as copper IUDs
4. Test regularly for STDs, and cure any that show up

Once this system is set up, one can freely have condom-free sex with everyone without significant issues, and can thus basically just no longer worry about it (except for taking pills daily).

A sizable downside is that taking PrEP requires a prescription, and thus usually requires careful planning to have enough when traveling, and for a minority of people it may not be indicated due to other medical conditions.