The economic world we inherited was built for hoarding and born from division. Someone once fenced off the first field and claimed it as their own. The rest were told to labor or leave. That original gesture of enclosure still lives in every policy, every transaction, every polite denial of need in a conversation with an insurance representative. We are expected to beg for our health, compete for resources, optimize our gains, and withhold what we have until the price is right. Care, even in its gentlest form, has become a currency with which to transact. Affection becomes unpaid labor. Grief becomes a scheduling conflict. Generosity must be rationalized or earned. What was once shared is now hoarded, branded and sold back to us, crumb by crumb.

To rebuild a world anchored in the commons would take more than reform. It will require the collapse of the fantasy that extraction is a natural order. In the current arrangement, the body is a unit of output. Its value is determined by productivity, compliance, or market appeal. Land is reduced to resource, and children are cast as future workers whose value lies in what they can produce for others. The commons does not begin with redistribution; it begins with rejecting the idea that life must be measured in transactions.

In a shared world, no one must prove they deserve clean drinking water. Shelter is not a reward. Nourishment is not indulgent. A child in need is not someone else’s problem, because there is no such thing as someone else. This is no fairytale. It is a form of epigenetic memory encoded in us. Many Indigenous societies practiced relational care that differed from the extractive logics imposed by colonialism. These were not utopias. They contained conflict and complexity. However, they also maintained traditions of reciprocity, stewardship, and collective survival, which disrupt the idea that competition is natural or scarcity is inevitable. Colonization did not erase these ways of living. They continue, often in altered forms: in kitchens that feed many before feeding themselves, in extended families that stretch rather than divide, in resistance networks organized around survival rather than profit. The goal is not to resurrect a perfect past. It is to acknowledge that alternative ways of living have always existed and continue to do so, despite centuries of attempted erasure.

Most people have experienced the commons without naming it. It shows up in the neighbor who watches your child without expectation. It lives in the pot of soup left on a doorstep. It emerges during blackout nights, when people gather instinctively, share batteries, and sit close. No transaction is required because the act is not a trade, but a shared responsibility. Still, dominant systems teach us to distrust this way of living. They cast the commons as idealistic. Institutions often frame mutual aid as temporary, viewing it as useful in a crisis but unsustainable over time. They insist the adult world must run on scarcity and restraint. You earn what you get.

That narrative protects those who hoard. Society rewards conquest through consolidation and control. It thrives on gated access and limited visibility and the commons threatens that order. It interrupts the illusion that only the deserving survive. It dismantles the myth that poverty is a moral failure. In practice, the safest societies are not the wealthiest. They are the most deeply interconnected.

Nature offers a model. Forests do not thrive through conquest. They rely on exchange, decay, and balance. Mycorrhizal networks connect the roots of different species, distributing nutrients according to each species’ specific needs. Pollinators cross ecosystems without permission. No single organism hoards to dominate the rest. This is not a pretty story, but a series of ecological facts. Extraction may produce power, but it does not create stability. The more we isolate ourselves behind brick walls and paywalls, the more fragile we become.

Skeptics will claim that commons-based living cannot scale. Scale may be the wrong metric. Thriving often lives in the intimacy of small communities, in networks held together by presence rather than policy. A neighborhood that shares food, shelter, and time may never appear in global indexes, yet it can outlast systems built for profit alone. And what these same skeptics rarely consider is that greed is not an inevitable consequence. It is learned. We are shaped by systems that reward hoarding and dismiss generosity as naïve. From early childhood, we are taught to compete. Gold stars are given to individuals, not groups. Students who help too much are corrected and told not to cheat. Children learn early that success requires separation. Over time, people begin to hoard not out of selfishness, but out of fear.

People hoard when they believe no one will care for them. People withhold empathy when they have been punished for needing it themselves. A society built on competition will always produce isolation. A culture that honors care as a shared responsibility begins to reimagine what it means to belong.

Obligation is often miscast as a burden. It can also be trust. To be responsible for one another is to say: your pain reaches me. Your hunger disturbs my rest. That is not weakness. It is the recognition of our mutual human condition. Under conquest, autonomy is idealized while dependence is mocked. In the commons, dependence is expected. People need one another. That need does not need to be fixed. It needs to be acknowledged.

Rebuilding the commons requires infrastructure, but more urgently, it demands imagination. We must relearn what enough feels like. We must stop treating precarity as a personal flaw. We must reject success as escape. There is no private sanctuary from collapse. Safety must be shared to be real. The future cannot be purchased alone.

Signs of this shift are already here. We are seeing debt abolition groups. Tenant unions are declaring housing a right. Cooperative farms are redefining growth beyond profit. These are not side projects. They are prototypes. They point toward a world where survival is not about competition. They remind us that the commons was not a myth. It was taken. What we do now decides whether we treat that theft as permanent or reclaim what is rightfully ours.

A world rooted in the commons does not begin with revolution. It begins with remembering. It begins with the instinct to give before being asked. It begins when we treat another’s need as belonging to all of us. The commons is not lost. It is already returning, and it is waiting for us to come home and begin building our gardens together.