I think that’s a totally valid way of framing things for an org. I think it’s valid as part-of-the-frame for group houses. But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live. “Alice gets out of the way so that Bob and Cameron can make progress” isn’t really workable when “progress” is built out of “Alice and Bob and Cameron having a healthy life together.”
My frame on this is option #1 above, where “refactor into smaller houses so you can have fewer stakeholders”, which goes along with “and people self-sort into groups of houses where people with similar preferences can have more agency over their lives.”
There was some intrinsic shittiness to the situation where a major thing early on is “well, we have a bunch of people living together, who weren’t really filtered for ‘How Well Do They Cope With Crisis Together?’, and it’s probably better if some of them leave, but being forced to leave your home suddenly is among the more stressful things that can happen to a person. So I see the key question as “how do negotiate who leaves, or, how people decide to stay together and what new norms they create, in a way that is fair.”
But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live.
I think the problem is a bit harder than this. Even if you get a bunch of “can’t deal with it” people together in one house, that house still ends up in a not-great place. They maybe don’t block other people, so that’s a plus, but it still sucks for them.
The bottom line here is, if someone does not have the mental capacity to deal with a problem themselves, then the only way to get a good solution is to outsource the thinking/deciding to someone else.
This feels like it’s missing something important to me. I can say the object level things that feel off, but suspect this is more of a frame disagreement situation (which I expect to be hard).
On the straightforward, factual level:
I think how well people can deal things is very contingent on their environment. In a world where they are constantly under pressure from a bunch of people with varying degrees of distrust, I think it can be really hard to deal with things. If they’re in an environment where they more or less get to directly control their life, I expect them to fare much better. Both because they object-level get to live in ways that are good for them, and also because having self-directed-efficacy is good for people even if they don’t get to use it to live exactly how they want.
When I imagine people splitting into sub-houses, I’m not imagining everyone splitting up based purely on how well they handle stress. I’m also imagining them splitting up based on what other things they actually want, and what style of stress management they prefer. i.e.
...do they prefer staying in their original home?
...do they prefer long walks in nature?
...do they prefer easy access to outdoor walks, or indoor hangouts, without other in person friends? Or are videocalls a good enough way to be social? Do they even care about being social?
...do they really want to remain in a city where they have lots of social or professional connections?
People vary on a lot of axes, and they form subgroups that enable each subgroup to thrive without as many competing access needs.
And then there’s the fact that smaller groups just requires less negotiation, period.
I agree that this a dimension along which things can improve orthogonal to stress-capacity, and if improvement along this dimension reduces stress-level enough, the original problem can go away to a large extent.
I think that’s a totally valid way of framing things for an org. I think it’s valid as part-of-the-frame for group houses. But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live. “Alice gets out of the way so that Bob and Cameron can make progress” isn’t really workable when “progress” is built out of “Alice and Bob and Cameron having a healthy life together.”
My frame on this is option #1 above, where “refactor into smaller houses so you can have fewer stakeholders”, which goes along with “and people self-sort into groups of houses where people with similar preferences can have more agency over their lives.”
There was some intrinsic shittiness to the situation where a major thing early on is “well, we have a bunch of people living together, who weren’t really filtered for ‘How Well Do They Cope With Crisis Together?’, and it’s probably better if some of them leave, but being forced to leave your home suddenly is among the more stressful things that can happen to a person. So I see the key question as “how do negotiate who leaves, or, how people decide to stay together and what new norms they create, in a way that is fair.”
I think the problem is a bit harder than this. Even if you get a bunch of “can’t deal with it” people together in one house, that house still ends up in a not-great place. They maybe don’t block other people, so that’s a plus, but it still sucks for them.
The bottom line here is, if someone does not have the mental capacity to deal with a problem themselves, then the only way to get a good solution is to outsource the thinking/deciding to someone else.
This feels like it’s missing something important to me. I can say the object level things that feel off, but suspect this is more of a frame disagreement situation (which I expect to be hard).
On the straightforward, factual level:
I think how well people can deal things is very contingent on their environment. In a world where they are constantly under pressure from a bunch of people with varying degrees of distrust, I think it can be really hard to deal with things. If they’re in an environment where they more or less get to directly control their life, I expect them to fare much better. Both because they object-level get to live in ways that are good for them, and also because having self-directed-efficacy is good for people even if they don’t get to use it to live exactly how they want.
When I imagine people splitting into sub-houses, I’m not imagining everyone splitting up based purely on how well they handle stress. I’m also imagining them splitting up based on what other things they actually want, and what style of stress management they prefer. i.e.
...do they prefer staying in their original home?
...do they prefer long walks in nature?
...do they prefer easy access to outdoor walks, or indoor hangouts, without other in person friends? Or are videocalls a good enough way to be social? Do they even care about being social?
...do they really want to remain in a city where they have lots of social or professional connections?
People vary on a lot of axes, and they form subgroups that enable each subgroup to thrive without as many competing access needs.
And then there’s the fact that smaller groups just requires less negotiation, period.
I agree that this a dimension along which things can improve orthogonal to stress-capacity, and if improvement along this dimension reduces stress-level enough, the original problem can go away to a large extent.