Finished reading Anna Neima’s The Utopians yesterday. It’s a warm, thoughtful, but unflinching look at what the author calls “six attempts to build a perfect society”. Here, in no particular order, are ten of my thoughts after reading this.

1. Hardbacks with photographs for the win. This is not a comment on the message yet, more on the medium. My copy was a paper book in hardback - and it came with black-and-white photograph sections (see image above). It won’t always work, but maybe, as we’re forever scrambling to find new online layouts to impress our readers, we ought to at least consider the alternatives. I was engrossed, impressed, informed.

2. Beware a man who says he has a vision. Maybe the statistics look different now, a hundred years on from the events Neima describes. And ostensibly, the gender roles in the 1920s were making it much harder for women to play their part. But her case studies mostly revolve around male figures (Dartington Hall being perhaps the most gender-equal, and, tellingly, the least creepy example).

3. Another way of life is always possible. It’s easy to cringe at the ways in which all these grand designs met similar, disappointing fates. But here’s the silver lining: these people built new realities for themselves. Sometimes literally out of mud and straw bales. Sometimes with the most tyrannical of empires breathing down their necks. I couldn’t help being impressed by that.

4. The money always runs out. I think I saw it quoted in Donald A. Norman’s book somewhere: the moment a project team kicks off their project, they’re already behind schedule and over budget. I don’t think I’m spoiling the book much by saying this. It’s still entertaining to see the way in which the budget difficulties arise (ninety red bicyles for your disciples, anyone?), and the creative ways in which the communities try to patch their finances.

5. The idea of manual labour is alluring… There’s a phrase which we often repeated back in Poland, only half-jokingly: “How about we say goodbye to it all and leave for Bieszczady?” It’s good to see that the appeal is not anything new. The temptation to quit your bullsh*t job and engage in something that matters. The drive to be driven. The need to connect to something real.

6. And the lived experience of manual labour is back-breaking. People who dream about farming all day invariably suck at farming all day. People who fantasize about living off the land end up shunning the hard work needed to live off the land. This, also, is nothing new.

7. Love thy administrator. The most enduring communities in Neima’s account had a few things in common. One of them was the “visionary + operations manager” pairing. You had the prophet, or teacher, or “one who knows” - to motivate, lead, set direction, and inspire. And close by his (invariably, his) side, you had someone who knew how to farm the land they were given, how to cook meals for dozens of people, when and what with to pay the bills. And when these guys left - well, you can imagine.

8. But keep dreaming the good dreams. Neima concludes the book with a heartwarming summary of different ways in which the utopian ideas she focuses on evolved. The mutations and offshoots were plentiful, and not all of them wholesome. But the ideals you’ll read about, throughout the book, refused to die, and kept coming back to life across the globe. Your admin person can’t always do all that - so keep your dreamers dreamin’.

9. We’re all just making it up as we go along. All those confident, enlightened men. All those eloquent pamphlets and treatises. The ones featured in The Utopians, and the ones they were rising up against. All of them changed their minds, stumbled, clutched at straws, reworked their designs - or withered as they clung on to old ideas while the world moved on.

10. But the real utopias were always the people we met along the way. This was one of the most wholesome discoveries I made while reading the six stories Neima published in her book: they were interconnected, and they went on to connect to many more. Each of them happened because another one of them happened. Many of the communities went on, or grew stronger, because of interpersonal connections with people from the other communities. And so many of our modern-day ideas about life, philosophy, work, spirituality (from Alan Watts to David Graeber, from Marie Kondo’s minimalism to Silicon Valley’s microdosing) can be traced back to something that took place in one of these places, or in another such setting. It never worked out the way The Man With A Plan intended - but it always worked something else out along the way, and it’s always been through this cross-pollination.

I hope you get to read the book, it’s been fun!