There’s something that I say so often, I sound like a broken record: It’s better to be proactive rather than reactive.
Sounds simple enough. Most people would agree with it. Most people also aren’t doing it.
Because being proactive is about being predictive. It’s about developing the discernment to look down the road and understand what the needs are going to be at that time. It’s about building before you need what you’re building.
And right now, in this particular moment in history, what needs to be built is community.
Not community as a nice-to-have sort of thing. Not community as a social media strategy or a weekend enrichment program. But real Community. Community as infrastructure. As the connective tissue that holds people together when everything else starts pulling them apart.
We are living through what some are calling a meta-crisis. Not one problem but a convergence of crises. Economic fragility. Institutional erosion. Ecological pressure. Epistemic collapse. The kind of moment where the systems people have trusted to hold things together begin to fail in ways they didn’t expect and weren’t prepared for.
And here’s what I know about that kind of moment: you cannot build community inside of it. You can try. But desperation makes it hard to be generous. Scarcity makes it hard to trust. Fear makes it very hard to see the person next to you as a neighbor rather than a competitor. And the kinds of communities that are built in the midst of crisis, are communities of pure necessity. And those kinds of communities are much less than ideal.
Healthy and sustainable community must be built before the crisis arrives. That’s the kind of upstream thinking that I write about so often.
The question isn’t whether hard times are coming. The question is whether you’ll face them alone; or with people who already know your name, already trust your word, already know what you have to offer and what you’ll need in return.
That’s what a collapse community is. It’s not a literal bunker. Not a tribe preparing to hold everyone else off. Not survivalism wearing a friendly face. But…
A seed.
There’s a critical difference between a survival community and a seed community. Survival communities optimize for protection. They draw the circle tight. They prepare for the worst by hardening against it. And I understand the impulse. I really do. But hardening against the world is just a slower way of losing it.
Seed communities are built for something different. They’re built to transmit. To carry forward the values, the practices, the relational patterns that extractive systems have spent decades eroding. Mutual aid. Reciprocity. The understanding that your flourishing and mine are not in competition; they’re connected.
That knowledge is old. And it’s been disappearing.
Building community now isn’t just practical preparation. It’s an act of preservation. It’s choosing to remember (and practice) a way of being together that the dominant culture has been systematically forgetting.
And here’s the thing about windows. They don’t stay open forever.
Collapse often doesn’t happen all at once. There’s a period, and I believe we’re in it, where intentional building is still possible. Where we still have enough margin, enough breathing room, enough trust left in the soil to plant something real. Once crisis becomes acute, you’re in triage. You’re managing damage, not building foundations. You cannot plant trees in a flood.
This is the window.
And the work inside it isn’t complicated. It doesn’t require a manifesto or a movement or a perfectly designed platform. It requires showing up. Knowing your neighbors. Sharing what you have. Asking for what you need. Practicing generosity before you need others to be generous with you. Building the habits of mutual care in ordinary times so they’re available in extraordinary ones.
That’s what this journey (RIVER) has always been about for me. Not a product. Not even a project, exactly. A practice. A daily rehearsal of the world we want to carry forward. So, get swept away by this RIVER. Because here’s what I believe. The communities being built right now; without fanfare, in neighborhoods and networks and small circles of trust, these are not just support systems for hard times. They’re the seeds of what comes next.
And the best time to plant a seed is before the storm.
The second best time is right now.