The Community You Build at Forty Is the One That Holds You at Eighty

On building a place to grow old in before you need one. How Kibbutz Samar and Tamera handle aging, care, and the generational handoff.

What this essay argues

On aging, care, and the generational handoff: what it takes to build a community at forty that can hold you at eighty, drawn from Kibbutz Samar and Tamera.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. Grounded in interviews at Kibbutz Samar and Tamera.

The essay

On building a place to grow old in, before you need one

Before embarking on this journey, I assumed that building a community was mostly a project for people in their twenties and thirties. People with energy and a willingness to start over. The older people I met inside these communities slowly changed my mind. They were very much part of the meetings and the meals and the daily life of the place, just differently than they had been at thirty. They had not been moved somewhere else when their roles changed. They were still an integral part of the community while transitioning into being elders.

The contrast with the world outside these communities is what brings me to this piece. Outside the community, growing old looks very different.

The default outside

In most of the late-industrial world, growing old is something that happens to you alone, or close to it. The nuclear family is too small to absorb the work of caring for its own elders. The children live in different cities. They have their own jobs and their own children. When the person needs more care than a Sunday visit can provide, the family looks for somewhere that does it professionally.

There are gentle versions of this arrangement, with gardens and staff who know your name. There are harsher versions, in places that are understaffed and underloved. Either way, the person ends up somewhere they did not build, surrounded by people they did not choose, with their family visiting on the schedule the family can manage.

This is the model you usually see in the Western world. Most of the places outside of intentional communities run on it. It absorbs almost everyone who lives long enough to need it.

In my opinion, the strange thing is how rarely the arrangement is questioned. There is nothing inevitable about it. It is a specific arrangement that emerged with a specific set of conditions: industrial labor patterns, the splitting up of extended families, the privatization of care into something you pay for rather than something you owe. The arrangement is recent, historically. People lived in very different arrangements for most of the time humans have been on earth.

The intentional communities I have spent years inside have, at their best, kept alive a different option. A place where you grow old surrounded by people who know your story and have a role for you that does not end when you slow down. It is imperfect and often unstable. When it works, it works.

Growing old at Samar

Samar is a small kibbutz in the Negev desert, in southern Israel-Palestine. It was founded in 1976, has around 254 members, and was built on a more radical version of the kibbutz idea than most. A kibbutz is a collective community, traditionally agricultural, originally built around shared property and a shared economy. The first one was set up in 1909. At peak there were close to 280 of them, spread across what is now Israel-Palestine. Most have privatized to some degree by now, meaning the collective economy has been replaced by individual salaries and a smaller core of shared services. Samar was one of the last holdouts.

For decades Samar ran without managers and without a formal salary, with the dates from the groves as the central income and the dining room as the central place. Yuval, who has lived there most of his adult life, described what the inside of that felt like.

"It's twenty years of organizing anarchy."

— Yuval, Samar

The whole place revolved around the dates. In summer the children worked in the groves alongside the adults. Everyone ate together in the dining room. People knew each other across decades.

You cannot do that for free. Yaniv, another long-time member, said it directly.

"You should always think that in 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, maybe 50 years, you will still live with these people."

— Yaniv, Samar

The benefits of living together at this depth are real: land, shared space, the ability to host people, the absence of being alone. The price is that the neighbor you might be angry at is also a person whose pain you know. You are mixed with these people at the most serious levels. You know their life story, and they know you know.

Living together at this depth, over decades, has a cost. Mostly argument, and the daily work of figuring out what to do next.

"We had endless kibbutz meetings. Everyone spoke, everyone argued. It was democracy alive, not theoretical. Sometimes it was hell, but that was the way decisions were made."

— Nirit, Samar

Uriel, who has been at Samar since he was young, said that after ten or fifteen years, problems start to accumulate. People get hurt by each other and they stop showing up. If there is no foundation underneath holding the community, when crisis comes there is nothing to lift you back up. Most communities I have visited hit this wall. Most do not survive it without something underneath the friction.

Nirit named the thing that has to be underneath.

"At the base of partnership there must be some humanity, some compassion, goodwill and tolerance. Even if it is no longer what it once was, it is still possible to continue if there is tolerance and goodwill."

This is what carries a community across decades. The willingness to keep choosing tolerance when the other person has been impossible for thirty years. The choice to keep showing up to the dining room even though you saw the same person at the meeting last night and they made you furious.

In a place built like this, growing old is part of the same life as being there at twenty or forty. Eileen, who has been at Samar since the early years, has now retired. She used to work in the school as a librarian, and she still does children's books on the kibbutz, where she walks to her work. She told me she is more of a Samar'nik than she has ever been. She does what she wants to do and contributes where she wants to contribute, which she says is what she has always done.

Retirement at Samar is a change in what your work looks like, not an exit from membership. Your work is on the same land you live on. The dining room is still the center of everything, the pool is still there, the day has its rhythm. You are still inside the place that knows you.

Then comes the further part of the arc. The part where the body begins to fail and the question of care becomes literal. Samar has gone through significant changes over the years, and Nirit told a story about what happened twenty years after the biggest of those changes.

"My mother, twenty years after the change, she was already demented and needed help. The kibbutz, even though it changed, even though she experienced it as a failure, cared for her in such a human and beautiful way that I have no bad words to say about them."

Read that twice. The structure had changed, her mother had grieved that change, and the original dream she had built her life inside of was gone. The community still held her at the end. The thing that held her was the longer fabric underneath the kibbutz dream: years of meals, years of fights, years of meetings, years of knowing each other. It showed up when her body could no longer hold itself.

I think this is what most accounts of community survival miss. They look at the formal agreements, the documents, the votes. Those things matter, because of what they protect. What they protect is what Nirit's mother was held by at the end: years of shared meals, the neighbor who came when needed, the same dining room across decades, a roomful of people who had argued each other into the ground a hundred times and chose to keep showing up. That is the agreement that holds when the body fails.

The Tamera handoff

Tamera is a community in southern Portugal. About 170 people. Founded in the mid-1990s by Sabine Lichtenfels and Dieter Duhm, originally from a German precursor going back to the 1970s. It calls itself a peace research center. The work involves free love, nonviolence, rituals around a stone circle, and a long-running set of practices for the inner life of the people who live there. Sabine is now in her seventies. Dieter is older. Most of the founding generation is in the same range. The people who arrived in their thirties and forties at the time of founding are now in their sixties and seventies.

At Samar, what held the community across decades was the daily fabric. Meals, meetings, the tolerance of people who knew each other's pain. At Tamera, the question is different. The founding generation is still very much present, and the second generation is stepping into leadership. The handoff is happening in real time, slowly and unevenly, sometimes painfully. The community does not divide property. Land, houses, vehicles, businesses are held communally.

"It started some years ago where I felt, wow, this is at the moment not my task anymore, because I noticed it's too much coming from duty but not from the inner duty. And I would say I am gaining more and more this inner staying in my center. And I come if people call me and I don't feel I have to."

— Sabine, Tamera

What Sabine described is the inside of a transition. The grip is loosening. She is still in the rituals and still on the land. But the daily weight of carrying the place is moving away from her body. Whoever picks it up next will not be her. That is the point.

The next generation that is picking it up is the part that hurts.

"The younger ones want recognition. The elders can feel judged. It feels like a family dynamic. The younger ones want the parents to see what matters to them. The older ones can feel criticized for how they did things before."

— Joshua, Tamera

This is the sentence I read three or four times the first time I saw it. Joshua is naming something I have heard in different words at almost every community where the founders are still alive and the second generation is beginning to take leadership. The founders feel that the new generation is rejecting what they built. The new generation feels that the founders cannot see what the place needs now. Both feelings are correct. And both feelings, left in the room without a structure to hold them, will quietly poison the place.

I think this is where most communities get wrong. They believe the family dynamic is interpersonal, between specific people who need to work it out. The dynamic is structural. Without a process to move authority from one generation to the next, the older generation continues to hold the keys past the moment they wanted to put them down, and the younger generation either leaves or stops trying to take responsibility.

Joshua described what eventually changed at Tamera.

"In the early days, there was no formal decision-making structure. People used to say, 'We talk a lot, and then things happen.' The ideal was that we did not need a structure because we had a community of trust. But as new people arrived, that trust was tested. There was not a clear system for onboarding or mentoring. Younger members were encouraged to take leadership roles before they were ready. Over time, that created tension and eroded trust."

In 2021, a facilitator told Tamera plainly: this is a low-trust environment, you need to face that. The community has since started experimenting with sociocracy and consent-based decision-making. The work is unromantic: paperwork, meetings, role definitions, accountability. The boring side of building a community that lasts past its first generation.

Some of the younger people who pushed for these changes have already left, and some are still there. The work has not finished. It cannot finish, because the thing being built is the next phase of the place itself.

The catch

All of this only happens if the community builds for it. The default does not disappear just because you joined a community. Some places that started with the right intentions have aged into something closer to the elderly-home model, by accident, when the work of writing the second decade was not done.

The Farm in Tennessee was about 1,500 people at its peak in the 1970s. It is now around 200 and functions, by drift more than by plan, as something close to a retirement community. Stephen Gaskin, who founded it, died in 2014. The younger cohort that would have refilled the membership mostly did not come back.

Findhorn in Scotland, the spiritual community Eileen and Peter Caddy started in the 1960s, declared itself "no longer financially viable" in July 2023, put 50 staff at risk of redundancy, and sold its Cluny Hill college building for £625,000 in March 2025. Eileen Caddy stopped giving workshops at 76 and died in 2006. The community has been working out who it is without her for almost twenty years. The working-out hit a financial wall.

Sandhill Farm in Missouri spent over 40 years as an income-sharing community in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. It is now two families and no longer income-sharing. The model did not survive the cohort that built it.

The pattern across all three is the same. A community that did not write its second decade while it was still in its first. The people who started something did not put on paper what would happen when their bodies could not carry the place anymore. They kept carrying it until they could not, and then the structure dissolved.

These places show that the alternative to the elderly home is itself a project, with its own work, that has to be done deliberately. The communities still standing are the ones that did that work. Samar did it across decades of meals and arguments. Tamera is doing it now, in the middle of the handoff. The ones that did neither are now half-empty.

At Samar the agreement got written across decades of meals and arguments, and the formal version came at the back end, after the elders were already needing care. At Tamera the agreement is being written now, mid-transition, while the founders are still on the land and able to participate. The advantage of writing it earlier is that the founders can shape what their own care looks like. The advantage of writing it earlier is also that you do not need to be a kibbutz, or a peace research center, to do it.

In my opinion, this is the part of the conversation most people in their building years skip past, because being old still feels far away. The community you join or build today, and the agreements you make explicit inside it, are the conditions under which you will eventually need someone to hold a cup to your mouth. The agreements you make explicit now are the ones that will be there to hold you. The ones you leave silent are the ones that will quietly disappear when you need them.

Decide which agreements you want at the end. Then start writing them down now.

If this landed with you

The interviews behind this piece are worth reading in full. The Samar voices, Yuval, Yaniv, Nir, Uriel, Eileen, and Nirit, are in The ToGather Project archives at togatherproject.eu . Sabine Lichtenfels and Joshua at Tamera, on stepping back and on what the second generation is asking for, are in the same archive.

If you know someone who is starting a community, or thinking about it, or already inside one and feeling the founders' generation start to tire, share this with them. The work this piece points to is partly paperwork and meetings and role definitions, and partly the slower work of meals and arguments and choosing to keep showing up across decades. It is what decides whether you grow old inside a community that knows your story, or somewhere staffed by people who learn your name late.

And if you want to support more of this fieldwork, more interviews, more honest documentation of what actually happens when people try to live together, The ToGather Project is currently running a campaign on Artizen.

Support ToGather on Artizen

Bringing this into your own community

Write the second decade while you are still in the first. Decide now what you want the end to look like: who holds you when your role changes, what happens when a founder steps back, and put it on paper while the people it concerns can still shape it. If you are already in an older group, start the handoff before it is forced. Name it, build a process to move authority, and let the next generation take real responsibility.

Read the original

This essay was first published on the ToGather Substack, written by Sharon Avraham. Read it on Substack.

Related in the Living Library

• Member Transitions and Departure
• Kibbutz Movement: Degania and the Constitutional Tradition
• The Healing Biotopes Plan (Tamera)
• Labor Credit Systems: The Twin Oaks Model