So I took a trip to Santa Cruz recently and I was wandering through my favorite bookstore, bookshop Santa Cruz.

And I ran across this book by Kristin Godsy called Every Day Utopia, what 2,000 years of wild experiments can teach us about the good life.

On one level, this book is about something I love reading about, which is communes and various experiments in communal living.

And she's ranging all the way from way back the Neolithic period to modern eco villages to communes and religious experiments you might have heard about in the 19th and 20th centuries.

But on another level, it's this book about the problem of care in society and in families, how to find enough care, how to share the needs of care, and the joys of care broadly enough, and how to construct living arrangements that center care and center community.

So communes and what happened to them and the various stories around them, all the obsession of mine, if you've been listening to the show this year, you know I'm thinking a lot about the scarcity of care faced by young families and the elderly and the crisis of loneliness we seem to have in our society.

And so this book struck me as I think the term is relevant to my interests. So I asked Godsy to come on the show and talk about it.

As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.

Kristen Godsy, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

So I'm going to begin with the point you make early in the book where you write quote, today's future positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be a miss in our private lives.

Tell me about that point.

Yeah, so I do think that we're in a kind of plastic moment right now.

And in the last decade or so, because of the various challenges that we're facing, you know, in the 21st century, there have been a kind of spate of future positive books that are sort of thinking about economic policies or social policies that can very much be implemented in the public sphere in order to address some of these diverse challenges.

So what do you, what books do you think in a few?

So I'm thinking of like Rudger Braggman's utopia for realists, right, where he talks about a 15 hour work week or he talks about open borders or universal basic income.

And so, like, do you want us in Kotler have this book called abundance, you know, the future is better than you think Aaron Bassani wrote a book called fully automated luxury communism, the best of the titles, the best of the titles, which is about like free solar power and asteroid mining and crisper gene editing and all sorts of things that will sort of enhance our lives in the future, you know, collective ownership of the algorithms that are eventually going to replace all of our jobs or whatever.

So all of these books really tend to ignore the private sphere. And I think this is an issue with a lot of the sort of what I think of as futurism or future positive literature right now is that it leaves the private sphere and family relations intact.

And there's sort of an assumption that you can change society, you can change politics and economics without really looking at the fundamental institution and society that under pins those wider and larger structural systems.

So if you take those other books you mentioned, I take most of that literature as being about an insufficiency of material goods in different ways, I think all those books are about how people of less means right now could have much more in a fair more utopic future.

And I take your book, which kind of sells itself is about communes as about an insufficiency of care in our lives. Is that a fair way to read you?

Absolutely, I mean, I don't want to say it's about communes because I think that that's a part of it. Certainly I talk about different ways of living collectively in wider networks of love and care with both people who are a blood related relatives and our non blood related friends and colleagues and comrades.

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