We are the Power Plant for the Elite: How the Nuclear Family was designed for inefficency

Or: Why You Feel Like You’re Doing Everything Alone—Because You Are!

I. The Friction We Call Family

Once upon a time—not in a fairy tale, but in the world we were built for—we lived in circles. Not pyramids. Not boxes with garages to contain our private means of travel, but circles of kinfolk, steady companions, uncles and aunts everywhere, and half-wild children under everybody’s watch, no matter where they played. Everyone watched the fire. Everyone knew how to protect the group.

Now we live in rectangles. Four walls. Four people. A fence. Two incomes. Three cars. No safety net—at least not one that satisfies our innate need for emotional, soulful, and physical security.

The nuclear family is the great compression machine of modern life. It flattens everything—childcare, emotional support, elder care, economics—into a single fragile unit and calls it normal. We call it freedom. We call it tradition. But what it really is, is friction.

Because when the only place you belong is your own tiny hearth, you’re always one bad day from exile. And exile from the nuclear family feels like death—because in ancestral terms, it is. So we cling. We control. We micromanage love. Jealousy blooms not from pettiness, but from panic. Possessiveness gets mistaken for passion, and for some, it becomes love. Violence becomes the final, tragic attempt at connection when all else has failed.

It isn’t that we’re bad at love. It’s that we’re trying to do the work of a hundred people with two exhausted bodies and a toddler screaming for possession of an iPad—a pale substitute for what children once had: a constant chorus of playmates, not weary parents and glowing rectangles.

Put a single hamster in a cage with a wheel and make it run for every morsel of food, and it will run for its life—producing a steady supply of kinetic energy. That’s what we’ve become: isolated generators of effort, running on anxiety, burning out in silence.

II. Individualism: The Weighted Crown of Freedom

Here’s where it gets messy, politically speaking. I want autonomy. I want self-sovereignty. I want to write what I want, pray how I want, build what I want with people I choose.

But individualism, as we practice it in the modern West, isn’t freedom. It’s privatization of the soul. Each person their own miniature power plant, generating emotional, economic, and social energy alone—feeding into a system that never lets you rest. We burn and burn, and the energy goes up the line.

Community isn’t obsolete. It’s just outsourced.

Now we “choose” our communities—if we can afford them. And ironically, the freedom to curate perfect little tribes can make us even more intolerant of difference.

We network. We pay for connection. We subscribe to Photoshopped intimacy. And the great paradox is that our rugged individualism requires more collective scaffolding than ever—yet we build it in isolation.

Bring on the robots, and we’ll outsource even our shared labor. More efficiency. Less humanity.

Here’s a thought exercise: Do you think we are moving away from community? Or are we being forced—finally—to recreate it intentionally? And globally, what would that look like—communities created not just from ideological alignment, but around specific work, skills, or joys? To me, it feels like we are becoming cogs in a machine.

III. Hierarchy at the Hearth

(or: Make America Groveling Again)

Fifty years ago, the nuclear family didn’t just isolate us. It embedded hierarchy into our most intimate space. The head of household. The breadwinner. The homemaker. The good child. The troubled one. Roles etched into dinner-table routines, reinforced by office org charts, government structures, and nation-states that function like patriarchal households scaled up.

There’s a reason politicians are pushing so hard for “family values” right now: if they can enforce hierarchical structure at the grassroots level, it reinforces it at the top. The family becomes the training ground for obedience, deference, and domination—fortifying the maleness of power across society.

As above, so below.

This hierarchy trains us to see dependence as weakness and control as safety. It teaches us that care flows downward, authority flows upward, and deviation must be corrected. It’s no accident that a culture obsessed with “family values” often ends up punishing difference.

What starts as a bedtime routine becomes a blueprint for empire.

IV. What We Can Do Now

(That Isn’t Moving to a Yurt)

We can’t all return to the village. But we can begin to remember it—and to build echoes of it in whatever space we have. Here’s where we begin:

• Make your home porous. Potlucks. Co-parenting. Spare beds. Choose a life that lets others in.

• Share the burden. With your partner. With your neighbors. Stop performing self-sufficiency when what you need is kin. Help whenever you can and draw boundaries that include community service.

• Redraw your hierarchy. Replace obedience with mutuality. Let your kids see you ask for help. Let your partner be soft. Let your friends be family. Let your children seek guidance from others in your circle.

• Create sacred friction. Dance while doing dishes with your family. Tell stories while folding laundry. Make work with others feel like the pleasure it used to be. Why do you think we love these scenes in movies? I am specifically thinking about the scene in Practical Magic where the Owen’s sisters and aunts dance around the table singing put the lime in the coconut. This is our nature.

Because we are not power plants—meant to grind alone and fuel the world for someone else’s profit. We are rivers. We are fire circles. We are meant to flow, to carry one another, to burn brightly in clusters… and we were meant to seek each other in protection against common enemies, which were never supposed to be ourselves.

And we are most ourselves when we belong to each other again.