Before & After

Before

Today we have a socioeconomic system which uses money for the exchange of goods, services, and human labor. During our adult life we accumulate money when we are paid for our labor and we use that to buy possessions that we need and want in our lives. We buy houses, cars, vacations, and we fill our houses with furniture, equipment, appliances, books, toys, clothes, and jewelry, and if we have accumulated enough money, we can buy even more elaborate things like boats, snowmobiles, RVs, motorbikes, and anything else we think might bring happiness to our lives.

There are so many things that we buy that we use for such as small time. Think of a car which sits on the driveway all night, you drive it to work for 30 minutes, and then it sits in your office parking lot all day. If you have a boat you might use it for a couple of weeks and a few weekends in an entire year, the rest of the time it is floating unused on a lake, or parked in your yard. In a neighborhood of 200 homes, each one probably has a garage or a basement filled with power tools, but how often is that cordless drill being actually used in each of those homes, perhaps only a couple of hours each year? Even a simple game of Monopoly sits on a shelf in each of those homes only to be played maybe once or twice a year. If you look through a typical family home in the house, garage, and yard, you will find hundreds of possessions that have been accumulated but which are rarely used. After children are born, the family buys clothes and toys for many years only for them to be worn and played with for a few months. After a short time everything finds its way to a yard sale, perhaps a charity shop, or more likely the dump.

After

Nutopia does not have the concept of any private ownership of land, property, or material possessions. There is no money and nothing has any value, and labor is considered a contribution to the needs of the community. No one owns anything, instead all land, property, goods, and services are shared equally by citizens in the community. Homes are right-sized so a single person might have a single bedroom home whereas a family of four living with elderly grandparents might have a 4-bedroom home with an additional single bedroom living space. As circumstances change, people simply move to a space that is more suitable, so for example, a young couple living in a single bedroom space would move to a bigger space when starting their own family. Similarly an older couple who's children have left home would move to a smaller space. Moving home is not the traumatic experience it is today, by listing, negotiating, buying, selling, packing, storing, and moving the entire contents of the house in tractor trailers, instead each citizen has only their individual Personal Items Container for personal items to pack. Every other item in the home or garden is shared so they are either kept by the new occupants of the home or returned to the Central Sharing Facility so that they can be used by someone else.