The quiet reorganisation of how we live
Are we seeing a proliferation in alternative ways of living that is just hard to spot?
Is the age of experimenting with different ways of living enjoying a resurgence, or is it now over? In the 1960s, 1970s, and even into the 1980s, such experimentation in utopian living seemed popular as communes, squats and back-to-the-land movements sought not simply to modify existing systems, but to reconfigure the organisation of everyday life. These were explicit attempts to live differently as alternatives to mainstream lifestyles.
Do today’s societies lack either the ambition or the capacity to imagine fundamentally different ways of living? A new book by historian Gregory Claeys suggests that utopian ideas of better lives have either become discredited or have come to feel detached from the practical organisation of everyday life. The question we are therefore asking is a simple but important one: are experiments in different ways of living over, or is it that have they simply become harder to recognise?
It is easy to describe our life as ‘pretty standard.’ Maybe we have a full-time job, a partner, a couple of children, and a house in the suburbs of a major city. Nothing in this description would typically attract the attention of those interested in alternative lifestyles, but if we look more closely, then perhaps a different story unfolds
Childcare may be distributed across multiple households, including an ex-partner and a neighbour, paid in favours. Employment combines formal work with freelance income and informal flexibility. Health decisions move between GP advice, online forums, and social media. Financial arrangements relied on a shifting set of accounts, buffers, and informal agreements.
Hence, whilst from a distance everything looks very conventional, up close almost everything seems quite the opposite. So, are we in fact in a period where we have experiments in everyday living taking place, just that they are hiding in plain sight? And if so, what are the implications for policymakers and marketers who seek to engage with people and drive change?
The label of alternative lifestyles
Claeys sets out how, historically, alternative ways of living have been easiest to see when they are explicit rather than informal and when they have an ideology underpinning them. Communities such as the Shakers or the Amish are good examples of this: they organise life differently, in a very visible way, often in deliberate contrast to the societies around them.
Contemporary analysis follows a similar pattern with thinkers such as Sophie Rosa and Alva Gotby drawing attention to emerging forms of intimacy and care that depart from dominant norms, highlighting, for example, the growing importance of friendship networks, non-monogamous arrangements, and more collective approaches to dependency. Crucially, these are often framed as alternatives: ways of living that are consciously articulated and, in some cases, politically positioned against the ideal of the more familiar notion of the self-contained, independent household.
These contributions are important, not least as they show that alternatives exist. However, this focus perhaps risks introducing a bias, as it tends to focus on what is named and spoken of and, in doing so, risks overlooking forms of change that are absorbed into everyday life without being recognised as such.
Assemblages
A helpful lens to explore everyday alternative ways of living is provided by anthropologist Anna Tsing with the concept of assemblage. These are temporary combinations of various elements including jobs, relationships, bits of knowledge, forms of support, that come together in ways that work, but often only just. They are not stable or centrally organised systems, but arrangements that hold for a time before needing to be adjusted again. Seen this way, contemporary life is perhaps less something people step into and more something they piece together as they go
Work, for instance, becomes a bundle of roles, contracts, and income streams, reflecting the wider fragmentation of labour. Care is distributed across networks of family, friends, and neighbours rather than contained within a single household. Health, meanwhile, is navigated through hybrid forms of knowledge that combine institutional authority with peer advice and informal sources. Intimacy is organised across overlapping relationships that between them produce support, and are not confined to a single relational form.
These arrangements are not designed in advance but are constructed on the go, often under pressure, and are continually adapted as conditions change. They are not only assembled, but also, as anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out, repaired, compensating for absences and working around constraints in ways that allow everyday life to continue.
What drives this?
Claeys would likely argue that this kind of ‘assembled’ way of living only really makes sense once stability starts to thin out. When work is less predictable, services feel patchy, and support systems don’t quite hold, people stop relying on fixed structures and start piecing things together. On this basis, uncertainty and gaps begin to feel like the normal backdrop of everyday life. This is close to what sociologist Ulrich Beck had in mind with the idea of a ‘risk society’: a world in which the management of insecurity shifts away from institutions and onto individuals, who are left to navigate it as best they can (Beck, 1992).
Earlier accounts framed this as a kind of freedom where people were becoming more self-directed, more able to shape their own lives. But for many, it is less about reinvention and more about simply keeping things on track. Again, as Graeber put it in a different context, much of modern life involves making systems that don’t quite work appear as if they do, patching things together, adjusting as you go, filling in the gaps in ways that rarely get noticed.
So, perhaps it is hard to unpick whether these ways of living are chosen, or if they imposed out of necessity. In practice, it’s perhaps hard to separate but surely for most people, necessity comes first. Work is less secure than it once was, housing absorbs more time and income, and public services can’t always be relied on in the same way. The effect is that more of the burden of organising everyday life sits with individuals and the people around them.
But what is striking is how quickly these arrangements stop feeling temporary. Flexible work can feel like independence, even when it started as a compromise, relying on friends or family can feel like community rather than necessity, drawing on different sources of health advice can feel like being informed rather than unsupported. So what begins as ‘making do’ can, at least in part, become something people come to value. What begins as ‘making do’ can, over time, become something people come to value, even as the constraints that produced these arrangements continue to shape what is possible.
Historical perspective
A longer historical perspective helps us to better understand this moment. As Claeys demonstrates, alternative ways of living have rarely begun with fully articulated blueprints. Instead, more often, they emerge as practical responses to conditions that are no longer workable, gradually stabilising into recognisable systems.
The Shakers, for instance, did not begin with a complete design for communal life. Their practices developed incrementally, in response to the tensions of late eighteenth-century religious and social conditions. Early followers of Ann Lee were facing instability in both their religious beliefs and everyday lives, particularly around issues of property, sexuality, and social hierarchy that existing institutions were struggling to manage.
Celibacy wasn’t simply a starting principle but emerged as a way of managing concerns around desire and spiritual discipline. Collective ownership grew out of economic insecurity, while gender equality reflected both belief and the practical realities of living closely together. These practices were worked out over time, each responding to a different pressure, rather than being designed as part of a single, coherent system.
A similar dynamic can be seen in the Amish. Rather than rejecting modernity outright, Amish communities have historically engaged in a process of selective adoption, continuously negotiating which technologies and practices can be incorporated without undermining the cohesion of the community. Decisions about electricity, transport, or communication are evaluated in terms of their effects on relationships, authority, and community boundaries. What appears, from the outside, as a fixed or conservative way of life is, in practice, an ongoing process of calibration.
This pattern extends beyond religious communities. Nineteenth-century cooperative movements in Britain, for example, saw workers pooling their wages to open shared shops, set fair prices, and gain more control over what they bought and sold, practical responses to the instability and exploitation of industrial capitalism. Early kibbutzim operated in a similar spirit, organising farming, childcare, and decision-making collectively in order to manage the economic and social uncertainty of their surroundings. In each case, everyday practices were worked out in situ before being codified into more stable institutional forms.
Not all such experiments become recognised as alternative ways of living. As Saidiya Hartman shows in her account of early twentieth-century Black women in urban America, experimentation has often taken place outside formal institutions and without recognition as such. The ‘beautiful experiments’ she describes were not organised as utopian projects, but emerged as everyday responses to constraint.
These experiments took involved the organisation of daily life. Women left exploitative domestic service to live with friends or lovers, pooling income and sharing space in ways that challenged both economic dependence and social expectations. Households were reconfigured, sometimes temporarily, around friendship, desire, and mutual support rather than marriage or family obligation. Relationships themselves were treated as open to negotiation, rather than fixed by convention, allowing space for autonomy in contexts where it was otherwise limited.
These were not stable arrangements, nor were they recognised as legitimate alternatives. They were often precarious, subject to surveillance, and vulnerable to breakdown. Yet they represented deliberate attempts to live differently within the constraints imposed upon them, ways of carving out freedom, however partial, in environments that offered little of it.
Across these examples, we can start to see that later appears as a coherent way of living is, in fact, often the endpoint of earlier experiments. Those practices that proved workable were repeated and gradually formalised.
What distinguishes the present, then, may not be the absence of such experimentation, but that many of these arrangements remain in this earlier phase, emergent and not yet stabilised into recognised forms.
Today’s alternative lifestyles
The alternative ways of living, or assemblages, that characterise contemporary life often seem to remain fragmented and temporary. They do not seem to consistently coalesce into shared visions or collectively recognised alternatives but remain dispersed across individuals and networks, unevenly held together and only partially stabilised.
We can consider the possible reasons for this. First, drawing on the notion of Liquid Modernity, we can see that the conditions of contemporary life are more fluid and less territorially bounded than they once were. Historical communities were able to consolidate in part because they were geographically and socially contained. Today, mobility makes this containment more difficult, as individuals move between roles, relationships, and environments with greater frequency. This makes it harder for practices to stabilise into fixed forms.
At the same time, contemporary assemblages are entangled with market systems that both might, on the one hand, enable them but more likely will absorb them. Practices that emerge as responses to constraint are quickly commodified, reframed as lifestyle choices, and reintegrated into existing economic structures, limiting their capacity to develop into autonomous systems. For example, practices such as mindfulness, now packaged through apps like Headspace, began as informal ways of coping with stress but have been absorbed into the market and reframed as tools for individual optimisation.
Digital infrastructures enable coordination, but they also allow people to assemble highly individualised styles of work, care, and identity without requiring collective alignment. What might once have become shared practice instead remains distributed, even when widely experienced. For example, remote work, enabled by platforms like Zoom and Slack, is widely undertaken, but each organisation and individual assembles their own version rather than collectively agreeing on a single model.
The result, it seems, is not the absence of experimentation, but an abundance of it, just that it lacks consolidation. If earlier assemblages stabilised into ways of life, contemporary ones seem more likely to remain in motion and are rarely allowed to settle.
Seen in this light, contemporary life is not lacking in alternatives so much as saturated with them, only in dispersed and often unrecognised forms. What we are witnessing are not fully formed utopias, but micro-utopias: situated attempts to make life workable under conditions where inherited models no longer hold.
What might policymakers and marketers be missing?
If experiments in new ways of living have not disappeared but instead become dispersed and embedded within everyday life, then the challenge is not simply to identify them, but to recognise them for what they are. This has important implications for those seeking to engage with people and shape behaviour.
Policy makers, in particular, tend to work with relatively stable models of how life is organised. Households are treated as coherent units and individuals as decision-makers. Yet the reality is that things are far less contained. Care is distributed, decision-making is shared or negotiated, and responsibility is often spread across informal networks. Interventions designed for neatly defined individuals or households can therefore miss how life is actually lived, failing to connect with the structures people are already relying on.
A similar issue applies to marketing. Much contemporary marketing still assumes relatively stable identities and lifestyles, targeting individuals based on fixed segments, life stages, or clearly defined needs. But if people are assembling their lives across multiple roles and relationships, these categories begin to blur. The same person may be a parent, a carer, a freelancer, and a patient, moving between these positions over the course of a week. Messaging that assumes coherence can therefore feel out of step with lived experience.
But perhaps even more fundamentally, both policy and marketing are in danger of misreading adaptation as deficiency. When people rely on informal care, draw on multiple sources of health advice, or piece together income streams, these behaviours can be framed as problems to be corrected. Yet they are often pragmatic responses to conditions that are not easily changed – which means that interventions that seek to ‘fix’ behaviour without recognising the context that has generated it risk undermining the very systems that allow people to cope.
There is a case that instead we require a shift in perspective. Rather than asking how to move people from one stable behaviour to another, the question becomes how to support the arrangements people are already ‘assembling’. This may involve designing for networks rather than individuals, recognising the role of informal systems, and engaging with the realities of constraint rather than assuming idealised conditions.
It also requires a different way of seeing. If contemporary alternatives take the form of micro-utopias, albeit they may be partial and provisional, then they will not always be visible as movements or clearly defined segments. Instead, they will be found in the work people do to make life function in the arrangements they build, the compromises they make, and the ways they hold things together.
The challenge is that these are not immediately identifiable. Recognising them requires more effort, looking beyond stated identities and formal structures to the practices through which people actually organise their lives. Without this shift in attention, experimentation is easily mistaken for conformity.
Conclusions
It seems that we can make the case that experimentation in ways of living is far from over. Instead, what has changed is its form: where earlier periods produced visible, collective alternatives, our current period is characterised by dispersed and often unrecognised experimentation embedded within everyday life.
Unlike historical utopian projects, these do not seek to stand apart from society or establish clear boundaries between inside and outside. Instead, they are embedded within existing systems, adapting around them rather than replacing them. They are rarely explicitly named as alternatives and seldom stabilise into shared doctrines or institutions. Instead, they remain partial and provisional, lived before they are articulated, and often without ever being recognised as something distinct.
Contemporary society is often described as lacking shared visions of the future. Yet this may reflect a limitation in how change is perceived. People are not simply moving from one system of living to another but are assembling lives from multiple, overlapping elements, adjusting them over time in response to shifting conditions. The most significant experiments in how to live are not always the ones that boldly state their presence, but those that take shape within ordinary life, quietly reshaping it while preserving the appearance of continuity.