Picture this:

You have an extended family of 20 close relatives. You all live together in one giant house. You tend your gardens together, cook your meals together, do your laundry together. All chores are shared. All expenses are shared. You will grow up and grow old here.

Your career will be in one of several family businesses owned by one of the 20 members of your household or by other trusted family members on nearby estates. How much you make doesn’t matter because the businesses themselves pay for the entire household.

Each estate has one head. If you have any need, any problem at all, you go to the head of the estate and ask for help, and they help because you’re family.

The estates are all overseen by one main head who keeps all the estates healthy and strong.

No sugar coating it: You likely have little say in whom you marry, unless the head of the estate allows you to. But whomever you marry cannot mistreat you because it would scandalize both extensive family lines and cause vicious repercussions. You should learn to love each other.

Your children will be provided for no matter what happens to you. Family members help care for them every day to give you rests, and they’re taught every day by skilled family so they grow up educated in a range of living skills and business skills.

When you’re suffering, everyone notices because you live and work in such close proximity. Because you’re family and not strangers, they work to help you in whatever way you need just as you help them in return.

Any family member who abuses fellow members is dealt with harshly because family is all. The clan cannot be threatened from within, and the head holds the power to punish or exile members for crimes against the family. People must get along and work out their problems, or else.

These are idealized statements, obviously. No situation is perfect because humans are imperfect, we have bad days and greedy desires. But the extended family system has stood in nearly every culture in the world since the dawn of humankind. We are designed for this system.

In a world where we shrink away from family to hide in one-room apartments with Netflix and memes, a world of desperate and fearful dating where we exchange fluids before names, with people smothered by crushing loneliness, how many would trade it to return to our natural system?

This is what our ancestors surrendered in the quest for survival. Some gave it up willingly with the promise of better jobs in the city. Others lost their land during the Dust Bowl and were forced into factory jobs and urban ghettos where they forgot how to bond as a family.

We live now with 100 years of shattered family bonds. Most will scoff at the above concepts as hopeless and impossible. “No family could love like that,” they’ll say. “No person could be trusted as head of a family to not exploit everyone beneath them.”

We live in an entrenched system of generational attachment wounds where people have forgotten what love and intimacy even feel like. Many have never experienced intimacy with family. Most are lonely and cannot imagine how to quench that agonizing thirst.

We must find or way back to the family estates. We must build new family systems and reconnect in large units. We must live together and nurture one another.

We must prioritize staying together over the promise of greater pay elsewhere.

Until we heal the family unit and rebuild these connections, the primal units we are designed to live within, our brains will recognize the unnatural setup of our isolated modern existence and log our very society as reason for constant anxiety and stress.