What We Lost When We Stopped Living in Community, and What is Coming Back
Written by Julie Zdravkovski, Spiritual Advisor & Medium
Julie Zdravkovski is a spiritual advisor and thought leader redefining how we engage with intuition, transformation, and personal power. Known for her direct, no-bypass approach, she challenges spiritual narratives and guides people back to grounded, embodied truth.
There is a phrase that most of us have heard so often that it has almost lost its meaning: it takes a village to raise a child. For a long time, it has sat in the background of the way we talk about family, parenting, and support, without any of us really pausing to notice that we have been living lives where the village has been quietly and systematically removed.
The village used to be the assumption. It was how life was structured, how children were raised, how the elderly were cared for, how meals were made, how work was shared, how grief was carried, and how the ordinary weight of being human was distributed across many hands rather than resting on the shoulders of one person, one couple, or one small nuclear unit expected to hold everything on their own.
Somewhere along the way, without any of us really deciding to, we stopped living that way. We were sold, and I think for the most part willingly bought, a version of adulthood in which success was measured by how independent we could become, how self-sufficient we could appear, how much we could carry alone before quietly collapsing under the weight of it, and how completely we could construct a life that looked like it did not need anyone else in order to function.
The individual became the goal. The I became the measurement, and the we, the ancient, foundational, deeply human we, was quietly folded away as though it had never been part of us to begin with.
What is happening now, and what I feel is beginning to happen collectively over the next twenty years, is a return. Not to something new, but to something we have always known: that we were never meant to do this alone. The interesting and quietly painful part of this return is that a great many people have spent their entire lives learning how to live without support, so that when support finally begins to arrive at their door, they no longer know how to receive it, even when it is exactly what they have been waiting for.
What we lost when we started doing it alone
What we lost when we started building lives around the individual rather than the collective is far more than the practical support of extra hands. What we lost was the felt experience of being witnessed by a group of people who knew you, saw you, held you across the seasons of your life, and would notice when something was wrong before you had the words to name it yourself.
What we lost was the ordinariness of belonging, the assumption that the people around you were part of the fabric of your life rather than something you had to schedule, protect, and quietly compete with for time and attention.
We lost the shared load. The meal that arrives without being asked for. The person who watches your child while you rest. The friend who sits with you in the hospital because they were already going to be there. The neighbour who calls in for tea because that is simply what happens.
All of it quietly evaporated over the decades, and in its place, we built a version of adulthood in which asking for help became something to feel guilty about, receiving support became something that required elaborate reciprocation, and needing anything at all became something to hide behind the more socially acceptable performance of doing perfectly well on your own.
What we told ourselves is that we were becoming more capable, more evolved, more empowered. What actually happened is that a great many of us became more isolated, more exhausted, and more quietly starved of the kind of connection that was always meant to be woven into the everyday fabric of being human, rather than reserved for the occasional dinner or the birthday that comes around once a year.
The struggle to receive when you were taught to do it alone
One of the most disorienting parts of this cultural shift back toward community is that many of the people it is trying to serve have spent so much of their lives doing it alone that they no longer know how to receive support when it is offered.
They have built entire identities around being the capable one, the strong one, the one who does not need anything, the one others come to rather than the one who reaches out, and when community finally begins to arrive at their door, they do not recognise it as safety. They recognise it as pressure.
The person who has learned to do it alone will often reject the very support they most need, not out of arrogance, but because their nervous system has quietly wired itself to expect that help comes with strings, that support is a debt to be repaid, and that being seen as needing anything is a vulnerability that will eventually be used against them.
This is not their fault. This is what happens when generations of people are raised inside a culture that treats independence as the highest good and interdependence as a kind of failure to launch, and unlearning it is not something that happens quickly.
If you are someone who finds it difficult to accept help, to ask for support, to lean on the people around you, or to admit that you cannot do it all on your own, please know that this is not a personality trait, it is a response to the environment you were raised inside.
It is possible to begin, slowly and gently, to let yourself be met by the community that is now trying to form around you, even if receiving it feels foreign, unfamiliar, or almost too much at first.
The cycle we are moving into
Whatever language you use for it, whether it is astrological, cyclical, generational, or simply the natural rhythm of the collective returning to what it needs, we have entered a period where the emphasis is going to shift, quietly and unmistakably, from the individual to the collective.
Astrologers have been naming this cycle for some time, pointing specifically to Pluto's movement into Aquarius, which began in 2023 and will remain there, with some brief retrogrades, until approximately 2044. It is a twenty-year container, and it is not incidental that it feels the way it does right now, because we are living inside the opening chapters of it. The disorientation many people are feeling is precisely what happens when a long cycle turns over into something new.
Aquarius, in the language of astrology, is the sign of the collective. It governs community, shared consciousness, humanitarian movements, reimagined systems, and the ways we organise ourselves as a species rather than as isolated individuals.
Pluto, wherever it moves, brings deep transformation, the dismantling of what no longer works, and the surfacing of what has been buried for too long. When you place these two together, what you are looking at is a twenty-year period in which the individualistic structures that have shaped modern life will be quietly and, at times, forcefully rearranged in favour of something more collective, more shared, and more genuinely interdependent.
If you want a sense of the scale of what a Pluto in Aquarius transit tends to produce, the last time this occurred was between 1778 and 1798, a period that included the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and a wholesale reshaping of how humans thought about power, freedom, community, and the relationship between the individual and the wider society they belonged to.
What we are entering now is not a repeat of that, because history never repeats in the same shape, but it is a return of the same underlying energy. The invitation is similar: to look honestly at what has stopped serving the collective and to allow what is asking to be born in its place to actually come through.
This is not a call to abandon your individuality. Your individuality still matters. Your identity, your voice, your calling, your creative expression, and the particular way you contribute to the world are all part of what you are here to embody.
What is shifting is the assumption that those things must be carried entirely alone, without support, without witnesses, and without a wider web of belonging that holds you as you become who you are here to become. The individual and the collective are not opposed. They are meant to work together, and what we are being asked to remember is how to hold both in balance.
The people who will find this transition easiest are the ones who have already been quietly practising it, who have been building small communities of trust around themselves, who have been leaning into the friendships and relationships that feel genuinely reciprocal, and who have been letting go of the belief that needing support is a weakness.
The people who will find it hardest are those who have built their entire lives around the performance of self-sufficiency and now have to allow themselves to be met by a world that is quietly asking them to belong.
Why unconventional connections are not lesser, they are older
One of the quiet consequences of the return to community is that the shape of what a family or a partnership looks like has begun to open up in ways that would have been unthinkable only a couple of generations ago. While there is nothing wrong with the traditional structure of marriage, children, home, and the picket fence, there is also nothing wrong with the many other forms that connection is now taking as people build lives that reflect who they actually are rather than who they were told they should be.
Couples are choosing not to have children and are building rich, deep, purposeful lives together that are no less meaningful than those of couples with children. There are chosen families forming among friends who have decided to raise and care for one another and to grow old together in ways that go far beyond convenience.
There are blended households, co-parenting arrangements, multigenerational homes, relationship structures that do not fit neatly into any single word, and partnerships that quietly redefine what love, commitment, and shared life can look like when the template is no longer the point.
What almost no one is saying, but I want to say clearly, is that these unconventional forms are not new, they are ancient. Long before the modern nuclear family became the standard, humans lived in extended families, communal households, child-rearing arrangements involving multiple adults, and interdependent kinship structures that looked very little like the two-parent, one-house, one-income version of family that we have been told is the way things have always been.
What we are calling unconventional now is, in many ways, simply the older wisdom returning in new clothing, adapted to the world we are actually living in. It is entirely aligned with what a Pluto in Aquarius cycle tends to produce, which is the dismantling of the assumed structures and the return of the ones that were always more true.
None of this discounts the depth of love, growth, or purpose that can be built inside a more traditional structure. The point is not that one form is better than another, the point is that community and belonging are not tied to a particular shape, and that as we return to the wider web of connection we always came from, the forms that connection takes will begin to look many different ways, and all of them can be sacred.
The responsibility of those who create space
For those of you reading who are teachers, guides, mentors, healers, facilitators, or anyone whose work involves holding space for others, the return to community does not happen automatically. It is created by the people who choose to build spaces, gatherings, circles, classes, and communities where safety, warmth, and genuine belonging are not afterthoughts but foundations.
If part of your work is to create space for others to grow, this is the moment to take that responsibility seriously. Not in a way that becomes performative, but in a way that recognises that the people arriving at your door are often carrying a lifetime of doing it alone, and that the environment you create around them will either give them a place to soften into belonging or quietly reinforce the isolation they have already been living inside for far too long.
The communities that will matter most in the coming years will not be the ones with the largest audiences or the most polished branding. They will be the ones where people feel safe enough to be honestly imperfect, to ask for what they need, to admit what they do not know, and to grow inside a container that welcomes them as they actually are.
If that is part of what you are here to do, please do not underestimate the importance of holding that space well. It is one of the most quietly essential contributions anyone can make right now.
What you already know
You already know whether you have been living inside a life that is quietly starved of community or whether you have begun to build the web of belonging that will hold you through what is coming. You know it in the small moments when you would love to reach out to someone, and instead you sit with it alone because you have not built the kind of relationship that makes reaching out feel natural.
You know it in the way you plan your life around the assumption that you will handle everything yourself. You know it in the tiredness that comes not from the work you are doing, but from doing all of it without anyone truly beside you.
The return is happening whether you invite it or not. The village is coming back, in new forms, in unconventional shapes, in the friendships, partnerships, gatherings, and circles that are quietly reshaping how people choose to live.
The only question is whether you are going to allow yourself to be part of it or keep standing at the edge, waiting for it to feel safe enough to enter.
You do not have to know exactly what your community will look like. You do not have to build it all at once. You only have to stop pretending you are supposed to do this on your own, because you are not, and you never were. The part of you that has always known this is the part that is being asked to lead you home.
A note from me, and an invitation
If something in this piece raised a question you have been carrying about the community you have been longing for, the support you have been afraid to ask for, or the form of belonging that is quietly asking to take shape in your life, send it to me.
Each month, I choose questions from readers and channel a response in this column. You will not be named. You will be heard, and through you, others sitting with the same thing will be heard too.
Send your question here.
If at some point you want to work with me more directly, you can find ways to do so here, where spiritual advisory sessions, classes, books, and more are available when you are ready, not before.
I am a medium, and I am genuinely interested in what you already know but have not yet trusted.
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Read more from Julie Zdravkovski
Julie Zdravkovski, Spiritual Advisor & Medium
Julie Zdravkovski is an international spiritual advisor, teacher, and thought leader known for challenging the norms of the spiritual and self-development space. With over 30 years of experience, she cuts through surface-level spirituality to deliver grounded, direct insight that prioritizes truth over comfort. Beginning as a child medium, Julie has spent decades refining her intuitive abilities while also building a corporate career in leadership and human behavior. This dual lens has allowed her to bridge spirituality with real-world application in a way that is both practical and transformative, propelling her in building a professional, spiritually-led business, Modern Day Medium.
