So you have some savings and you are thinking about how to invest it for your future.
Those thoughts tend to get deep… it’s not just about selecting the right investment strategy, you also have to figure out what you want your future to be.
So what does a good future look like? Is it one of living isolated in a suburban home, playing golf, and eventually moving into a nursing home where someone may come visit you once a week or so?
And what about the state of the world… how do you plan for a secure, fulfilling future for yourself when the whole world seems to be in crisis? It may be uncomfortable to think about, but it is also hard to ignore the dire warnings that many of our major climactic systems are now reaching tipping points to collapse, some of them in this decade.
So let’s take a look at what it means to plan for the future.
What do you really want?
When we talk about what we want, we can talk at many levels from the superficial and immediate to the deep and long-term. If we go deep enough, it seems that everyone wants pretty much the same things. These are the basic things that we need to be happy. We might also want other things, but not at this fundamental level.
When we boil down the things that people are seeking for their happiness, their fundamental desires seem to be:
- Material security. Having “food, clothing, and shelter” as well as safety for yourself and for your family, now and into the future. This also means being taken care of when you are old and infirm.
- Community. A group of people who you love; and who love you, support you, strengthen you, and enable your freedom.
- Purpose. A sense of meaning to your life, and the feeling that your life matters.
Arguably, any person who has these three things is a person who is happy with their life. They may want additional things, but they have everything they need and are not upset if the realities of their situation prevent them from having anything else.
What does financial investment provide?
The standard investment advice is that you should put your money into a diversified portfolio of market investments that will grow as the economy grows, and will provide you with returns that you can spend in your retirement.
You can use those funds to help secure the first of those three fundamental objectives. If you have enough money and invest it in the right things, you can keep paying for your food, clothing, and shelter and perhaps have more money left to do other recreational activities.
And as you get older, hopefully you will also have enough money left to move into assisted living and then a nursing home, where you will be increasingly isolated from society. Your social connections will be relegated to the other occupants of the facility, and to the occasional visitor who will come less and less frequently.
This path provides very little of the other two objectives: there is little feeling of community, and your sense of purpose in life will keep diminishing toward zero, as you’re left there alone and unneeded.
Meanwhile, the money you have invested in the market is supporting the expansion of the current consumerist economy. Your investments are directly supporting the companies overseeing the destruction of the entire natural world, and helping bring on the polycrisis. In other words, this kind of investment also greatly reduces the possibility of you achieving the first fundamental goal of being safe in the world, and having your family be safe in the future.
(You can try investing in “green” funds, but these have two big drawbacks. First, they typically provide lower returns than the more consumptive competitors, so they make less sense from a purely-financial perspective. But more importantly, these sorts of investments are rarely actually regenerative… they just invest in things that are a bit less destructive than the mainstream techniques. For example, producing (and using) alternative energy formats such as solar panels still requires massive amounts of resources, energy, and land-destruction.)
A safe and effective investment
The Integration Center Model was designed as a technique to invest money in a way that provides all three of those fundamental desires while also taking effective action against the polycrisis.
The first step is to remove some of your investments from the market (thus depriving the extractive economy of the financial power you were giving it), and buy some land. Next you spend more money to build a residence there and establish gardens and a permaculture food forest.
At that point, even if all of the future plans fail, you still have secured most of the first goal. You now have a place to live for yourself and your family, and your land can feed you and them indefinitely. Unlike with conventional farms, your permaculture design will be nurturing the land, not detracting from it. And it will require less work to maintain, as much of the food you eat will come from perennial systems that require less care.
But that’s just the worst-case scenario… one where you still have material security for yourself and your family now and in the future, and you have reversed some of your impact on the environment: turning some of your extractive investments into flourishing land.
The next step is to start bringing people out to your residence and taking them through the Integration Center curriculum (these will be the early versions of what later become standard integration retreats). The Integration Center Open Business Plan gives you a map for how to do this. You will need help doing much of this, and some more of your money gets invested in hiring friends to move in with you and help grow a retreat center. As this process continues, you are growing a village around you: one made up of healthy people you enjoy being around.
The plan is adaptable and flexible… you will change how you do it as you learn lessons, and you will have other Integration Center projects to model and collaborate with (the first project has been starting up as of late 2024).
This is not an easy plan, and there are many points where it could go wrong. The plan has been designed to minimize the likelihood and impact of those potential failures, and to be changeable and adaptable as conditions dictate. But again, in the worst case, you will have much of your material security concerns taken care of. In the best case, however, you will have arguably the most rewarding life possible.
What if you don’t have enough money?
Ideally none of an Integration Center’s startup capital should come from bank loans, as taking out a loan directly contributes (by the bizarre logic of the current global bank-debt currency model) to the creation of money and thus the expansion of scarcity, since a loan creates more debt than money. Additionally, it is advisable to buy the land outright so as to ensure the long-term possession of the land.
In some countries, the plan may be possible with very little money. (Once the retreat center has adequate cashflow, outside funding might no longer be necessary.) In an inexpensive part of the United States, if you have much of the skills needed and if your community has the labor pool to build the initial structures, you might be able get the project running for under a hundred thousand dollars. In a more expensive part of the US and with more contracted labor, the cost could be as high as one to three million.
You cannot seek out investors, as there is no mechanism for financial return in the project… all “profits” go to the sustenance and growth of the retreat center and the village. And again, it is inadvisable to take a loan.
If you do not have this much money to invest, you have two other options. Your first option is to seek donations from people who would want to build the project with you. Investing their money won’t give those people any special treatment in the project however… they will need to be operating on the same principles as you: the ones defined in this article.
Your other option is to join into an Integration Center project that is already starting up. There is no investment cost; however you will need to attend a retreat as an Associate Member (paying a sliding-scale fee for attendance/membership), and then get hired on as a Colleague Member. As a Colleague, you then may need to pay for several modalities of therapy as part of completing the Colleague Member Curriculum. Depending on how that Integration Center was able to organize their finances, they may provide you a salary as a Colleague Member, and they may also help pay for some or all of the therapy.
Completing that program, if you are accepted by the other Partners, you will become a Partner in the project (essentially a co-owner), and will have secured your future in the village.
Your future if you choose this investment
If you choose to invest your time and money into building an Integration Center, you will be making a lot of work for yourself over the course of about a decade. You will be collaborating with cool people to design and implement a plan to turn a piece of injured land into a thriving biome that incorporates humans into its flow.
You will be collaborating with those and other friends to start building a productive food system, then you will be building a retreat center, then building a village. This will all inherently feel very meaningful, giving you ample amounts of the third basic desire: a sense of purpose in your life. And as the community grows stronger, that sense of purpose will be amplified.
You will be pursuing physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual healing; as will all the people you are working and living with. All of you will be bringing out your best possible selves. As you continue working, building, living, and healing together, very strong bonds of love and care will naturally grow among these emotionally-stable people. Unlike in the deeply-isolating mainstream culture, you will be truly achieving the second basic desire, and building deep, healthy community.
As you grow older, you might not have enough money to lock yourself into an expensive nursing home and get intense levels of modern medical care. But you will have been living a healthy life on healthy land, eating healthy food, working outdoors doing fulfilling work while surrounded by people you love. Chances are, as you grow older you may not be nearly as susceptible to diseases and infirmities as you would if you lived isolated in a city.
In your later years, instead of going to an assisted-living facility, you will live at the center of the village. You will be helping take care of and educate the children and adolescents, and you will be helped by the adults and adolescents as a natural part of their participation in the village.
The older you get, the more attention and respect you will get, as you will be a genuine village elder, with deep knowledge of the land, the plants and animals, and the flow of the village. When the village faces troubles, they will look to you for guidance. The people around you, your loving chosen family, will honor you as they gladly take on the responsibility of helping you with any infirmities. (And they will know that the care they give you will be given to them in their later years.)
Again, this future is not guaranteed, and will take a lot of work to make it fully succeed. That will be meaningful work with people you care about, leading to a safer, more rewarding, more promising future. Is there really any better way you could invest your money?
Further reading: Integration Center Open Business Plan
Further reading: Effective Action for the Polycrisis