About

Socibuild : The Company

If living in the countryside appeals to you and you either have:

• The capability to earn income remotely
• Horticultural skills
• Building maintenance skills (including plumbers, electricians, etc.)

…or if you have an interest in developing any of these skills or capabilities, read on!

Why Leave The City? – The Downside of Urban Life

Today many remote workers live in crowded cities, even though they don’t have to, because that’s what we’re used to. We all have a tendency to stick to our old habits.

Yet city life can have numerous disadvantages that many people, whose careers give them locational flexibility, would do well to be aware of:

• Sky-high rents
• Higher rates of many mental illnesses
• Traffic Congestion
• Higher crime rates
• Higher divorce rates
• Higher likelihood of contracting contagious illnesses
• A stressful environment to rear children in – filled with judgemental strangers
• Drug gangs and sex rings who surreptitiously groom the children of busy parents
• Higher likelihood of dying during a deadly pandemic
• Air pollution which can make asthma and other health complications worse
• Noise pollution from alarms, sirens and loud traffic that can lead to permanent tinnitus and hearing loss
• Sleep deprivation caused by light pollution, noise pollution and anxiety from overcrowding – a serious concern since lack of sleep can increase the risk of heart attacks, memory damage, diabetes and many serious mental disorders
• Aggressive neighbours
• Many cities are low lying with a high risk of flooding, especially as sea-levels rise
• During economic and political crises, riots are often particularly severe in urban centres
• Intense pressure to consume products and services that damage the environment

Despite the fact that history is riddled with instances of plagues, like the black death or the Spanish flu, disasters, like tsunamis and volcanoes, economic and political meltdowns, like the Wall Street crash and, more recently, the Great Recession, and civil wars, like the one which is currently raging in Syria, we mostly assume that we ourselves will be just fine – and that nothing really bad will ever happen in our own neighbourhood.

But how high is your flat above sea-level? If the entire financial system collapses, does your local community have the skills and resources to hand to produce basic necessities like food and fresh water? Or are you utterly dependent on commercial companies, which could go bankrupt, to provide you with even the barest necessities required for life itself? If a deadly pandemic spreads across your city, how easy would it be for you to avoid contacting anyone for a few months until the worst was over? Or would the need to pay rent to your landlord force you to go to work – even if, by doing so, you put your very life at risk?

During times of disaster, whether natural or man-made, the safest place to live is in a robust community with members who trust and protect each other and possess the skills and local resources to meet their own needs along with a significant buffer zone to spatially separate community members from desperate anonymous masses of people.

The unfortunate truth is that most cities do not possess the ability to feed their own populace by cultivating local resources. Almost everything must be bought with money. This means that if the monetary system collapses, millions of people, all living in close quarters, could face starvation within a matter of weeks. Even those who stockpile stores of food will be surrounded by thousands of other starving people, desperate for something to eat. Cities are held together by commercial transactions between people mediated through the banking system, if that banking system fails, there is simply too much anonymity in cities for society to continue to function on the basis of personal relationships between people, centred on trust.

Beyond the relative safety of robust countryside communities during times of crisis, there are other advantages to living in a small community with a relatively low population density.

In cities, we spend most of our lives in spaces that other people control. The workplace, businesses, public spaces run by municipal authorities. This means that when groups of people do annoying loud things in your vicinity, you often just have to suck it up. On the flip side, if you want to have a party, or any other social gathering, you have to worry about annoying the neighbours. The strict behavioural expectations and regulations that govern almost every square inch of the city are easy to forget about, and mindlessly comply with, until you become the parent of a large number of unruly children, at which point you must choose between keeping them locked up in a cramped city flat, paying extortionate childcare costs or constantly cringing inwardly as they embarrass you in public adult spaces – perhaps the stress and difficulty of looking after an urban family might be one contributing factor to high divorce (and low marriage) rates in cities.

However, the stress, noise, pollution and overcrowding of cities can take its toll, even on the health of those who are childless. Because we tend to only be aware of changes, the daily grind becomes invisible, and eventually we take our urban lives for granted: the streetlights coming through our curtains at night, the loud continuous noise of cars, the occasional screaming or shouting in the far distance muffled by the traffic ( Physical assault? A stabbing? A simple argument? Rape? Or people just out partying and having fun? Who knows? ), the quiet desperation of the homeless sitting against the walls of buildings, the car fumes in the air, yet although the continuous presence of all these stressors renders them invisible, they can nevertheless slowly erode away at our physical and mental health.

As we slowly become desensitized to the stressful anonymity of our crowded, yet isolated, urban lives, we lose our awareness of the particular things – all around us – that are stressful, noisy, depressing and unpleasant and are just left vaguely wondering:

“Surely there is a better life than this somewhere out there waiting for me?”

Yes, it just so happens, there is…

The Countryside Can Be Incredibly Beautiful

Life in the countryside can be wonderful… the fresh air, the open space, the verdant green forests, the cheerful bunny rabbits hopping about amid rolling, flower-filled meadows, the blue sky, the babbling brook filled with leaping trout, the chirping birds tumbling through the breeze, the frolicking lambs, the children running round the Maypole, the stoic cows lowing in the pastures, the merry fiddler dancing a jig on the roof, the innocent laughter of the milkmaids returning from the barn, and the fresh, ripening produce growing in the vegetable plots.

What could be better than to spend the day working in such an idyllic place, surrounded by nature and then return to your large, spacious country cottage, well-exercised and ready for a hearty meal, and then, afterwards, wander outside for a while to gaze upwards at the majestic milky way spanning all the way across the clear, dark, star-filled rural sky while listening to the gentle, rustling, pine-scented breeze and the gurgling river in the distance before finally returning to the dark of your bedroom for a peaceful night’s sleep? What could be more satisfying than to see the produce you planted grow into a lush garden and then, when harvest time comes, to share some of your vegetables with grateful neighbours, to see the home you worked on gradually improve with each renovation, to see the cattle and children you rear grow tall and multiply? To see the fruits of your labour form a legacy that you’re proud of?

Wide open space, lush vegetation, fresh air and a familiar community of friendly, trustworthy neighbours along with a large, comfortable country house you can easily afford and no financial worries.

What more could one possibly ask for?

But Living In A Small Community Can Also Have Challenges

Yet, moving to the countryside also has potential challenges. We don’t need much more than 10 close friends and 100 acquaintances to have a stimulating social life, in fact our brain is incapable of handling much more than 100 relationships to any degree of sophistication, so a small community of 100 people who you get along really well with is ample company to provide a stimulating social life. The challenge with moving into a small community is: what if you don’t get along well with most of them? What if you and your neighbours have nothing in common? What if you find each other boring – or even objectionable?

While living in a populous city, surrounded by strangers, can be sometimes be an alienating experience, there is nevertheless a large choice of groups, clubs, discos, societies, workshops, classes and all manner of structured activities available in most urban centres where one can meet individuals with similar interests. And, if you fall out with one group or society, you can always join another (the downside of this being that many urban relationships can be quite fleeting). In a rural community, if you don’t like your neighbours there’s literally no one else to turn to. When things go well, this lack of choice can producer closer, longer lasting, more intimate and meaningful friendships; when things go bad, this lack of choice means you run the risk of being shunned by the entire community.

The same applies with crime. A small well-functioning community where the neighbours are virtuous, everyone knows each other, gets along together, and looks out for each other will likely have a much lower crime rate compared to a large, anonymous city where a professional class of serial criminals can find a never-ending supply of strangers to prey upon. Yet small dysfunctional communities can be far worse than a city. While a small functional community might have no criminals, a small dysfunctional community can have plenty of criminals but no police!

Humans are not well-adapted to the crowded, anonymous conditions that are present in modern cities and living in a small, spacious close knit rural community can be an incredibly healthy, fulfilling experience where you can get back to nature and forge lifelong friendships. It is also a great place to bring up children. But it is crucially important for you to find the right rural community whose members accept you and share your interests.

Socibuild Wants To Help You Find Your Rural Paradise

Once Socibuild is financed, it will to dedicate itself to creating, and finding, rural locations with exceptionally high levels of social capital. The “social efficiency” of a community can be considered to be the fraction of members in a given community with whom you have a positive relationship. Large cities typically have a very low social efficiency, but because of the sheer number of people who inhabit them, it is still possible to find plenty of people to talk to – even if urban relationships can sometimes be fleeting.

While small communities do not necessarily have a high social efficiency (in some small communities, everyone hates each other!) it is critically important to ensure the social efficiency of small communities remains very high – as a low social efficiency can severely isolate members.

Small, highly-functional communities with a high social efficiency and a positive culture offer social lives that are every bit as full, rich and stimulating as those that can be found in urban centres.

Our core philosophy is community curation. We believe that, by bringing the right people together, we can create, and enhance, highly functional rural communities. On an economic level, we aim to bring virtual workers (including authors and bloggers), organic horticulturalists and tradesmen with building maintenance skills (or amateurs with strong DIY skills) together into rural communities in the countryside. On a social level, we are looking to bring together artistic, expressive people who have a positive attitude to life and a wide range of interests and hobbies, who care deeply about the environment and are passionate about creating a better world. We are also interested in bringing groups of people, who are already friends or partners, into our communities so long as most members of the group possess favourable attitudes, interests and skill sets.

In addition, if you have just moved into a Socibuild Community we also intend to offer 1 hour long, biweekly meetings on skype (or another digital platform) with a Socibuild staff member to communities who wish to avail of this offer. Socibuild staff members would then make suggestions for shared community activities, point you to resources, and possibly use Socibuild’s network to refer and make referrals to help community members grow their businesses and establish valuable relationships both within and outside the community (although the extent to which this is possible will depend on particular circumstances and cannot be guaranteed).

Furthermore, in the event that someone doesn’t fit into one of our communities, Socibuild will make reasonable efforts to find an alternative community in which they are a better fit (although there can be no guarantee of success).

Once they are set up, Socibuild communities will combine the spacious freedom and joy of nature with a rich social life with relationships that are deeper and more fulfilling than can be found in cities. They will be places where children will have the space and freedom to learn, explore and creatively express themselves and also remain safe from harm.

Our communities will be the perfect locations for remote workers who enjoy nature!

Best of All…Accepted Applicants get RENT FREE ACCOMMODATION for the first 2 years!!!

We believe in investing in people. Real estate value aren’t really about location, they’re about the people in that location. By attracting valuable positive, people to a location, and creating great communities to live in, we believe we can boost real estate values in that location and create value for our company in the process.

We understand that choosing to move anywhere is a big decision for anyone to take – and often a large cash investment. In fact, many small rural communities don’t have a rental market, so the only way to move there is to buy a house.

For that reason, once Socibuild communities are operational, all applicants accepted into Socibuild communities will be supplied with SPACIOUS RENT FREE ACCOMODATION for the first 2 YEARS after their arrival! (Although residents will be expected to cover utility bills) If, after 2 years, you’re not completely satisfied with our community and don’t feel it’s worth paying rent to stay there for longer, you can simply rent somewhere else, no strings attached! Either way, you’ll save yourself 2 years of rent payments – so what have you got to lose? And, if we accept you, we’ll even fund you up to £300 to cover your moving expenses!

So if you’re a remote worker who’s sick of renting in the city, and are looking to get more from life, why not contact Socibuild and enquire about moving into a community inhabited by fellow remote workers located in a scenic, rural location? What have you got to lose? At the very least, you could save yourself 2 years of rent payments.