Happiness and Hypocrisy: The Life of Hippies

Memory is a weird thing. When Ania and I left Romania four years ago, I had a strong case in my mind about how the hippies weren’t actually hippies but hypocrites, about how their reality was distant from their values of free love and openness.

Now, four years later, living among people who have a similar energy in Dharamkot, I have a much gentler opinion. They were just people doing the best they could, while using much grander words than their actions deserved.

Which means that this post, originally intended to be a scathing critique of present-day hippie culture, is now just a smattering of thoughts connected by my own unreliable memories.

The Happiness

Just over four years ago, Ania and I were volunteering on… let's call it a hippie community in Romania. A German couple had bought the land around five years prior, and they had started a community with people they loved. The place was called Valea Babii - or the valley of the witch.

The main characters in the community were Kadi, Korbi, and Anna. Kadi and Korbi used to be together, but then he went to a rainbow gathering once and returned with Anna. The atmosphere was sometimes tense, but after Kadi came back from an ahayuasca “journey”, they were hugging each other and apologizing.

On one of the first days after we arrived, there was a beautiful cake on the kitchen table. Kadi had baked it for an irritating French guy whose name I don’t remember now. This was after an ahayuasca “journey” that a bunch of them had returned from. Today wasn’t his actual birthday of course, but it was marked something more significant: he had been born again after the ceremony and that’s what they were celebrating.

Beautiful Cake! I have no memory of how it tasted, though

After that colourful start, I really felt like they welcomed everyone on the farm without judgement or fear. It's not like I'm an expert on racism, but no one looked at me differently there, and it seemed like this was the same for everyone they looked at.

Everything in the kitchen and on the land seemed to be communal -- anyone could try anything they wanted. I would wake up, make coffee and someone would drink part of it. The french guy ate overcooked rice for breakfast saying that was the healthiest thing anyone could eat for breakfast.

The food was great! Anna made hummus and seeded bread almost every day. We had homemade mayo, salad picked wild from the gardens, pesto that one of the volunteers spent hours grinding by hand, and so on.

Even though we were on “workaway" which normally included 4-5 hours of work per day, everyone was free to do whatever they wanted. We held yoga classes for each other. Even I led a yoga class once. While the foreigners focused on energies and feeling good, my instructions were all about getting the pose and breathing right. Funny.

A girl from Netherlands led us through a drum meditation that left me feeling a bit wobbly.

Anna sometimes refused to cook because she didn't feel the energy, and another day, the energy told her to teach us the basics of Thai Massage.

The bonfires were no joke!

There were bonfires every day, which I loved. One night, I was playing the bongo with a bunch of people, each of us on our own trip, but somehow making sense together, and I was almost in a trance. One girl later told me that that was one of the best moments in her year.

The Hypocrisy

Korbi talked a few times with pride about how he was giving a big "fuck you" to the system by living the way they were in this community. But of course, part of the money to run the community was coming from the social security he collected as an unemployed German.

They shared a lot, of course, but when things got valuable, shit got intense. They had given a rundown part of their land to a Dutch guy named Lawrence. He cleared the land for a garden, and built a beautiful house for his wife and kids. It had taken five years, but now the land looked lovely and much better than the rest of the community it was a part of. At this point, Kadi and Korbi started asking for their land back. There was so much gossip about this among the volunteers that we made up a song for them;

This land is my land
This land is your land
From Valea Babii
To Lawrence Island.

"Who will do the work?" seemed like a question that hung over many heads. To us, it looked like Anna was bearing the brunt of the responsibility, and she indicated multiple times that she was not happy with it.

The biggest hypocrisy, in my opinion, was their opinion of the villages surrounding them. In the community, they said they were working hard to build a place that didn't depend on the outside world: a fully self-sustained community that lived off the land.

Honeymaking in the neighbouring villages. I tasted pollen for the first time here.

We visited the neighbouring villages a few times. The people there told us that apart from flour, oil, and a few other things, they were self-sufficient. Valea Babii was struggling to get this done and refusing (in my mind) to admit that there were people right next door who had already achieved this goal that they could learn from.

Sidenote: The villages were mostly full of older people. They told us that their kids were working in Germany, and only came back for the holidays. And here the Germans were, giving up their life there to come live a self-sufficient life. Funny how that works.

Near the end of our stay, the drum-meditation girl was saying she wanted to start a community where she would let only like-minded people in, where they would live in harmony with nature, and be completely independent of the outside world. "So, like a village?", I asked, and she looked shocked.

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At the end of the day, I feel like a hippie community is a strange ideal. They seem to want a life of freedom, without realizing that freedom requires hard work and discipline.

You don't get to be free just because you are privileged enough to buy a piece of land, or because you think you are fucking up the system while benefiting from it in a thousand ways.

Freedom, after all, is more than just getting rid of chains.