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RE: The Dream of Doing ONE Thing Really Well... Instead of Being Mediocre at MANY
I have long thought that a solution is to form/join an intentional community of conscientious people who are able to greatly reduce costs by sharing some costs like cars, tools, child care, etc.
It is enormously wasteful that even next door neighbors have to all individually own certain tools that are only used occasionally. Ladders? drills? cars? laser printers?
The problem is, of course, finding a group of people who can treat others as they would have others treat them. (And have the awareness to clean and put back in their place the tools they use. Now I'm starting to feel weary too LoL)
I have come across many intentional communities; even here in our small city of 10,000, there are six co-housing projects. But what I mostly see is communities formed not out of educated consciousness, but by various social dropouts and whereas the idealism behind them may be fair the execution tends to be a group of tents and shacks in a pasture where the primary "value" seems to be the freedom to be "baked" senseless, all the time. Maybe that's a harsh indictment... and there definitely are exceptions.
My (late) cousin in Denmark lived in an intentional community there for many years, and it was much more like what you describe: A very nice group of small cabins around a central "community house," but everybody had their own space, their own kitchens... individualism and cooperation lived side-by-side. But it also came with about a $75K "membership fee" price tag, and you got to live there as a "guest" for three months (paying rent) before the community would vote on you to decided whether you fit the community, or everybody parted ways with no hard feelings.
After that, it was sort of like the old UK system of ownership being called a "99 year leasehold." I guess many who are into "communes" and "collectives" would pooh-pooh it as an exclusive Club Med, but the point was that the high price of admission made people give a $hit about what they were participants in. Sad as it may seem, people's degree of "caring" is often directly linked to how much of their own skin they have in the game...