These examples highlight the deficiencies of the Soviet economy, and it's evident that such failures caused considerable suffering among the population. Nevertheless, given more time to engage in activities akin to the first two examples, and separated from the threat of malnourishment, I believe I would experience greater happiness and a stronger connection to both my food and community. Through shared struggle, bartering, and communal work, we can create a sense of connection that is absent from the isolation brought about by specialization, which, although more economically efficient, also contributes to the social problems present in western society.

Well what's stopping you? How much time do you spend on HN and social media? You can use that time to grow vegetables instead.

I used to go foraging for mushrooms with a close friend. That friend developed depression due to his perceived failures to keep up in the rat race of career advancement, and committed suicide last year. I know this because of some pretty explicit conversations I had with him about feelings of inadequacy due to money and career path. So now I don’t have a friend to forage mushrooms with. I can do it by myself, but that doesn’t really address the alienation issue.

As someone who also lived in that society, albeit briefly, I can tell you that "experiencing a stronger connection with your community" is not necessarily a positive. Especially when you don't exactly have much choice when it comes to picking said community in the first place.

Certainly, I completely agree that it's not always a positive. Western capitalist culture is better suited to providing freedom to non-conformists, and it's true that life can be arduous in communal cultures if one deviates from the norm.

On the other hand, there are psychological advantages to collaborating with one's community to address shared issues. In western capitalist culture, many individuals are predisposed to feeling that their problems are their own responsibility, leading them to believe that any misfortune they experience is solely due to a lack of effort or poor decision-making on their part.

I wonder if it would be possible to build a society that gets the positive parts of both approaches, or if there is a better balance to be sought between individualism and collectivism.

I don't recall much "collaboration with one's community", at least not in urban Soviet landscape - perhaps things were different in the villages (but if they were, I don't think the Soviets could claim credit for that). The society that they ended up building was actually very cutthroat in many ways once you got past the guaranteed basics that everyone had, precisely because anything above that was that much harder to get.

Thing is, you fundamentally can't enforce good socialization. You can enforce socialization in general, but the more it is forced, the less likely it is to actually be good. A good society is the one that gives opportunities for people to socialize if and when they want it, and accepts that some people really just don't and that's fine too.

My parents and grandparents were forever traumautized by this experience leading them to leave objectively worse lives. Instead of actual leisure they'd spend their free time working on their car in the garage (because there are no car services), working in the garden (because food supplies aren't too diverse and you can't just go to the store to buy jam), or doing something else. They still feel weird about me ordering apartment cleaning once a month.

My grandma would continue working in her garden until she was extremely old because she was used to this, even though we could have bought any veggies or fruits to her. This likely affected her health in a negative way.

Living in a pre-industrial society isn't "good". It doesn't bring any advantages.

Not exactly different from my parents experiences growing up in the US, where "summer vacation" was a trip to uncle's farm to detassel corn or pick cotton, hunting to get meat, etc.

Yep, all of my vacations growing up were either hunting or fishing trips. While getting out in nature is nice, when you take your kids out on a boat for 10h / day because you haven't caught enough fish it very quickly stops feeling like a vacation and more like work.

Yeah. I remember my parents getting a permit to vacation by the Black Sea like once. My grandfather went to Egypt once. The vacations even within the soviets were super scarce experiences and going to the west was only possible for a choir trip or something like that after being vetted by the kgb for your flight risk.

There were trips to leningrad or moscow but even those had years between them.

So yea, most vacations were helping out at grandparents farm. And reading books during rainy days.

I wonder why young Poles, Romanians and Ukrainians really want to come west and join the EU.

Wouldn't have anything to do with this.