RELM
The New Social Contract
A complete framework for permanent human freedom, built from scratch on common ground.
You just never got to read it first.
It goes like this: work full-time for 45 years. Hand most of what you earn to landlords, banks, insurers, and shareholders. Hope the economy doesn't collapse. Hope your body holds out. And if everything goes perfectly — if you're one of the lucky ones — you get to stop working at 65, with whatever's left.
That's the best-case scenario of the current deal. That's what it looks like when the system keeps its promise.
Most people don't even get that much.
We're proposing a new one. A social contract where full retirement takes 10 years instead of 45. Where you never work more than three days a week — not at the end, from the very start. Where your quality of life improves the day you walk in the door, and never stops improving. Where "retirement" isn't the exhausted final chapter — it's where your life actually begins.
The day you walk through the gate — broke, exhausted, carrying nothing — your life immediately becomes better than it was.
Not eventually. Not after you've proven yourself. Not after you've earned it. Immediately.
On your first day, you receive: A warm bed in clean, well-built shelter. Three outstanding meals from a professional-grade kitchen. A hot shower. Access to a hot tub, movie theater, library, swimming pool, workshops, and every communal amenity.
In exchange? Two days of work per week. Twenty hours. That's the complete price of your room, board, and community membership.
Two days of honest work buys you five days of genuine living.
Why does conventional retirement take 45 years and this one takes 10?
It's not magic. It's subtraction.
Most of your labor in the conventional system doesn't benefit you. It benefits your landlord. Your bank. Your insurance company. Your employer's shareholders. You work 40 hours but only a thin fraction of that value actually reaches your life. The rest is extracted by the long chain of middlemen standing between you and the things you need.
Relm eliminates the entire chain.
Every hour you work goes directly into the community that directly sustains you. No landlords. No shareholders. No profit margins skimmed off your effort by people who contribute nothing to your life.
When you stop losing 70% of your labor's value to other people's profit, the timeline collapses.
Show up with nothing. Receive warm shelter, three excellent meals a day, and full access to every community resource and amenity. Instantly. Unconditionally.
Two days per week. Twenty hours total. That is the complete price of your room, board, and access to everything. Stay as long as you like.
Every citizen. Every tier. Regardless of anything else. Your life is yours. We borrow a piece of it. We do not own it.
Full, luxurious, permanent retirement — without ever working more than 30 hours in a single week.
Your own private, self-sufficient dwelling — designed to your preferences. Full access to all community infrastructure, forever. No requirements. No obligations. You gave enough. You are done.
Wherever you go in life, you will always have a supremely comfortable home to return to. No matter what happens out in the world, you can never fall.
Promise Six is the one that changes everything beyond the village walls.
The single greatest force holding people captive in lives they hate is fear of the fall. If I quit my job, I lose my apartment. If I take a risk and fail, I'm homeless. If I chase my dream and it doesn't work, there's no floor beneath me.
Relm is the floor.
Once you've earned your place, you can leave. Go start a business. Travel the world. Chase something impossible. And if all of it falls apart, you still have a home, meals, community, and dignity waiting for you. No questions asked. No reapplication. Forever.
And it's not just a system — it's people. As a Tier 3 member, you have an entire village with significant resources standing behind you. Experts in a dozen fields. Institutional knowledge. Collective wealth. A community that is genuinely invested in your success and well-being. You're never really on your own.
Relm isn't just a destination. It's a launchpad. It removes the single biggest risk of attempting anything unconventional. The downside of any bold decision becomes simply: going home.
The core of the village is an underground complex carved into ancient geological formations — wide arched corridors connecting vaulted chambers, residential wings, workshops, growing rooms, and communal spaces.
This is not what most people imagine when they hear "underground."
This is not a bunker. This is not a basement. This is a village with fifteen-foot arched ceilings, streets wide enough for three people to walk abreast, warm indirect lighting that makes walls and ceilings appear to glow, and living walls of ferns with flowing spring water.
The honest tradeoff: Most underground spaces have no natural light. Fiber optic sun pipes channel real sunlight into key areas, and LED lighting shifts color temperature throughout the day for circadian health. Screened courtyards — open-top chambers with sky above — provide full sunlight and outdoor experience. For those who need daily sun and open sky, surface homesteads are the Tier 3 option.
Imagine this.
You step into a vaulted chamber with a fifteen-to-twenty-foot arched ceiling, warm ambient light with no visible source, a living wall of green ferns, the sound of running spring water, and polished stone floors cool beneath your feet. Whatever you imagined "underground" meant before this moment no longer applies.
The streets — we call them streets, not tunnels — are twelve to fifteen feet wide, with arched ceilings lit by hidden LED strips that make the stone glow warm amber. At ankle height along the base of the walls, faint blue-green bioluminescent mushroom beds cast an ethereal light.
That's not a tunnel. That's an underground city.
Through glass walls along the corridor, you see fish swimming in illuminated tanks below and lush green hydroponic vegetable beds growing above. Not just agriculture — a living art installation that produces tonight's dinner.
Community infrastructure isn't spartan. It's the pitch. Every amenity communicates: this is real, this is permanent, this is better than what you had.
The movie theater has perfect darkness — no light leakage — and perfect acoustics, because earth absorbs sound. It's possibly the best movie-watching experience most people will ever have, built for the cost of labor alone.
The library is climate-controlled at 62°F with managed humidity. Books last forever down here.
The fermentation room produces cave-aged beer, wine, and cheese. Not metaphorically cave-aged. Literally cave-aged. That label alone commands premium pricing, and in this case it's the honest truth.
Most intentional communities fail because they're designed as a single organism — one power system, one water system, shared everything. When the shared system breaks, everyone suffers simultaneously. When people disagree about resources, the whole community fractures.
Relm is designed as a network of fully self-sufficient nodes.
Every completed dwelling is an independent life support system:
Community resources are a bonus — they enhance life, they don't sustain it. The consequences are profound:
No single points of failure. If any system goes down, dwellings still function independently.
No dependency-based social dynamics. Nobody stays because leaving means losing water or power. Every person's continued participation is genuine.
Flexible and scalable. New dwellings plug in without straining existing infrastructure.
Every citizen enters at Tier 0 and advances through contribution. The principle: the more you invest, the freer you become. In conventional society, the more you build, the more you owe. Here, the more you build, the less is asked — until nothing is asked at all.
The maximum at any tier is 30 hours per week. Three days on, four days off. Hard cap. Always more days off than on.
Shared quarters, three meals/day, full access to all amenities and community resources.
Required: 20 hrs/week (2 days) · Optional: +10 hrs banking toward advancement
Training time counts as full credited labor.
Everything above, plus a private bedroom.
Required: 15 hrs/week · Banking: 15 hrs/week toward Tier 2
Reachable in ~7 months.
Everything above, plus cash earnings unlocked. Begin designing your permanent home.
Required: 10 hrs/week · Banking: 20 hrs/week toward Tier 3
Your own private, self-sufficient dwelling — designed to your specifications. Full, permanent, unconditional access to everything. Forever.
Required: Nothing. Zero hours. Zero obligations.
You gave enough. The contract is fulfilled. The village cares for you for life.
Relm doesn't use money internally. The economy runs on labor credit — hours contributed, tracked transparently, applied toward advancement or, at Tier 2+, converted to cash.
Not all hours are equal. Tasks carry multipliers from 1.0× to 2.0×, set algorithmically based on transparent inputs: how many people are qualified, how many are willing, how urgently the community needs it done, and how much skill it requires.
The floor is 1.0×. No citizen ever receives less than one hour of credit for one hour of labor. Period.
The ceiling is 2.0×. A skilled doctor retires in under 6 years instead of 11. That feels fair. But no 3× or 4× creates a privileged fast-track class.
Why it works:
Cash compensation at Tier 2+ is derived from actual external revenue — not an arbitrary rate. When crews perform work for outside clients, revenue is split: ~25% to the community, ~75% among the workers. The "hourly rate" is whatever the market actually pays.
At every stage, your life at Relm is better than what you left behind. You're not suffering through a decade of misery to reach paradise. You're living well from day one, and it keeps getting better.
Relm provides free education and training at all levels. No tuition. No debt. No gamble.
In conventional society, professional education means six-figure debt on a gamble. Here, you train for free, gain a skill, and immediately start earning faster credit. Zero risk. Guaranteed return.
Relm pursues comprehensive food independence through overlapping systems:
The village targets zero external waste dependency at maturity:
Everything is composted, incinerated (ash reused), recycled, sold, or processed internally. Only a tiny residual hazardous stream requires outside disposal.
Rail set into corridor floors — the same basic mine cart technology that's moved material underground for centuries. Small electric platform carts carry cargo at walking pace through the complex: kitchen to workshops to residential wings to storage.
Starts as a simple cable-and-cart spoil removal system during excavation (a winch, a cable, a tipping cart — total cost under $500). As the network branches, simple mechanical switches route carts to destinations. Each upgrade layer builds on the last without replacing it. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is rebuilt.
Eventually scales to passenger transit as corridors extend. Same track, same switches, bigger carts with seats. The excavation infrastructure becomes the transit system.
Every wing and major chamber gets a corresponding ventilation shaft to the surface, concealed at the top. Redundant design — if any single shaft is blocked, airflow continues through alternates. CO2 monitors in every occupied space. Backup battery-powered fans. Life-safety critical, never compromised.
No visible light sources. Indirect LED strips create the impression that walls and ceilings glow. Color temperature shifts throughout the day — warm morning tones, neutral midday, amber evening — maintaining circadian rhythm underground. Fiber optic sun pipes channel actual sunlight from the surface into key areas during daytime.
You became a doctor to heal people. Instead, you spend half your time fighting insurance companies and filling out paperwork designed to deny your patients care.
You became a teacher to inspire minds. Instead, you're drowning in standardized testing and administrative mandates on a salary that doesn't reflect the importance of your work.
You became an engineer to build things. Instead, you're optimizing advertisement algorithms.
Relm gives you back the thing they stole.
A doctor here practices medicine purely — for people who need it, on a schedule they choose, without insurance companies, hospital administrators, or billing codes. Just a doctor and their patients.
An engineer designs and builds real things that real people use every day — solar installations, water systems, buildings, tools. They see their work standing on the land.
A teacher educates people who want to learn, designs their own curriculum around what actually matters, and sees their students become skilled, contributing citizens.
The real math: A Relm doctor earning $40/hour with no rent, no mortgage, no utilities, no food costs, and no commute keeps more money than a conventional doctor earning $150/hour in a city with $3,000 rent and $500 monthly car payments and student loan debt.
Your skills built someone else's dream for long enough. Come build your own.
Relm welcomes families. Children are a community's future, and their wellbeing is a collective priority.
Each child carries a modest additional hour requirement — covered by parents, family, volunteers, or the community itself. In exchange: free childcare, complete education from early childhood through advanced levels, and the full protection of the village.
No latchkey loneliness because both parents work full-time. No food anxiety. No moving because rent went up. No watching parents fight about money. No ambient awareness that the world is a machine designed to extract your energy and discard you.
Parents who are present, rested, and genuinely engaged. A village where every adult knows them. Food grown by people they know personally. Education from people who teach because they love it. A landscape to explore freely and safely.
Most importantly: they watch adults voluntarily helping each other — not because a boss demanded it, but because they want to. That's their baseline understanding of how the world works.
A child raised in Relm grows up immersed in the system — they know which skills carry the highest multipliers, they start accumulating credited training hours early, and they enter the labor system as a young adult already highly skilled. Conservatively, a young person raised here can reach full Tier 3 retirement by age twenty-five. Without ever working full-time hours in their life.
Let that sink in. Your child, at twenty-five: permanently retired. Their own private, well-maintained home. A luxurious safety net that can never be taken away. And an entire village — with substantial resources, a wide bench of experts in every field, and stored wealth — standing behind them, invested in their happiness. They're a phone call away from a community that will use every advantage it has to help a member in need.
In the conventional world, retirement is where life winds down. In Relm, retirement is where life begins. That twenty-five-year-old can travel the world, start a business, take risks, chase something extraordinary — and always know that the worst-case scenario is coming home to the comfort and security they've already earned.
The first village is proof of concept. The children who grow up in it are proof of culture. And that's what makes the whole thing irreversible.
The contract must be enforceable to be meaningful — but enforcement is gradual, transparent, and humane. No one is blindsided. No one is destroyed by a single bad week.
The graduated response:
Someone has to be genuinely, persistently unwilling to contribute — not merely struggling temporarily — before the system reaches the point of asking them to leave. And even then: fair severance, transportation, and dignity. The worst-case exit from Relm is more humane than losing a conventional job.
Disability and medical exemptions: Tier status frozen, community absorbs full costs indefinitely. The default position is always in favor of the person.
No inheritance of tier status. Every citizen earns their own. This prevents recreating the class system Relm was built to eliminate. In practice, children raised in Relm start with enormous advantages through education and community support — they don't need inheritance.
Excess community wealth beyond operational needs is invested in conservative instruments, building a permanent endowment. Returns provide increasing passive income independent of active labor.
This is the same structure that lets universities and foundations operate indefinitely: principal grows, returns fund operations, dependence on active labor decreases over time.
Most intentional communities are labor-dependent forever. Relm has a built-in trajectory toward full financial independence as an entity.
Revenue streams:
By year 15–20, the endowment alone can sustain all retirement costs from returns. The village itself — like its citizens — retires.
History shows alternative communities attract hostile attention — not because they fail, but because they succeed enough to threaten existing power structures. Employers don't want workers who have a better option. Landlords don't want tenants who can leave.
The idea lives publicly — a manifesto, a website, a growing community of interest. The physical location stays private until the community has: lawyers on-site, financial reserves, clean regulatory compliance, measurable local economic contribution, and enough people that suppression would be conspicuous and politically costly.
The best defense isn't secrecy but integration — a community so woven into the local fabric that threatening it means threatening the area's own interests.
Almost by accident, Relm is one of the most resilient human habitations designable:
The first village is proof of concept. It proves the systems work, the tier structure works, the economics work, the culture works. Everything after that is replication.
The second village is faster than the first — blueprints, institutional knowledge, trained builders, and credibility already exist. The third is faster still. Each new village adds to the collective endowment. Each adds another node in the network.
The geological formation suitable for this construction extends hundreds of miles. The potential is not one village. It's a network of villages — a new social infrastructure offering a genuine alternative to the conventional economic system.
Not through revolution or politics or protest. Through simple demonstration. A better way of living, proven by the people who live it, available to anyone willing to contribute.
Every Tier 3 retiree who leaves to explore the outside world is a walking advertisement for the model. They're healthy, rested, financially unburdened, and permanently supported. When people ask how they got there, the answer is Relm.
They don't need to evangelize. Their existence is the pitch.
Retirees choose between two dwelling options:
A private room carved from the earth, branching off community corridors. Free to the retiree — excavation and finishing provided by community labor. Inherently climate-controlled at 62°F. Steps from the kitchen, the great hall, and all amenities. Every critical system has both a community connection and an independent backup.
Tradeoff: no natural light except sun pipes and courtyard access, no yard.
A freestanding home on the community's land — truly self-sufficient. Solar on the roof, rainwater collection, atmospheric water generation. Connected to the underground complex via buried conduit for backup systems and a narrow-gauge rail tunnel for deliveries.
Benefits: natural sunlight, a porch, a yard, a personal garden, stars at night. Higher cost than underground. Scattered naturally across the terrain, built to blend with regional architecture.
Both options include: dedicated power circuit with battery backup, dedicated water with independent filtration, private bathroom, sealed entrance. Independence through redundancy.
Underground construction enables something surface buildings can't: true zoning with sealed boundaries.
Pet owners live with their animals in comfort. Allergy sufferers get genuinely allergen-free spaces. Everyone gets what they want.
This is not idealism. This is arithmetic.
The only question is whether you're ready to stop participating in a system designed to extract your life's energy for other people's benefit, and start building something that gives it back.