Why Don’t We Trust Our Neighbors?

My neighbor Yuki knocked on my door last Tuesday. Her water recycler was making that grinding noise—you know the one. She had the parts, had watched the repair tutorials, even had her grandmother’s old toolkit. But she was waiting for a work order from Colony Administration.

“How long does that usually take?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Three, maybe four weeks. Depends on their backlog.”

I stared at her. “Yuki, your kids need water.”

“I know. But regulations say—”

“Back home, we’d just fix it.”

She looked at me like I’d suggested we build a fusion reactor in her kitchen.

This is my third month documenting life on Station Kepler-442b, and I’m still trying to understand how 50,000 humans convinced themselves they can’t solve problems without asking permission first. These are the same people who figured out how to grow tomatoes in artificial soil, who jury-rigged the atmospheric processors when they failed during the settlement’s second year, who organized the most beautiful memorial service I’ve ever seen when old Henrik passed.

They figured it out together. Nobody told them to.

But mention fixing a water recycler without filing forms in triplicate, and suddenly everyone becomes helpless.

I spent the afternoon in the communal gardens. Mrs. Chen was teaching three teenagers how to prune the hydroponic tomatoes. When the system alarm went off—just a minor pH imbalance—they handled it in minutes. Nobody called Colony Administration. Nobody filled out incident reports. They just… fixed it.

“This is different,” Chen explained when I asked why. “Food systems are community responsibility. Everything else belongs to the Administration.”

I asked who decided that. She paused, pruning shears halfway to a wayward vine.

“I… it’s always been that way?”

No, it hasn’t. I pulled up the colony charter that evening. In the first five years, residents formed seventeen different working groups to handle everything from waste management to conflict resolution. They organized themselves. They took care of each other.

Then the Administration arrived with their “efficiency protocols” and “standardized procedures.” One by one, the working groups were disbanded. “Don’t worry,” they said. “We’ll handle everything now.”

Now Yuki’s family hauls water from the communal taps while waiting for permission to fix their own recycler.

The strangest part? Everyone knows this system doesn’t work. I’ve heard the complaints in every cafe, every community center. The Administration is understaffed, overwhelmed, responding to the urgent while ignoring the important. Projects sit in bureaucratic limbo for months.

But mention doing something about it—actually organizing, actually taking responsibility—and people get uncomfortable. “What if we do it wrong?” “What if there are regulations?” “What if the Administration doesn’t like it?”

What if your neighbor’s kids run out of water while you’re asking permission?

Yesterday, I watched three families quietly coordinate to repair the main corridor lighting. No forms. No approvals. Just neighbors who got tired of stumbling around in the dark. It took them two hours.

They remembered, for just a moment, that they don’t actually need permission to take care of each other.

Maybe that’s the real controversy here. Not whether the Administration is competent or incompetent, but whether we still remember how to trust ourselves.