At the end of every trip there is a particular half hour that I have now seen close to ninety times.

The bags are by the door. Somebody is on the phone to a taxi. Everyone is tired, a bit sunburnt, slightly hoarse from the night before. And there is a mood in the room that is not sadness exactly, but something adjacent to it.

Somebody always says a version of the same sentence… Why is normal life not like this.

I have been thinking about that question for six years, and I recorded a conversation about it recently with somebody whose answer surprised me.

The person you would expect to say something else

Adriano worked on Candy Crush, a game played by something like a billion people. He has also opened concerts for well-known rock bands.

Those are two versions of a life most people would describe as successful, and they are not versions that usually go together.

So when you ask him what has actually made him happy, you expect the answer to live somewhere in there. The scale of the thing he helped build. The stage.

It does not. He goes somewhere much smaller and much more specific, and once he explains it, it is obvious.

What the research has been saying for eighty years

This is not a new idea, which is part of what makes it strange that so few people live by it.

The longest-running study of adult life ever conducted followed the same group of men for decades, tracking health, work, money and relationships. The finding everybody quotes is that the quality of a person's close relationships predicted how happy and how healthy they were in later life better than wealth, social class, or almost anything else.

Not the number of people they knew. The quality of a small number of connections.

And yet almost nobody organises their life around that. People organise around work, and treat relationships as the thing that will fit into whatever is left.

Why a ten day trip produces something a year of normal life does not

Here is what we think is actually happening on these trips, and it is less mystical than it sounds.

Three conditions have to be met for closeness to develop. Repeated unplanned contact. A shared context. And enough time in each other's company that people stop performing.

Adult life systematically removes all three.

You see friends by appointment, weeks out. You have no shared daily context with most of them. And you see them for two hours at a time, which is not long enough to get past the catch-up and into anything real.

A house with eight people in it for ten days restores all three at once. You cannot avoid each other. You are all doing the same thing. And by day four the effort of being an interesting version of yourself has become too tiring to maintain.

That is when people actually meet each other.

The part that is uncomfortable

If happiness is mostly a function of who is around you and how honestly you can be around them, then it is largely a function of something most adults have stopped actively building.

We spend enormous effort on the parts of life we have been told to optimise. Career. Fitness. Finances. Almost no effort on the one variable that the evidence keeps pointing at.

Not because people do not care. Because nobody tells you it needs maintaining, and because the structures that used to handle it for us, school, university, the office, have ended or are ending.

What we take from it

We are not claiming a coworking trip is the answer to this. It is ten days.

But what those ten days do reliably is show people what the conditions feel like when they are all present at once. And a surprising number of people go home and change something, because once you have felt the difference it is quite hard to pretend you did not.

The conversation with Adriano is out now on Nobody Eats Alone, you can find it on Spotify and similar. He says it better than this article does, and he has more right to say it.

Here’s the link to the Youtube video: https://youtu.be/eLNq1AIKcX4