A decade ago, remote work looked like liberation.

Work from anywhere. Live anywhere. Connect with anyone, instantly, at any hour. The office was a constraint and technology had finally dissolved it.

Most of that promise was kept. And yet a growing number of people who achieved exactly that life describe something they didn't expect and don't quite have language for.

Not loneliness in the dramatic sense. Something quieter. Finishing work at six in a beautiful city with nowhere to be and nobody expecting them. Weeks where every conversation is transactional. The specific silence of closing a laptop and realising the day is simply over now.

We optimised for reach and accidentally deleted proximity.

Community used to be a byproduct

For most of human history, community was not something anyone had to think about.

It was a byproduct of geography. You lived near people, worked near people, and the relationships assembled themselves out of sheer repetition. The office, for all its faults, gave people twenty accidental relationships they never had to organise. Lunch happened. Someone asked about your weekend. You had a running joke with someone in accounts.

Remove the shared physical space and none of that disappears loudly. It just stops happening.

And the replacement we were offered was connection at scale. More contacts, more channels, more availability. Which turns out to be a poor substitute, because what people were actually missing was not information about others. It was being in rooms with them.

Community stopped being a byproduct. Now it has to be designed.

People are already voting with their time

The evidence is not subtle.

People are choosing coliving over apartments they could easily afford alone. Choosing coworking spaces over kitchen tables that cost nothing. Choosing to travel in groups rather than solo, even when solo would be cheaper, easier and entirely within their means.

None of those choices are economically rational. All of them are making a point.

This is not a travel trend or a lifestyle fashion. It's a correction. Something essential was removed from how people live, and it's now being deliberately rebuilt, because it no longer assembles itself.

Why coliving isn't the answer either

Coliving is a genuine improvement on working alone, and it deserves credit for that.

But a coliving is a building.

You share a kitchen with whoever happened to book the same month as you. There's no selection, no shared intention, no defined arc. Sometimes the chemistry is extraordinary. Often everyone nods politely at the coffee machine and gets on with their own week, and after a month you've had pleasant interactions with fourteen people and know none of them.

Proximity alone doesn't produce community. It only makes it possible.

What actually works

After six years and more than fifty group experiences, the pattern is consistent. Four things have to be true.

The group is selected. Who is in the room is the entire product. Not the villa, not the destination. Every person accepted changes the experience for everyone else, which is why we screen and why we say no more often than people expect.

The time is defined. Ten to fifteen days works because the clock creates the intensity. Everyone knows there's an end, which is precisely why nobody wastes the fourth evening on small talk. Open-ended arrangements are comfortable and rarely urgent.

The environment changes. Being somewhere unfamiliar removes the context that holds your assumptions in place. It's why realisations arrive on a Tuesday afternoon abroad that never arrive at home.

Someone holds the room. This is the invisible one, and the one that decides everything. A trained host whose job is not logistics but building a container safe enough that people stop performing. Without it, ten interesting people in a beautiful house will politely coexist and leave unchanged. We've watched it happen.

Get all four right and connection isn't something anyone manufactures. It arrives on its own, usually around day four, and everyone in the room can feel it.

Where this goes

We think this format becomes normal.

Not the dominant way everyone works, but a regular and expected part of the year for a large number of people. Two or three of these, the way people currently take holidays, except they come back with collaborations, friendships across continents, and a clearer sense of what they're building.

The infrastructure is already assembling. Verified properties designed for groups rather than couples. Trained hosts rather than well-meaning organisers. Platforms that vet participants instead of simply processing payments.

And the demand is not going to soften, because the underlying condition isn't going to reverse. Work is not returning to a single building for most people. Which means the connection that used to come free now has to be built on purpose.

That's not a market. That's a need.✌️