A look into the future of living - Fighting loneliness with community

Communities matter and are key to our happiness. How the world is reconnections with deeper community needs.

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The world needs more communities!

It looks like since the pandemic people found that something nuclear to their lives was missing in the last years.
Our busy lives, the rat race, the constant overflow of negative urgent news and content is able to distract us and help us forget to thing about ourselves, our life, our happiness.
Until one day a virus pushed everyone home, gave us a lot of free time, for the first time many people had time to think, to not be distracted, to understand how miserable they actually were.

Since the pandemic a record number of people quit their jobs. The Great Resignation they called it.
We understood that what we do for 8 hours a day matters a lot for our happiness and we looked for something better leaving hotels and restaurants struggling to hire workers.
We went to coding schools. UX/UI courses, digital marketing online academies, and we learned the skills needed so that work supports life, and not the other way around.

A life centric approach to how we live.

Finally!

We can now work from anywhere, the future of work is without any questions, distributed.

Why do I speak about remote work in an article about communities?
Because ironically remote work will be the key to rebuild the world and how we live, but first…

Loneliness, the 21st century challenge

Loneliness is not a new theme at all but it’s gaining importance in the news and that’s a good thing.
The truth is that elderly loneliness was already a big challenge, specially in the villages that were abandoned by the young one looking for better work opportunities, for office jobs, for money and growth.
Millions of people were left abandoned as they grew older not only in the villages but also in the traditional neighbourhoods in the cities.

But today we speak more than ever about loneliness, on a hiper connected world, why the hell do we feel lonely?

Just in the last few days many news websites wrote about it.

My theory is that we feel lonely because we left our social circles to go and look for better jobs.
We left our hometown, our friends and our family to look for our dream of making an impact in the world and make good money.
We said to ourselves that one day we will go back to our hometown, but most of us never did.
We built relationships with the people we spent more time with, the people working with us, 8 hours a day, if not more.
We built this relationships not because we had something in common, but because these people were just there, facing the same challenges as you.
Then the pandemic came and we felt for the first time how lonely we actually are

The result?
As reported by the Financial Times:
”Social isolation, measured by the average time spent alone” increased from 285 minutes per day in 2003 to 333 minutes per day in 2020, and “this decline is starkest for young people aged 15 to 24” - Vivek Murthy research

“almost half of Americans in 2021 reported having three or fewer close friends”, while “only about a quarter reported the same in 1990”. - Vivek Murthy research

Check the full research paper here.

As the pandemic was the turning point to how we work
The loneliness epidemic will be the turning point to how we live.

Happiness = Community / Friendships + Exercise + Nature

The book “The Good Life” by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, the directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest scientific study of happiness ever conducted, mentions clearly that the secret for a fulfilling and meaningful life is strong relationships.

In Roberts Ted talk, viewed by over 50 million people, Robert mentions that good relationships are not just for our happiness but also for our mental and physical health. Friendships can make your memory last longer and your body suffer less when in pain.

Good relationships protect our bodies and our brains, loneliness kills.

“Its not the number of friends
It’s the quality of your close relationships that matters.”
Rober Robert Waldinger

It’s time to replace your workmates by playmates and foster happy relationships in order to live a longer happier life.

But in a world where people are disconnected at the same time as they are hyperconnected, how can we find and foster this key relationships?

Community Living, the new era of human connection

It’s hard to make new friends as an adult, the endless hours of work, your marriage, the kids… How will you be able to make new friends?

We need to go back to communities, we need to go back to our tribes.

Seth Godin mentions that we all belong to tribes, he actually wrote a whole book about it.

“A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.”
― Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

We are surrounded by tribes.

I belong to several tribes and I have a feeling you do to.

In my life tribes changed over time, but today I belong to the digital nomad tribe, the remote work tribe, the Crossfit tribe, the beach volleyball tribe. some of this tribes I lead, others I am just a member enjoying the relationships that these tribes bring me in my daily life no matter where I am.

It’s time to reflect, to which tribes do you belong to? Could you be more involved in them? Could you actually lead a tribe?

When these tribes come together something magical happens, I feel that in beach volleyball tournaments, in Crossfit competitions and in digital nomad and remote work conferences.
These are the places and times where we gather, where everyone who has something that unites them come together, when we are surrounded by people like us, where we feel that we belong.

A great community offers:
- Shared values and goals
- A sense of belonging
- Shared rituals and practices
- Trust and safety
- Volunteer opportunities that help people work together
- Clear caring leadership
- Opportunities for growth and learning
- A physical location where the community gathers
- Celebration and recognition

There are communities that follow this vision in different areas, from artistic communities, sustainability, tech, educational, health-conscious, spiritual, etc.

Religions are one of the most successful cases of a thriving global community.

I believe in the power of communities so much that actually created a whole project for the digital nomad community…

The Digital Nomad Village - Ponta do Sol

The digital nomad village is a project I wrote more than 7 years ago and that came to life in February 2021, located in a beautiful village in Madeira island, Portugal, named Ponta do Sol.
This project was build in partnership with the Regional Government of Madeira and Startup Madeira and has been running for 2.5 years.
From the community perspective, the goal is to create a thriving community of digital nomads who aim to create deep connections while having a positive impact and connect locally.
Digital nomadism can be a lonely lifestyle, so most nomads actually travel between communities spread around the world in order to connect with like minded people while going in adventures and working online. Good examples are Canggu in Bali, Chiang Mai in Thailand and Lisbon in Portugal.
But while we could find incredible people in these communities I lacked the easiness of understanding the complex structures and sub-groups inside the community, which led to people finding themselves alone in the middle of a thousand people.

Buy designing a community from scratch and centralize all the management and information we were able to become the easiest and most well connected community in the world to step in and enjoy.
Ideally in the first week you will meet 30-50 people. By the end of the month you will meet hundreds of nomads, expats and locals.
From all these, you will find your own people, and enjoy deep connection.

Our free workspace at the center of the village is a simple space designed for working and connection. We organize daily events, as diverse as possible, that go from workshops to volunteering at the dog shelter, and of course the already legendary Purple Fridays.

This is a place and a community designed for deep connection.

Like Ponta do Sol is thriving inside the nomad community we see more and more communities appearing and thriving in many diverse tribes.

People are finally finding meaning through communities.

The future of living and communities

Like we understood with the nomad village project, it’s key to design communities and villages are actually the most perfect places to do it. So now we see different projects in different parts of the world, bringing life to ageing villages, gathering the tribes that met online in physical locations and helping people connect and never feel lonely.

We see people leaving cities with their families to join their communities in villages, maybe it’s their hometown (met several madeiran who came back with their jobs and joined our community), or maybe it’s a place that a community leader designed and build to gather people like us, that do things like that.

Cities are not going to die, they are reorganising themselves around neighbourhoods, the original city communities and even big businesses like Ikea and Decathlon adapted to this new world, opening small stores at the neighbourhood level to serve this public. Neighbourhood coworking clubs like Switchyards in Atlanta are thriving, local public libraries are full of people working, the neighbourhoods have a new life in them besides being a dormitory.

Community leadership is today one of the most interesting careers in the world, one that allows you to help someone build their community or become a leader and organize your own tribe.

The world needs more community leaders.

The world needs more people connecting to fight loneliness.

The world needs more friendships.

Ps: We are organising our first Digital Nomad Fest in Albufeira, Algarve. If you want to connect with the nomad community, consider checking it here.

https://thenomadworld.org/

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