Nomad Life

September 13th, 2023

Some thoughts about how to live a good life. Your mileage may vary.

Current status

I’ve been a (minimalist) nomad for more than 4 years now. Mostly going from one coliving to another.

In practice it means that every one or two months, I take my suitcase and blue backpack with white palm trees and I move to a different coliving. I come back to the same places often and I mostly follow the sun.

I’ll get back to what makes a great coliving, but the main idea is to share a place with other like-minded people from all over the world. And to spend a lot of time together as we sleep, work and laugh under the same roof. I wrote about my first experience here.

I’ve tried to explain why I like it so much by drawing this graph of “Enjoyment” as a function of “Privacy”. For me coliving is at the top of the curve: it’s maximizing potential enjoyment.

curve based on very accurate statistical data™

Humans seem to be seeking privacy and then develop a Stockholm syndrome with big cities. Living with so many neighbours that they’ll never talk to. Surrounded by so many places they’ll never visit. Close to friends they’ll only see once in a while. Netflix is the blue pill.

Relinquish a bit of privacy and they end up with a flatshare. Which is already much better. But flatshares can also very often end up badly. People fight, a “managed” environment is needed.

Now getting closer to the concept of a coliving: between hostels and flatshares. But the only way to really feel it is to go to one (good) coliving for at least a month. Usually people doing that end up challenging their previous way of living. I see that all the time.

Two questions

When I meet other people at these coliving spaces, if they recently started their nomad journey and find out that I’ve been doing it for years, I inevitably get that first question:

1/ What is the best coliving?

Then from basically everyone that gets to know me a bit better, I get a deeper question:

2/ How long do you want to live this life for?

I see the confusion on some people’s faces when I tell them that I don’t have a base, that I’m always in motion (at a very slow pace though). For the previous generation living this life what just impossible, or reserved for misfits or dirty hippies. So I understand where that question comes from. And this article is also a way for me to try to give it a refined answer.

The best coliving

I guess it’s a very natural thing for any topic to ask for “the best”: what’s your favorite artist? best wine or cheese? best city, car, sport, player etc. As if we needed it to orientate ourselves.

I’m trying to resist using this concept of “best” in life as much as possible because it’s usually too simplistic (how do you rank on different variables?) and also not dynamic (I used to dislike oysters but I’ve now developed the taste to savour them).

So my usual answer is that depending on what you want, you might enjoy a different coliving. As actions speak louder than words the ones I find myself returning to are the ones I can highly recommend:

Cloud Citadel in the French Alps if I feel like enjoying the mountains (summer or winter)
Burgas Coliving in Bulgaria if I want to get that summer-camp-for-grownups feeling
Nine or Maraya in Tenerife for all-year-long good weather (eternal spring) and a yoga-infused relaxed life
Sun and Co. in Spain for personal growth
Château Coliving in Normandy when I’m pretending to be a king
Alt_ChiangMai if I’m in Thailand

Every year I’m aiming to try at least a new one just to get out of my comfort zone. Usually after other nomads whose taste I trust recommended them to me.

I have yet to go to a coliving owned by a chain that I like. The Outsite or Selena of this world might be providing lovely (albeit expensive) spaces, but they’re completely missing the one and only ingredient that makes the coliving life superior: community.

Without a strong community, these places end up being nothing more than fancy hostels. It seems that chains can’t get it right because it takes much more skin in the game to run a coliving: owners of independent colivings have it, demotivated employees of soulless corporation don’t.

If you’re currently staying at a coliving and wondering if the community is strong or not, here’s a simple test I designed — “The Names Test”:

How many people know the names of at least 80% of the other people staying at the coliving?

Compute the ratio to the people who don’t know enough names

That’s your “Community Strength” (from 0 to 100)

I would argue that my favorite colivings have a score of 100. You just can’t fake community. The invaluable sense of belonging can only appear within a strong one.

Work

Also I think it’s not fair to call something a “coliving” if they don’t provide a decent co-working space or at least a desk in every room. Sadly many people spend a lot of time on calls and they need a space to do so without annoying other colivers who are just enjoying a life in the non-metaversian physical present!

Coliving with a theme

The coliving life is about living a normal life with other people, but it’s with activities that it becomes special: you are gently pushed to try new things, and create memories with other colivers along the way.

It recently came to my attention that some colivings already have an implicit theme (mountains, beach, yoga, castle etc.) that is influencing the type of available activities. The main activity for any coliving will always be around food and drinks though: you can’t beat a good Apéro turning into a party to create strong bonds with others!

But I’d like to see more colivings with an explicit theme. Imagine meeting with people who are excited about the same topic (apart from wine and cheese) and collectively becoming better at it weeks after weeks. We know since Flow was published that this is a way to get these moments of “optimal experience”.

I have two obvious ideas in mind for a themed coliving:

1/ Craft coliving

Drawing, painting, crocheting, sculpturing… Every day there’s an event around these crafts. This could be an artist coming to teach colivers, a trip to go sketch a local monument, a visit to a gallery, etc. The coliving would provide all the tools. This could be awesome - you know you want that!

2/ Skate coliving

A massive wooden skatepark inside, and another huge concrete one outside. Skateboarding every day. Classes available for all levels and ages. A board shop and a bar on the premises. Contests organized every month (with concerts). “Pro Skater” on a console for injured skaters. Movie nights to get inspired - first pick: Man Down.

It makes sense that the first colivings, the pioneers, didn’t target a niche. The market wasn’t deep enough. But one pandemic later, the growth of the nomad population is on another trajectory. There will be more and more nomads with overlapping interests.

Not a camp

If you go to Tenerife there’s already a plethora of “surf camps”. People go there for a few days to surf, party and shag. No problem with that at all. But it’s not a “normal” life: nobody’s opening a laptop there.

The point of a coliving with a theme is to have something similar as for the focus on one activity but still living a normal life. You can skate one hour per day every day and that’s amazing. No need to do it 6 hours per day 7 days a week.

Partying and shagging still very much encouraged though.

Long term

I haven’t had coliving fatigue yet - quite the opposite. if I spend more than a few weeks not in a coliving I start to feel like something is missing: my social life is no longer seamlessly organized. I have to exert myself just to try and meet friends for coffee or dinner. I have to plan in advance most activities, when in a coliving there’s a weekly agenda that’s keeping people in sync - and then you just randomly bump into each other in the common areas.

But I understand that meeting new people all the time can be tiring. Even if you’re trying to be conscious about it, there’s an inevitable amount of smalltalk required before feeling connected to someone. Before you can feel good just sitting silent next to each other. Before you can feel sad when that person is leaving.

Some colivings try to enforce a 2-week minimum stay but ideally you want people to linger for at least a month. If someone is staying less than a week it’s almost a waste of time to try and connect at a deeper level: that’s hostel vibe, not coliving vibe.

Having lived this life for some time I almost always end up staying with people I already met. That’s amazing. Actually the best thing as long as these people are not on my blacklist! To be fair the coliving population is on average a delight. But you cannot avoid the bell curve: there’s always some people you’ll like less. One instant red flag for me is “loud people” but I’m not here to talk about them ;)

Another challenge of this nomad life in the long run is about raising a family. Most colivings are not suitable for kids which gives this chicken-and-egg problem: no colivings for families → no nomad families → no demand for family-friendly colivings. It’s true that the trend in the nomad world is to not have kids, as it would mean giving away the freedom and the lifestyle that goes with it.

But maybe there is a way to reconcile these two apparently contradictory lifestyles.

Covillage

Have you heard of this “village” concept?! That’s how people use to live before the Stockholm syndrome of big cities took hold. The idea is simple: villagers live with their families in their houses (farms, etc.) and they meet with other villagers in the street, at the local café, pub, church… They all know each other. There’s a real sense of belonging.

The only problem? People fight. They end up hating each other (and creating cliques) but they’re stuck in their village. A cold war settles in, the community vibe is gone.

What is a co-village?

It’s a coliving in a village, or a village around a coliving.

Imagine a big piece of land with a building in the center. Inside that building there’s a co-working space, a big living room, dinning room, kitchen, and maybe a cinema, gym and bodega. There would also some bedrooms for normal colivers to stay for shorter periods (1 month minimum).

Now imagine around that building a constellation of chalets hosting families of 1 or more. They have more privacy, and tend to stay at least one year. They’re still part of the coliving life but can opt-out more easily to do their own things if needed.

More importantly these families can have kids and raise them within the community. A much better way than the fallacious nuclear family included in the big city trickery!

Here be dragons though. Nothing would kill a coliving vibe more than having kids around (noisy, stealing the attention of everybody, etc.). Once again this requires a managed environment: rules are needed and have to be enforced. Maybe it’s about having certain time slots and rooms being accessible only for adults.

What about fights?

Or why would a covillage be better than a village? What is the ingredient that can fix the problem of people ending up hating each other? The answer: a benevolent dictatorship.

That dictator should be an entity (business or non-profit) managing the covillage. If people fight that entity will be in the middle trying to find a solution. In extreme cases it can decide to ask a member of the community to leave.

I understand this is a controversial idea. The first reaction is to find it stressful that members can get kicked out if they’re not “pleasing” the entity in charge. But there’s another side of the coin: the covillage is a business that wants to attract clients/covillagers and if they start kicking people out randomly, they’ll probably go bankrupt quite fast!

I can’t stress it enough that this is not a naive utopia. There are countless projects starting with very “beautiful” ideas (Привет, товарищ) but ending with blood.

No utopia. No dirty hippies. Just normal people living an exciting life ♥