There's a big shift afoot.

It’s a shift in how we live, work, and find belonging.

I'm excited by it. And a bit anxious as well.

This series of posts is my attempt to get my head around it. If I've done my job here, by the end you'll both be examining how you live your own life and also thinking about opportunities to help others do the same.

Let's call the destination we are heading to the "New Life Bundle." And, to make sense of it, we'll first have to talk about where we came from before: The "Old Life Bundle."

The Old Life Bundle started with the job.

This usually went one of two ways:

Either way, for many, the choice of where to live is all about the job (or the job of your spouse, etc). And Job + City becomes the primordial choice in your life bundle. All else flows from there.

Of course, it’s "Job + City" because the job was attached to a specific place. You were required to live where your employer (actual or prospective) was. For most people, this place was a city because that’s where employers are.

Your next choice was home: Where, specifically, in that city to live.

This choice had a major constraint attached to it: It needed to be commuting distance to that job. And given the architecture of our cities, that essentially boiled down to suburbs vs city center. And with each, a certain kind of housing stock and set of daily habits. Commute vs price. Car vs transit. Personal space vs urban energy. Cooking vs take-out. BBQs vs bars. You chose, but that choice was highly constrained with well-defined trade-offs.

Next: Community. That combination of home and job largely defined who your community in that city was going to be.

Three of the most important sources of community for people in the Old Life Bundle were neighbors, religious/civic organizations, and coworkers.

And none of these involve a particularly active choice. Your neighbors are randomly handed to you after you choose your home. Your religious organization is likely the closest church or two to your home. Your civic organization is chosen from whatever handful of civic organizations were active where you lived. Your coworkers are determined directly by your job.

So, in essence, all of these primary community sources more or less fall out of your choice of Job + City.

Sure, there were other sources for community. Maybe you get really into your local bridge club. Maybe a bunch of your college or high school friends live where you do.

But think about your parents, aunts, uncles: Who is their primary community? Odds are they are one of those three groups..

Job + City → Home → Community. In that order.

This is the Old Life Bundle.

In the old life bundle, employers were the linchpin. They defined where people had to live (major employment centers), what homes were available to them (commuting distance from the office), who formed their core communities (coworkers, neighbors, civic/religious orgs).

There are a number of forces weakening the hold of that bundle:

And now the big new catalyst: Remote work.

The pandemic radically accelerates the shift to remote work. A slow weakening of the old paradigm is now a stretched rubber band that no longer is able to go back to its original shape. Some of the 80m people currently working remotely in the US will go back to the office. There’s a lot of debate on how many, but everyone agrees it won't be all 80m of them. And even if they do go back to the office, they won't return with the same attitude toward the role of their employer in their life.

Remote work is the final blow to the Old Life Bundle. Without the linkage between job and city (and therefore job and home … and therefore job and community), the whole bundle falls apart.

Now people are able to select each of the components of their life bundle a la carte.

Whoa okay. Is this good or bad?

The great thing about the Old Life Bundle is that it radically simplified the construction of your personal life bundle. It’s sort of like building a sandwich at Subway. Sure you have to choose which sandwich, which toppings, and whether you want it toasted. But those choices are constrained and all fall out from the original choice to go to Subway in the first place.

Now we are sitting in a supermarket, trying to make a meal with 10,000 potential ingredients, and lacking a recipe.

The meal you need to make is now your life. And you must choose from 100 employers, 1000 cities, 10,000 communities online and offline, and innumerable ways to construct your day.

Good luck.

This is our collective dizzying headspace. And it will be equal parts oppressive and freeing. Equal parts anxious and exhilarating.

Queue the New Life Bundle.

The New Life Bundle are the structures, institutions, and companies that will appear to help people ground themselves in this bonanza of lifestyle choice along multiple axes.

The New Life Bundle will be a grounding force. It will quell anxiety by constraining choice and providing a focal point for people to construct their life.

So what exactly is it? We don’t know yet! This is what we are going to explore.

In the Old Life Bundle, the "Job X City" was the focal point. What’s the focal point of the New Life Bundle?

My hypothesis: There won’t be a single bundle. There will be multiple options for how people construct their lives. What they will each have is a focal point in the center: The thing around which the other components of the bundle fall into place.

Here are a handful of candidate bundles I'll explore in upcoming posts.

People who decide to put place as the focal point of their life will demand great places. They won’t settle for this.

In this new world, I’m hyper bullish on "remarkable places" - places that are noteworthy and opinionated.

Existing remarkable places will be winners. I continue to be bullish on Manhattan. But there aren’t a lot of Manhattans out there.

So increasing demand for remarkable places will also beget supply of new places. And those places won’t have to appeal to the median person in the way that existing cities do (existing cities appeal to the median person because they are really appealing to employers and their broad base of employees).

These new places will be more opinionated, more notable, more (as the French maybe say?) sui generis:

Examples:

The other opportunity that remote work raises is not having to choose a single place as home at all.

This is something different than digital nomadism (which for all but a few, becomes lonely and exhausting).

A decentralized city hinges on a group of people spread across multiple places. Let’s call it a "scene."

Examples:

Candidate bundle #3: Communal living Squad as the focal point

Communal living, of various forms, is having a renaissance. And physical coliving communities are a candidate for focal points in the New Life Bundle. I write about this in detail in a separate blog for coliving practitioners called Supernuclear, but in this space we’ll zoom out a bit to some of the wider opportunities and implications.

What’s behind this: People crave social support structures. They crave squads. And with the dissolution of the Old Life Bundle, there’s not an obvious way to get these.

Intentional communities. Chosen families. Fictive kin. Same idea - a core of people at the center of your life.

Example:

This one may be best illustrated by an example. You know that New Years resolution you make every January to work out more? The one that you forget about every year by Jan 12th?

Suppose instead of just resolving to work out more, you structured your life -- temporarily-- around the goal.

You move into a house with a nice gym, trainer, and a dozen other people who share the same goal. You live there January through March. In that environment, you can’t help but accomplish your workout goal. The environment compels you.

This is cohort-based living. It’s centered around a particular goal. Goals or specific temporary areas of focus could become the focal point in the New Life Bundle.

Examples:

Here we are, dear reader, in the Anxious Now. The Old Life Bundle is in its death throes. The New Life Bundle has yet to fully appear.

Your assignment is to reflect on the following two questions:

Okay. Until next time.