Global Oases Are Easier For Me Than Local Ones

Building an Oasis with Friends isn’t something I thought I’d want to do because it felt unnatural for the longest time. Some days, it felt like a borderline luxury desire. A major reason for my feeling this way was that the pattern of my life so far had been spending large chunks of life in one country before moving to another; on average, I have moved every 7 years.

This is not the same as travelling. It is wholesale needs-based relocation and settlement; integrating into a new culture was not the most difficult aspect of this, but having to do so repeatedly was the challenge. As a result, I have long felt that the stability of a long-term unit of friendship or romance is a luxury, which probably contributes significantly to why I have generally felt like an outsider. Distributed friendships seem more practical than anything else and I have had a fair few of them.

Over the last year, I have learned about new community living experiments emerging in cities, like Fractal in New York City. I sense that these are being created by others who feel a similar need for an oasis with friends. Something that makes their lives in a city enjoyable and fills them with purpose. A new Fractal-inspired campus has appeared in London recently, Mosaic. It seems to be filling a somewhat similar gap—I don’t want to call it a niche because this is an unfortunate gap that exists but shouldn’t.

While I do not know any people in these new setups, I do wonder what other factors are drivers for building such communities. I suspect not all members of such experimental communities share my story of feeling a lack of community due to repeated geographical relocation. While I cannot confirm this, I would not be surprised if at least some members are local to the city or the regions around it; they would simply be disgruntled by the current state of affairs.

While I have been in London and have increasingly settled into its rhythm, I can’t help but feel that another factor might just be that there is an acceptance of a compromise in personal life to make professional progress. This invasion of the personal by the professional can fundamentally change how we experience and interact with the cities we live in; as housing gets harder to find and families get harder to build here, a city increasingly feels like a place of work and little else. To start families, most people move out. Of those who have the capacity to build a life in the most expensive cities on Earth, they have little community if they choose to remain there. I am not attempting to substantiate this or find evidence of this; it is a pattern I am noticing from conversations with friends. The statistical analyses from economists that explain what is happening might either reinforce their beliefs or contradict them; regardless, their circumstances will remain unchanged so there is little consolation in pointing to justifications and analyses.

When I discuss this with my friends in California, it feels like this is largely a problem in developed Western economies, where being close to one’s family is uncommon. Or if one has that, then being close to friends is unusual. It seems they’re making a compromise somewhere along the way. When I visit India, it feels less the case but I fear the same wave is about to strike there, too. So, when I share ideas of such communities with my friends in India, Scotland, and the US, I hear them agree that there is an issue. It feels like a need for such oases is trending—or is beginning to—amongst millennials searching for something more meaningful and lasting; forming these experimental communities is one way they are taking action when they are unable to find purpose and community. Or purpose with community.

While I feel locally less integrated, I feel globally very integrated. I have seen a community of friends assemble in California around me when I visit from London; my friends from California have similarly created communities in London and Scotland that form around them when they visit. We feel like flames that draw moths.

I am currently writing this from Scotland, where I have an old and deep friendship. Here, I am in a little oasis, in proximity of their adorable but timid kittens who observe me from a distance. My community has gotten increasingly distributed over time as I have moved.

In a more ideal world, I’d have not just this globally optimal solution but a locally optimal one too. I think there are a lot of us out there who want that.