My Life In The Co-Living Scene, and Related Alt Culture Observations

Transcript of an interview with Santi Ruiz

At the beginning of this year, Santi Ruiz reached out and asked to interview me about my history in the co-living scene. After I did the interview with Santi, I thought others might find it interesting. So here is an edited transcript, published with Santi’s permission.

I offered my thoughts on a range of topics, including several very specific observations of co-living dynamics, and how this stuff fits into the broader culture.

Santi did not ultimately quote me for his finished article, which was just published July 2024 in Asterisk Magazine, because the stuff we discussed landed outside the scope of where the article ended up. Santi’s article is still good, though. It’s worth reading if you want a high-level summary of the Bay Area co-living scene; some of the people quoted are people I’ve known for years. (Sidenote: Santi co-wrote the Asterisk article with someone named Lydia You, who is not me; my name is Lydia Laurenson, and I don’t know Lydia You.)

This interview was conducted in February 2024.

SANTI RUIZ:

Hi Lydia, I am excited to hear about your experience with Bay Area co-living. Let me put my cards on the table. For my part, I used to run a fellowship for young technologists, 18-23 year olds. It’s called Interact. And a lot of those folks are in San Francisco co-living houses.

So I decided to write about this topic: How do people in these buzzy, up-and-coming, founder-focused co-living situations think about themselves? How do they think about how co-living shapes them?

A lot of that can be insular. People think they're the first people to live in a bunk bed with buddies. So I want to contextualize this in the culture of co-living.

LYDIA LAURENSON:

You found the right person. It's interesting — when I saw that you messaged me, I did not know whether this would be a hostile interview. But I have enjoyed your past comments on the Twitter/ X timeline, so I was excited to talk to you.

A lot of the time, people on the Red side are hostile to co-living. So initially, when you messaged me, I was unsure whether you had a political agenda. A lot of people on the right wing associate me with liberal counterculture and have negative stereotypes of me. So I asked you questions like, “What's your intention with this piece?” Thank you for explaining where you’re coming from.

I’m a heterodox person. I have some liberal opinions, I have some conservative opinions. But I almost married a famous far-right writer a couple years ago. When our engagement was announced, a lot of people on the conservative side of the aisle were outraged about my personal history, because I used to have a semi-famous blog about sexuality. I also have a history in alternative culture, including co-living.

So when I became publicly engaged to my ex, I got a lot of nasty feedback. I would see these conservative comments on Twitter like: Who is this slut who dares believe she is worthy of our God-King? And then, simultaneously, while I was getting hate comments from conservatives, I also got hate comments from liberal readers and acquaintances, like: Oh, she turned into a fascist and we hate her now. (In case it needs to be said, I am not a fascist.)

SANTI: What was your blog?

LYDIA: I wrote under a pseudonym, Clarisse Thorn. I wrote about BDSM, mostly. Sometimes I wrote about polyamory too — I was part of a sex-positive feminist wave. I stand by most of my old writing still, but it was a different time and I was a very different person.

I wrote a book about pickup artists. Funnily enough, this presaged my later involvement in the right wing, because in my PUA book I took an empathic perspective towards redpill guys. Some feminists read this book and were like: You're such a traitor. It was similar to what happened later, during my short-lived engagement. 

SANTI: Would you say that the co-living spaces where you’ve lived have been countercultural?

LYDIA: Yes, definitely, most of them have been. Most co-living spaces are a crossroads for alternative, countercultural practices.

But I don’t know if this is true about the younger people you have worked with in the Bay Area. I'm 39. These days, I hear about young founder hacker houses that don't feel the same. Many of the houses I hear about don’t feel like the old school Silicon Valley hacker culture that originally drew me out here to the Bay Area. But some of the culture seems very similar.

SANTI: I think there may be continuity in the idea that a better way of living is possible, and that lifestyle experimentation is a good thing. But there are interesting differences. One of those differences is kind of like… How much of this hippie counterculture lineage do you draw from consciously? 

LYDIA: Yeah. A lot of my community in the Bay Area is self-consciously countercultural. Not just the co-living spaces, also a lot of my friends who live alone or in nuclear families.

But something that’s interesting to me is how much of the “counterculture” has been mainstreamed. You could argue that I was a part of mainstreaming alternative stuff — with my blog, for example. I also had this magazine that I founded more recently. In the past, I had a strong countercultural element in my writing. But now I wonder where it’s all headed.

I have huge questions about mainstreaming certain aspects of the counterculture. For example, I’m worried about the popularization of psychedelics, which seems to lack any guardrails. What will happen if anyone can buy LSD pills at Walgreens at the drop of a hat, and take them without community support? That’s crazy. I worry that this is the path we are on. And that is not something that I have ever advocated for.

This was part of my motivation when I founded my own media company in 2019. I have roots in the counterculture. In my twenties, I wanted to destigmatize a lot of alt lifestyle things. But nowadays, I find that the mainstream media is less skeptical of countercultural stuff than I am myself. I find this concerning. So I wanted to create a media company that’s less prone to both kinds of bias.

This also means that I found myself having surprising agreements with the right wing when I started getting into that community, a few years back. For example — before I met anyone on the right wing, I had intuited this concept of “luxury beliefs,” and then later, I found out that this was a phrase that people use a lot in the “dissident right” or “New Right” community. Years ago, I had this idea that there are types of lifestyle experimentation that wealthier people can easily afford to do, and I suspected that those same lifestyle experiments are higher-risk for less wealthy people. Years ago, I would try to talk to my liberal friends about this idea, and often what people said was that I was unfairly gatekeeping. But when I eventually made some friends on the New Right and talked to them about this idea, they already knew what I meant. So I began to see that there was a funny meeting of the minds for me with some people on the right wing.

So… anyway, I’ve been very involved in alternative culture, and I have lived in co-living spaces for much of the last 20 years. I got interested in co-living as a teenager because I was reading old Doonesbury cartoons. I don't know if you've ever looked at the original Doonesbury cartoons. My mom had a collection when I was growing up. The Doonesbury timeline started when the characters were in college. A bunch of characters lived in a co-living space. I think they called it Walden, and the characters had all these shared experiences together. As a teenager I thought that sounded cool.

I graduated college early, when I was 19 years old, and then I moved to Chicago to be near the guy I was dating. It was an awkward period for me because I was quite young, I was college age, but I had already graduated from college. I ended up making friends with a lot of people who were at the University of Chicago at the time, because I was their age and I was living in Hyde Park. So I integrated with these student communities in Hyde Park. It started when I met one of the Chicago students on a wiki for a roleplaying game that I loved. We became friends and he showed me these co-living spaces, which were mixed students and professional adults, and I moved into one of them. Those folks usually called what they were doing “co-ops” rather than “co-living spaces.” I lived in one of those Hyde Park co-ops, off and on, for eight years.

SANTI: I went to undergrad at the University of Chicago!

LYDIA: Really? Cool. There is a co-op system in Hyde Park called Qumbya. It’s not affiliated with the university, but some students live there.

SANTI: I didn’t hear about it while I was there.

LYDIA: When I was at Qumbya, there were three houses, all of them legally under one entity. The original house, which is called Bowers House, has been around since the early nineties. Eventually, the group expanded into multiple houses in one neighborhood, and they partnered with a national nonprofit called NASCO. The acronym stands for North American Students of Cooperation. Its mission is to help cooperatives manage themselves.

I had this whole trajectory within Qumbya — initially I was more a “standard” house member, just doing my chores. Eventually I got interested in governance. At one point, I ended up being elected Chairman of the Board for the entire collective. So I learned a lot about how it worked.

Before this interview, I sent you this paper over Twitter: “Why Co-ops Die.” The paper was written in 2002. I received that paper while I was on the Qumbya board. The paper was originally written by one of the executive directors of NASCO, because NASCO cares about this question: How do we make these co-living communities work over the long term? I've sent that paper to everyone I talked to about this topic for years, because it's so interesting.

In the co-living ecosystem there is very little shared information over time. Frequently, even within the same cooperative, there is little functional long-term memory. So the author of that paper, Mr. Jones, nailed a bunch of these ongoing issues; for example, he points out that one thing that kills co-ops is when the group doesn’t own the property.

Ownership is a huge problem. I've seen so many issues around ownership. The person who owns the co-living property has a disproportionate amount of power in the community, unless they're extremely disciplined. Even for people with the best of intentions, their incentives frequently diverge from the people who live there, when one person owns the house and everyone else is renting.

But if you're renting from a landlord who isn’t part of the community, then sometimes it’s worse. The landlord might not want a co-living space on their property in the first place. They may have no reason to be friendly to the community at all, and you can end up with quite direct conflict situations. 

So anyway, I moved into this co-living space in Chicago in 2005, and I lived there off and on until late 2012. Then I moved to the Bay Area in January 2013. I did not live at Qumbya for that entire span of years in Chicago — I would take long breaks, like at one point, I served in the Peace Corps, so I was gone for a while. There were also periods when I didn't live at Qumbya but was living around the Hyde Park neighborhood. But even when I wasn’t living there, I was super entwined in the ecosystem of these houses.

In 2010-2012, I visited the Bay Area a lot, and I fell in love with the Bay. That period coincided with a time when I had had a serious bicycle accident in Chicago, and I broke my neck. I was lucky — I am in a very small percentage of people who survive these accidents at all, much less able to walk afterwards. But it scared me and I was like: I need a job with health insurance. I had spent all my twenties being a writer and activist, and I rarely made any money, but after this accident I was desperate for good quality health insurance. All my friends in San Francisco worked in tech, and I had already fallen in love with the Bay Area, so my tech industry friends convinced me to move here.

I had to hustle to get into the tech industry. I was scared and exhausted for most of 2013. It was hard. But finally, I got my first full-time startup job towards the end of 2013. And then I worked my way up. I developed a specialty working at the intersection of media and technology, and eventually, I launched my own magazine. During that period, I lived in more than one of these Bay Area co-living spaces. So I know the ecosystem, and I can compare the SF ecosystem to other ones, including the NASCO co-ops where I lived in Chicago.

SANTI: What is the ideological background of NASCO?

LYDIA: It’s very “normal counterculture liberal.”

NASCO is passionate about community. They believe more people should have the experience of living in community. I think democracy is a big aspect of how they think about it — they want people to be able to live in small democracies. But I'm not sure if they require their member houses to be fully democratic. A lot of these houses run on consensus rather than democracy, but I will note that I prefer democracy over full consensus. In my opinion, when a group tries to make every decision by consensus, it takes a long time and it burns people out. And dissent gets socially suppressed in consensus systems more than democratic systems.

NASCO mostly doesn’t have member co-ops in the Bay Area, because real estate is too expensive here. One of the key roles NASCO plays is buying buildings, to try to help with ownership. But owning buildings is not feasible in the Bay, not in the way that NASCO helps with ownership elsewhere in the country, due to the cost of the buildings. NASCO can still be helpful to Bay Area co-living spaces, though, because the organization has tons of institutional wisdom. They can come in and give seminars about conflict resolution, for example.

There is also a local nonprofit here in the Bay called Embassy Network, which operates some co-living spaces and does broader work on causes like prison abolition. [Note: In the final version of Santi’s article, he includes quotes from Zarinah Agnew at Embassy Network.]

Over the years I’ve seen that many co-living organizations that you see in the Bay Area are startups trying to make a profit, like — they’re trying to make a venture capital play for co-living spaces. This sometimes moves large amounts of money into the co-living ecosystem, so that’s nice. But I have never seen this “succeed” by VC standards of success. I know some of the people who tried it. They're smart people, and they often have a mission-oriented way of thinking about it. But it's hard to make a VC-style profit on co-living spaces. The margins don’t work very well. [This phenomenon also gets a mention in Santi’s article.]

However, it's also hard if you're creating a co-living space on your own, because you have to solve a bunch of problems all at once. If you're starting a new co-living space, then you need to solve both the core group of people who will start it, and also you have to solve the infrastructure problem, which is finding a space that will work for a community house. And you have to solve both those problems around the same time, which is complex. A lot of the time you can find the right group but not the right building, or vice versa. It takes major effort and focus to solve both.

In the years before I had my baby, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what long-term longevity these spaces can have. This means that a key question is whether children can be compatible with these spaces. A lot of people have great experiences living in these communities, and so we want to bring our children into these communities. And I sincerely believe that there is potential to raise children in co-living. I think we can have healthy intergenerational co-living communities. But life threw me a curveball in 2021 when I met my ex-fiancé, who I planned to marry. He and I became engaged quickly, and it was obvious that he would not be part of my co-living environment. So, he and I decided to get married and live a more “normal” nuclear family life. I did not expect this for myself, but that was what made sense at the time, for us as a couple.

I had already co-founded a co-living space in 2020, before I met my ex-fiancé. I intended the space to be intergenerational. But then, during my engagement, I started using my bedroom in the co-living space as an office. Then the engagement ended while I was pregnant, in 2022, and now I'm a single mother. So… during the weeks when the engagement was falling apart, my ex and I were on the rocks, and being pregnant, I was trying to take care of my health and to live in an environment where I felt cared for. I moved back into my old bedroom in the co-living space that I co-founded.

After my baby was born, my housemates and I agreed, within the community, to split off my space within the house. So I currently live in a separate sub-apartment within a larger co-living space. It’s a legal split, too. I have separate doors to my apartment, and I have a separate lease. The amount of rent that I pay is equivalent to a similarly-sized apartment for this neighborhood. In fact, this sub-unit has been rented as a stand-alone apartment previously, so it wasn’t hard to just make it an apartment again.

But it has been complex to make this work for everyone, and I’m going to move out into a new apartment later this year. And that is something I've seen a lot.

Every time people leave co-living communities, it is complex. There are always multiple factors. For me, in my current space, a big factor is literally my physical layout. I started wanting a new apartment because I realized that if I’m going to be paying the amount I’m paying, for my sub-apartment within this house, then I could spend the same amount of money and get an apartment with a physical layout that works better.

So, it’s complex. But even though it is complex, I have noticed a pattern: Many co-living spaces that start out with all adults and hope to eventually include children… don’t end up including children. I have known a lot of people who start co-living spaces with the explicit intention of having them be child-friendly, or contain children. Sometimes it works beautifully, sometimes it does not.

I’ve seen a lot of cases where people try it for a few years, like one year, or five years — but often, new parents have a hard time integrating with the non-parents in the space, or the parents will come into conflict with other parents. Then it’s higher stakes to work out a community conflict once children are involved, so it’s just harder for everyone, as opposed to working out a conflict that only involves adults. So then, a lot of the time people just leave.

It’s a real bummer, because when it works for everyone, these spaces can be extraordinary community experiences. So it would be nice if more of them worked well for parents and children. [Note: In Santi’s article, he highlights a co-living space in San Francisco that includes kids, which is called Treehouse. I’ve visited Treehouse. It had a lovely vibe when I visited.]

I would put it at 50-50. For the cases I see locally in the Bay Area, about 50% of the time, it works beautifully to add kids to a standard adult co-living space.

However, there is also a slightly different version of co-living with kids, and I see this second version work more often. Sometimes Millennials, or GenX, if they're wealthy enough, will develop co-living spaces that are more like shared apartment buildings, or houses with a shared backyard. There is more than one of these in the Bay Area, where the parents who live there will have separate apartments or houses, adjoining a shared outdoor space. With that type of layout, it costs a fortune to buy in, obviously, because it is just so much real estate. But it’s cool because the kids have a shared backyard to run around in, and then the families still have their own space. They can still childproof their own space however they want to, and they can run their own kitchen. All of that is important for families. [Note: Santi’s article briefly mentions Radish, a co-living community in Oakland that has this type of layout.]

SANTI: Can you describe the co-living space you founded?

LYDIA: It is two houses right next to each other, in an extremely pleasant residential neighborhood. The two houses share a backyard. Most people who live here have individual bedrooms, except for me, since I now have this apartment sub-unit instead.

I co-founded this space with a small group in 2020, during the pandemic. I had an individual bedroom prior to giving birth. A common format for adult co-living in the Bay Area is a large house, often one of the local Victorian mansions, where every resident has their own room. People share kitchens, people share a lot of the infrastructure. Again, in my case, I'm not sharing space the way I used to when I was a single adult. It’s easier for me to have a separate apartment because it enables me to baby-proof and manage my space in a way that works for my baby, without running all the changes past my housemates, which is what I would have to do if I were still sharing the kitchen and living room. It’s hard to share a kitchen with other adults when you have a newborn, unless they're your family or have some close relationship to you and the baby.

One thing I’ve realized, watching people experiment with these different co-living formats while having children — it seems harder for young parents to share kitchens and living rooms with non-parents than we expected it to be. Sometimes I think that adding kids into co-living spaces was easier for an earlier generation of parents, like the Boomers. When I was putting together my plans for an intergenerational co-living space, I visited several Boomer co-living spaces where kids grew up within the community. And, this is speculative on my part, but I think it's possible that Boomer Americans have more shared expectations about how to interact with kids, versus my generation, where we seem to have few shared expectations.

I think it’s possible that if you put ten Boomers in a room, they have more of a shared sense of how they're all going to pay attention and take care of the kid. Whereas I think that for us Millennials — maybe it’s partly that relationships are just hard for the younger generations. There is so little interpersonal trust. It is a complex process for any Millennial to interact with any other Millennial on any personal subject: Relationships, living together, childcare. Sometimes I think we just don’t have a lot of shared expectations about lifestyle, period. And we have tons of optionality, so everything needs to be hashed out on a case-by-case basis. This can be inspiring for people who love working out bespoke relationships all the time. But it can also be exhausting. And it is so much harder when you add children to the mix.

As an example of what I mean — my mom grew up in small-town Ohio. She was born in 1945. Her family lived in the same town for generations. She has stories from when she was growing up that demonstrate how everyone had a sense of collective responsibility for kids in her community, and they all knew each other, with a shared community identity. For example, as a kid once, my mom ran down to a bridge in her village, and she was climbing on the bridge. One of the neighbors saw her climbing on the bridge and called her mother.

Again: This neighbor felt obliged to call my mom's mom, and to say, Hey, just so you know, your little girl is climbing on the bridge. When I try to imagine this happening today, I can’t. This sort of thing does not happen in areas like the area where I live, unless you have an explicit agreement.

If I do not know specifically that someone else in the broader community opted into watching my kid and protecting my kid, I assume that they aren’t. I never assume that they are. And I couldn’t get that experience if I moved back to the area where my mom grew up. It’s gone. We would have to rebuild it. But how? I sometimes have this experience in small ways when I travel with friends and family. But I don’t have it every day around my neighborhood, even though my neighborhood is super nice, family-friendly, and safe.

This is part of a broader trend: The “normal” way of having a family is in trouble right now, in America. There are so many indicators of this. The Family Court system is a mess, and there’s this rising prevalence of single moms. If you want a family, you simply cannot rely on the “normal” method of having a family to work well. But then what?

So that is one reason I came to believe that co-living can be a good way to help people weather these transitions. Because there are not shared norms in “normal” America right now. I feel that it would be so much better for children to grow up in a real community of adults who are all bought into the intergenerational vibe — rather than these ersatz “communities” with zero shared norms, which are the current American default. But the actual logistics of creating an intergenerational co-living space are more complicated than they look. This means that, functionally, a lot of people, especially in the Bay Area, are only in co-living spaces until they have kids. Then a lot of the time they move out, at which time they separate from this community experience that was important to them.

So there’s this cutoff for many adults, within these co-living spaces. And yet these are generative cultural spaces, which are important for the tech community and the alternative communities. Many people don’t want to leave. It’s painful. But… ultimately, if you're going to try co-living as an adult with children, you are entering into an experimental situation with a high chance of failure. Plus, at the same time, a lot of us also have startups. Living in a co-living space can be very demanding on your energy. If you also have kids and a startup, then where are you going to put your energy? This is a huge factor in what I see happen for parents in these spaces.

That’s part of why I spent so many years on the problem up front. I spent years trying to integrate co-living and having kids. I learned a lot and that knowledge is informing my approach as I move forward. I sometimes talk with friends about making a new shared co-living arrangement, with everything we’ve learned. But we all want to move slowly and build intentionally, because we know that the stakes are high.

So in conclusion, I've seen some examples of co-living with kids that work well, and some that don’t. I think it's a subtle problem. It’s bigger than it looks on the surface. Part of it is a problem that all parents have: Once you're a parent, your priorities shift so much. You can say the platitudes: I love my baby so much, and I'm gonna take care of him… but like… most people in my community here in the Bay Area, who do not have children themselves, will never understand what that statement means on an instinctive level.

I have the impression that a lot of Boomers did more childcare by default, when they were growing up. They knew more about how to be around children.

SANTI: There were more children around, in general, when the Boomers were young.

LYDIA: Yes, that’s true. In contrast, when you’re talking about highly motivated Millennial professionals in the Bay Area… it’s so different now. If you are an upwardly mobile professional in a coastal city in America, the odds that you've had essentially zero contact with children are incredibly high. It’s wild how much you don't know.

In retrospect, it’s interesting to me, the way I was thinking before I had a kid. I did have some experience. For example, I babysat as a teenager. I had spent time with kids as an adult. But before I had a kid, I thought about it in such an abstract way. One of my parent friends in Silicon Valley came up with this phrase, the “Parenting Singularity.” We used to talk about it when we talked about developing child-integrated co-living spaces. We would say something like this: We know there's a Singularity coming for us on an individual level. We don't know how we will change when we have kids.

Some of the guesses we made were correct. Some of them weren't. We knew it was hard to plan around the Parenting Singularity. We knew we couldn’t always predict how becoming parents would affect our relationships, or how it would affect our communities. But we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

And I think part of this is — for many Silicon Valley types, our relationships to our birth communities and our families of origin are weird. The alienation and cultural dislocation that exists across America is very present for us, and maybe it is particularly true of us. I don't know if this is less true with the younger tech people that you're working with. But one thing that is absolutely true of the Bay Area alt subcultures, my friends who are middle-aged tech weirdos: Many people who end up here were weird at home. In particular, many people who move to the Bay Area have a bad relationship with their family.

That is not the case for me. I’m close to my parents. I feel very grateful that I have a good relationship with my parents. But at some point, I had this insight: Wow, I'm on great terms with both my parents, and how many of my Bay Area friends are like that? That was a profound moment for me. It has come back to me many times over the years.

People who live in the Bay Area generally need to focus hard on their professional success and need to earn enough money that they can stay. And successful people here often focus on becoming beautiful, high-agency exemplars. People do amazing things with their hobbies. Most people I know who stick around the Bay Area have incredible, well-realized lives… these unicorns of human beings. And at the same time… a lot of these amazing people have terrible relationships with their families of origin. It can make things a bit strange when we all live together.

The people you live with are not your family, necessarily. But, in my experience, the people you live with end up occupying a sort of emotional “family” “slot.” Even if you don’t intend for that to happen, I think people living in your house feel like family, on some level. So, your family stuff will come up while interacting with housemates, especially if you live with someone over a long period. Once I started noticing that, I realized that it explains much conflict and weirdness in Bay Area co-living spaces.

When I lived in Chicago, the co-living vibe felt less wild and more orderly. For example, I have often thought that places in the Bay Area are weirdly allergic to chore requirements. This is crazy to me. I perceive that this chore allergy is constantly messing up the internal culture in these houses. This problem did not exist in Chicago in the same way.

There’s a common expectation in the Bay Area that everyone in the co-living space will contribute everything out of passion, somehow the pieces will come together at exactly the right times to make it work, with no required chores ever. In contrast, when I was in Chicago, the Qumbya co-ops assigned chores as soon as people moved in. In Qumbya, you moved in, and you instantly had a chore that consumed one to two hours per week. Or, if you were lucky enough to get a more interesting chore, sometimes the interesting chores took more of your time. Those chores were a bedrock part of living in that community. This was part of what made that community functional. 

There were also clear expectations of participation in other ways. When I moved into the Qumbya co-op in Chicago, I was told: We want you to be at home for dinner a certain percentage of nights, and you will cook dinner for everyone twice per month. We expect you to attend 75% of house meetings, which happen once per week. You will do at least two hours per week of chores.

In contrast, there are spaces in the Bay Area occasionally that have shared dinners — but shared dinners are once a week at most. Everyone is out partying, or networking, or dating, or working late. Meetings are more like once a month, or even rarer, which to me feels borderline non-functional.

When I lived in Chicago, sometimes the weekly meetings at Qumbya were hours long, and people hated them. But my observation is that when those meetings happen, stuff gets handled that is more than logistics. The meeting is not just the argument over: Who's misusing the blender, or: Who lays the mousetraps, should we have mousetraps at all, oh God, some of our members are vegan, how can we even think about having mousetraps, except we can’t have have hantavirus either, what about live traps, okay the live traps aren’t working, we need to get rid of the mice — you get my drift. These meetings can involve annoying logistical arguments with twenty people at once, so I understand why people don’t like them. I’ve had the mousetrap conversation a dozen times across different houses. But the point I’m making here is, I think the surface argument at a stressful meeting is not the only thing that's happening. There’s also an energy exchange, and a way of syncing up with each other, a way of working out small psychological issues before they snowball. The meeting sets expectations together. 

In houses that don't have regular meetings, what I feel is a “community debt” that gets built up, even if they somehow manage to keep the kitchens clean and the mousetraps handled. Maybe it’s similar to technical debt at a tech company, where you ignore a technical issue for too long and eventually it will take weeks to fix, when maybe you could have fixed it quickly up front. I think there is a lot of “community debt” like this, especially in Bay Area co-living spaces — situations where you could have had a house meeting and a conversation six months ago, but the meeting didn’t happen because people don’t like meetings, and then the issue doesn’t get resolved until it’s gigantic or people leave.

Of course, continuing the metaphor of technical debt — there are reasons technical debt happens at tech companies even when people have good practices around it, and the same is true of community debt. Sometimes issues go away on their own, or they can get resolved better by one person doing something on their own. I acknowledge that.

So yeah, for chores… what I see in the Bay Area is this philosophy that some people call “Do-Ocracy,” which is like: Just do it if it needs doing. But what you end up with is that many people don't do their chores. Or the chores are haphazard, or they’re occasional, or all the chores land on one person. In some of these co-living spaces with adults, it works out fine anyway and the dishes get done somehow. But it’s still weird to me. It’s a weird part of maintaining these groups in the Bay Area.

In the Bay Area, you have these beautiful, agentic, brilliant, weird, fascinating people. And most of the people I lived with in Chicago were more normal. But in Chicago, it seemed like more of my housemates did their chores. 

SANTI: Isn’t a benefit of wealth being able to pay people to do chores? 

LYDIA: Sure. I mean, yeah, if people in a co-living group make $200k per year, then they should hire someone to clean the house. They shouldn’t be cleaning the bathrooms themselves. So of course this is true of a lot of people in Bay Area co-living spaces. But you’re always going to need to work out some logistical stuff with your housemates on a regular basis, even if you hire help for some of the chores.

Sometimes I wonder if that's one aspect of what's going on with the challenges of integrating parents into these communities — this do-ocracy stuff. I don’t know if it would be as challenging in spaces where the pulse of the house is more connected with set, clear responsibilities.

SANTI: So where are you at with all of this now? You have so much experience in co-living and also other alternative lifestyles as well. What’s your current trajectory?

LYDIA: Having crossed so many lines politically, I feel like I can see the outlines of the culture underneath the Discourse. I feel like the core issue underneath everything we're talking about, all these different lifestyle experiments, is that the baseline culture is a mess. And the culture war isn’t helping.

Our “normal” culture is so hard on people right now. So many people have trouble forming basic long-standing bonds. This really matters to me. I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

One issue is that there is very little community enforcement. There is so little moral order in communities. And I hate what the culture war does to this conversation. I want to have a sincere, nuanced conversation about moral order. I just want to talk to a lot of different people about creating consistent community bonds over time. But the Discourse around this is utterly bonkers. As one example, I follow a lot of conservatives who make a big deal about how they're anti-polyamory — but then, they don’t socially punish infidelity among their members. Why? Why would lying to your partner about sleeping with another person be okay, especially if consensual polyamory isn’t okay? I don’t understand that.

This seems common across all kinds of communities. People can cheat all over the place, people are terrible to their children, and sometimes it feels like no one is paying attention or trying to make relationships functional over the long term. And I’m glad we have no-fault divorce because it gives many people, especially women, opportunities for happiness that we might not have had otherwise. It makes it possible for people to escape abusive relationships. But I’m not sure how our culture will solve certain types of lifestyle questions that benefit from stability and consistency, like having children.

Nothing can be assumed about relationships anymore. So there is an opportunity for something better to be created around relationship norms. And I think there are opportunities for moral order. I do see people trying stuff. In my liberal Bay Area community, there is interesting community enforcement that happens through events and co-living spaces. For example, if a person is widely known to have raped a bunch of people, that person might get banned from co-living spaces where cool events are happening, or they might get banned from the best events. This is a way for community enforcement and moral standards to have teeth. But this also creates a lot of effort for the people who run these events and spaces. People end up creating their own community judicial processes, and then the community processes have their own problems.

Our society needs to have a real serious conversation about interpersonal commitment and morality. But I think that's everyone, it’s everywhere, not just weirdos in the Bay Area. The whole culture is a mess.

So I used to be very focused on these countercultural ways of living. I thought it was important that more people be accepting of alt lifestyles, not in an evangelical sense but because I thought alt communities had insight on how to do this stuff better. Now I'm less like that. I feel like I have seen the Matrix on all these cultural issues because I understand both the liberal and the conservative perspective. What is real underneath the culture war narratives?

Where and how can we create stable communities with members who truly support each other? Is it in the form of a liberal co-living space? What about a conservative religious village? I almost don’t even care anymore about the affiliation of people who are creating a community. I mean, I do care because I want to be part of a healthy culture and I want to fit in. But I also just want the culture to work for some people, somewhere, over a long period.

People need ways to live that make sense. For many people, what that means is stability — stable lives, stable worldviews, a stable nation to support them — especially for parents, as the stewards of the next generation of humanity. There’s so much you can do if you have a stable base and a lifestyle that makes sense for you, while fostering commitments. And if you don’t have those things, there are so many things you can’t do.

So how do we iterate on community living and create kernels, seeds, healthy soil, for community bonds moving forward? I’m opting out of co-living for now. But I think the conversation is much bigger than just co-living.