Growing up in Utah, most of my family was within an easy drive of each other. So for holidays, we would all go to grandma and grandpa’s house. The house would be full of people: aunts, uncles, cousins, and random relatives and friends. Upstairs, there would be lots of visiting, game playing, and eating, while downstairs us kids played bumper pool, the player piano, games, and vintage Barbies.
One wall of the basement was filled with bowling and golf trophies grandma and grandpa had won. My grandma was part of the early wave of women golfing and she was good. Golf was a big part of their life, as was bowling. They were both in leagues and would play with friends weekly, if not more.
Their life was rich with connection and community. In addition to golfing and bowling, they were members of their local Elks Club, they would go to church socials, dances, and my grandpa met a group of friends at the coffee shop every morning before anyone else woke up. On any given week, they had several community-focused events and gatherings—and that’s outside of anything they were doing with the family.
Fast-forward to now, and we find ourselves in a loneliness epidemic, with normalized isolation and a cratering of in-person connection. Sitting home staring at phones morning, noon, and night would be incomprehensible to my grandparents’ generation. Their families had been through some shit (immigration, loss, hardship, life in the mines, war, a depression) and they fully understood the value of community and connection.
So when we got together on holidays, it was a day to connect and belong.
The other day I saw an advertisement for a church that said, “Looking for a place to belong?” It was a great reminder that people are truly struggling to find any sort of connection and belonging.
Always-on gadgets, comparison, disconnection, and an addictive/toxic media landscape have us going ass-backwards. Throw in the remote work era, which is great for flexibility and horrible for connection, and we have ourselves an issue.
Which coworking can help solve.
And you don’t have to be part of the solution to the loneliness epidemic. It’s perfectly reasonable that you just run a nice space that people can work out of.
But … what if your vision was bigger than that? What if you decided to be a place where people could connect, learn, grow, and belong? What if, rather than chasing the space for rent model, you looked to the future and the people moving into coworking, and recognized that they don’t want desks and wifi, as they can find those things anywhere. They want to be around interesting, inspiring people and projects.
What if you created something that was imbued with energy, inspiration, buzz, vibe, and life? What if people were made better by simply being part of your community? What would it look like if you were part of a return to in-person connection and the dismantling of loneliness?
That’s our collective potential.
That’s the future we’re building.
That’s the promise of coworking.
So, let’s not sell ourselves short. Let’s pull from the past and lean into the future to create something meaningful and deeply human.
The Coworking Letter
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