Our culture wars contribute to the decline of genuine friendships and emotional bonds. Could co-living be a solution for some to connect and access housing?

Pop culture has gotten masculinity so wrong in the last decades that we have misunderstood its meaning. Why? Among other reasons, unaffected, non-bombastic attitudes attract less digital engagement. The conversation about why the modern male is struggling is an important one to have, however.

When people surreptitiously suggest that women must remain a shadow of their significant others, I always like to remember a quote by French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir:

“No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.”

No matter how we want to picture it, some have a reciprocal urge to create a narrative of confrontation among genders, with lots of potential gains from politically engaged people. In the background, some perceive the rise of autonomous, successful women as a threat.

Marriage as an institution is finding new equilibrium among the younger cohorts as they reach adulthood—and young women are adapting better to the challenges of postmodernity.

Across social media, hyper-masculine influencers get a massive following. Underneath the trend, however, one can see a few insecure beings hiding behind hypertrophied bodies and facial hair, claiming to have unleashed the secrets of manhood and the right to rule.

The challenge of keeping real friends in adulthood

Perhaps because we’re older, most of us are fortunately more interested in a type of masculinity that doesn’t try to show off insecurities traditionally more associated with high school years than adulthood. Non-toxic models of masculinity could help those raising families (it’s our case) as boys (and girls) look for role models online.

But, no matter how self-conscious we are about the risk of relying on online messages regarding the cultural wars, there’s a friendship crisis among adults in contemporary America. As housing expert Alex Armlovich points out:

“It’s not material decline. Americans are richer than ever at every rung of society! The collapse in adult friendship, social clubs, community & faith groups, & family formation; and a spike in overdoses & suicides–it points to a philosophical or spiritual malaise.”

Not surprisingly, the decline of friendship is more pronounced among men. Between 1990 and 2021, the percentage of men reporting having ten or more friends, not counting their relatives, went from 40% to 15%, whereas those reporting having no close friends at all spiked from 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021. Close friendships have also declined among women, albeit the change is less stark.

Unlike among women, fostering and maintaining healthy, non-confrontational adult friendships has never been an easy task. Sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne not only conceived the writing essay as a genre but also reflected on many valuable topics with insights that they hold today way better than any podcast compendium on living a good life, friendship among them (an essay literally titled On Friendship). He lived in turbulent times when the wars of religion were turning the French countryside into bloodshed. Amid the carnage, he preferred to explore timeless topics, many of which would help him—and others reading his essays over the centuries—navigate life.

Montaigne, unafraid of expressing his appreciation for a friend

Self-defined as a skeptic, Montaigne was comfortable enough in his skin to explore friendship among peers, a topic that has become residual among grown men: Michel de Montaigne wrote about his deep friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, whom he considered a “soulmate.”

Montaigne explains that they didn’t need each other because there was any sort of repressed attraction, need, utility, or family relation. They were buddies who shared a deep emotional bond in turbulent times and similar intellectual preferences. Both wrote about their special bonding based on mutual respect and deference. So, when La Boétie died suddenly in 1563 at the age of 30, Montaigne was overwhelmed with grief:

“I was so accustomed to be always his double, and so accustomed to rely wholly on him, that I feel as if I am no longer whole, and can neither be wholly happy nor whole at all.”

Michel de Montaigne, “On Friendship”

The philosopher of the French Renaissance didn’t seem to be bothered by the opinions of others, and he wrote that friendship among peers is a type of bond that can bring love:

“If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that it can only be explained by replying: ‘Because it was him; because it was me.”

Imagine one of those manly, solitary influencers explaining something like Montaigne-La Boétie: Many things went very wrong in our so-called “culture wars” to consider such a beautiful connection a no-go.

Our increasingly solitary habits

Studies repeatedly corroborate that friendship is one important thing we put aside during adulthood: We work more and more isolated, enjoy entertainment in more solitary ways, and use convenience services that prevent us from getting in touch with others. In parallel, access to housing is more expensive than ever.

Many people are delaying life decisions and paying an increased cost of higher education to get a less stable job that will hardly cover housing costs. This is not new, but the trend has reached a high percentage of people’s income, and many adults decide to stay at home with their parents or seek creative workarounds like living with others. Living “close to others” is not enough since both suburbia and cities are places where some people struggle to find meaningful bonding around them.

According to Pew Research, Americans barely know their neighbors and feel detached from their surroundings, lacking trust and a sense of belonging to a community; 57% of respondents only know some of their neighbors, and 23% of people under 30 claim to know no neighbors at all.

So, if many people face the consequences of isolation and find equal difficulties in renting or buying a place to live independently, are there ways to converge these needs? Many people think so, and coliving arrangements are on the rise, turning two potential inconveniences during adulthood’s most productive years into advantages: to meet new people, pivot in life, get back on track, widen horizons, etc.

Until recently, Kirsten and I had covered a few stories showing different coliving and more permanent shared arrangements, whether cohousing or likeminded “communities,” “pocket neighborhoods,” etc. In most of them, we found several constants: most people were young and worked professional jobs, most environments were urban or at least denser than conventional single-family housing suburbia, and most arrangements were temporary or transient.

People trying coliving as a permanent arrangement

Coliving is often described as an improved way of living with roommates, keeping the advantages minus the potential inconveniences. For an often-increased price, people in such arrangements get a private bedroom or even housing unit, sharing common areas for conviviality even though professional care ensures that shared kitchens, yards, bathrooms, gyms, living rooms, and other places used by all stay up to the task.

Recently, we visited Radish, a coliving cluster of homes around a Bay Area courtyard that evolved from a shared house in San Francisco to a more spacious “pocket community” with plenty of room for adults and children. Started by Phil Levin and Kristen Berman, “Radish is built around the ‘Obvious Truth’ — that people are happiest and healthiest surrounded by people they love and admire,” they explain on their website. Talking with Phil and many others at Radish, we saw how they had put their vision to work.

The move to claim more space started as a need when people at Radish realized that the place was evolving from a coliving of individuals into an arrangement with several stable couples trying to create their own unit. So, when many began needing more space and planning to have a family, they moved to a more affordable space across the bay to create their own intentional community; by staying together, they realized they could keep friendships and afford to stay in the Bay Area. Today, their co-owned one-third-acre lot in Oakland is home to 20 adults and 4 babies living in 6 buildings and 10 units.

The different spaces have adapted to the needs of every family unit; couples with children and single individuals have their own places and privacy, though common spaces allow them to share many meals and activities. This allows young families with small children to socialize and keep track of work and family in a balance they describe as optimal.

Most of them wouldn’t be able to get a place on their own at current rates. Phil explained that their idea—pooling different houses clustered together, plus building a couple more, in the same city corner to create their own walkable community—and doing so through one single shared entity. In the beginning, zoning rules weren’t flexible enough to accommodate their needs, though they benefited over time from the Accessory Dwelling Unit legislation in California, which allowed them to build 2 one-thousand-feet ADUs around their shared courtyard.

A historic co-living place in San Luis Obispo, California

We’ve also visited other coliving places where individuals become a big family, each preserving their privacy, though many of such designs don’t seem to adapt to families with children with the ease we saw at Radish.

When having a family is not in the equation, arrangements are more adaptable to existing buildings. Years ago, our friend Rory Aronson, who is based in one of the few places across the world with pitch-perfect weather all year round, San Luis Obispo, in the Central Coast region of California, mentioned an old institution in town everybody called The Establishment, thinking the story behind it was worth an in-depth video story.

An old boarding house built in the nineteenth century that served for many decades as a cheap place to stay for short or long periods, The Establishment had many interesting guests in its original incarnation, among them the beat writer Jack Kerouac, who stayed there for part of the spring of 1953.

When Sara McEre bought it, it had fallen into disrepair. Instead of buying the place and converting it into separate apartments for profit, she decided to create an intentional community with 19 bedrooms and a similar number of like-minded individuals, which we would call today “creatives” for lack of a better word.

The story behind The Establishment is cherished by those who have lived on it: Sara McEre bought the place after losing her 19-year-old son, turning it into an inviting place he would have liked.

What friendship brings in tough times

We visited it right after the Covid-19 lockdowns when social distancing represented a challenge for shared spaces like offices or houses with many tenants. We were lucky enough to meet Sara McEre, who was walking her dog and came by, aged but full of energy. We felt welcome and at ease, understanding that some spaces are much more than the amalgamation of individuals, reflecting that the total outcome is superior to the mere addition of its parts.

The physical environment was somehow humble and limited: 4 refrigerators, two stoves, 19 bedrooms (many of them with private sinks), 4 bathrooms, a living room, a porch, a vegetable garden, and one outdoor bathtub and shower, which served well the 19 young tenants. When one room opened, new members were voted in by all the tenants, just like in a direct democracy, a system that had served them well over the years. Even though each resident had their space in the fridge and pantry, many meals were shared.

They had also found a way to combat alienation: to stimulate bonding among cohabitants, smartphone use was discouraged in communal areas, where conversations and board games around a cup of tea or coffee were frequent. Many residents also cherished their privacy and described themselves as introverts, which we thought contradictory. Not to them.

Mark Grayson also came to say hi. A sixty-year-old ex-tenant at The Establishment, he had remained a friend of the place and the people living there. However, cardiac surgery put him at risk, and had to leave during the pandemic; we could tell that he missed living in the place where, according to him, he had discovered the true meaning of “home”:

“Prior to the surgery I had planned on living out my life here, like riding into the sunset, and that all changed… You hear people talk about bonding, friendships here that last lifetimes. Such an abundance of lifetime friendships here and that doesn’t happen when you live 2 blocks away in an apartment by yourself. I miss it so much.”

Coliving with a common purpose: the gardens at Kailash

Self-defined not as a co-living community but as an ecovillage with a huge restorative edible garden at the center, Portland’s Kailash Ecovillage turned its founders’ love for permaculture processes and local produce into a way to establish a long-term bond among the residents.

The story behind Kailash is equally telling: in 2007, Ole and Maitri Ersson noticed that they could buy a rundown apartment complex in the city. With much effort, they secured the financing to buy the property and quickly began de-paving the huge parking lot area to make room for the garden while keeping enough room for cars on the other side of the property. Today, all residents feel involved in the property, with 55 people collaborating one way or another to maintain the gardens, and extensive rainwater collection system, as well as sewage treatment.

They also appointed Neil Robinson as the community’s full-time farmer, helping sell Kailash produce that residents don’t keep at farmers’ markets for a profit, which is reinvested in the community. During our visit, Ole Ersson explained to us that having a common purpose creates bonding among residents. When we asked him and the rest of the people we interviewed how they would improve their model, they only showed one concern: there was a limit of spots for residents, which had generated a 300-person waitlist.

Perhaps without thinking much about it, residents at Kailash have found a way to reinforce conviviality and self-esteem among residents by creating a common purpose to fight for, which generates not only a spiritual benefit but also economic profit.

In the Spanish Atlantic archipelago of the Canary Islands, Emma and Edo built an off-grid community around one idealistic endeavor: rescuing animals and farming sustainably on the island of Tenerife. After buying cheap volcanic land, they began transforming the rocky, dusty soil into an experimental homestead that benefits from donations and extra food or materials generated within the island. To them, few things should be considered “waste.”

Portland’s Kailash Ecovillage and Tenerife Horse Rescue remind us of one of the constant sources around which people can create long-term conviviality: a common challenge worth fighting for, which can take the shape of a sustainable garden and waste treatment, an animal rescue facility, or any other viable possibility that finds common ground.

Consuming content about coliving, then living isolated

Ask any teenager today about a very-old-to-their-standards show called Friends, and you’ll likely have stumbled upon one of these pop culture references that parents and young children can share without posing or cringing. Teens today belong to Generation Alpha, one cohort below GenZers; we are raising two teenage girls and one teenage son, so we have some expertise on the topic.

Try telling them that back then, you would often watch the series sharing one single “screen” (that is, the TV at the center of the living room: the symbolic hearth of the 2nd half of the twentieth century) with many people sitting around it. Social watching represents a stark difference from today’s expectations —watching together instead of using a personal screen to watch a repackaged portion (or minimum viable unit of information we call clips or memes). Once they picture both experiences, they’ll perceive you as part of another dimension.

“Do you mean you watched Friends sitting with ‘friends’ or ‘family’ in the same place and at the same time?” —Your kids could ask. Then you guess what’s coming through their minds as they scrutinize you with a smirk of condescendence: no asynchronicity, a total lack of privacy, nor even a way to scroll through random comments by people they don’t know (which may or may not be insightful but can bring the impression that there’s some continuity in reality? The horror).

Many reasons explain the success of sitcoms like Friends with teenagers and young adults today, among them the postmodern trends that we all want to overcome: the risk of alienation is real, as long hours of work and commute shrink opportunities to create and maintain strong bonds. When combined, choices like not showing up at the office, exercising alone, keeping up with others digitally, and ordering things online explain why many young adults and middle-aged people in their prime feel lonely and in despair. Many GenZers are “already fretting about feeling lonely, anxious, or stressed about the prospect of working primarily from home.”

Slouching towards adulthood

Here’s another change between our teenage and adulthood and nowadays —you might tell your teen children. Series like Friends, Melrose Place, or New Girl— which focused on the lives of young adults sharing an apartment complex in Los Angeles—showed the messy coming-of-age endeavors of a cohort comprised by people coming and going and interacting with others; the sets were overwhelmingly indoors, but one imagined their lives beyond that portion of their everyday hustles.

Today, one would expect more silence, staring at screens, and high rates of cabin fever, for a reason. Almost half of American teleworkers regularly work from a couch (38%), one in five work from bed, and one in five work outside.

The loneliness trend has intensified since the series aired for the first time, when most of us middle-aged parents were Generation X young adults searching for role models. In the last few years, people have replaced real-life interactions in the office with remote work. At the same time, adult education, doctor appointments, and entertainment are now personalized digital events, bringing flexibility and convenience (but also estrangement).

Like Kirsten, who lived in New York near Washington Square Park when she was single and working as a TV producer, many young adults who decided to live in vibrant cities at the beginning of their careers shared an apartment, so Friends wasn’t explaining an extraordinary or revolutionary setup. Living next to where we want to work as young adults is expensive, and sharing a place can be an ideal temporary solution.

The difference between the nineties and today is that arrangements to counter expensive rents like the one highlighted by Friends are not exclusive to very pricey world cities such as New York, San Francisco, London, or Paris. It’s not extraordinary that younger people see themselves in Friends despite being 2024: how would they miss an opportunity to get an uplifting view of one of the most dysfunctional and frightening aspects of adult life nowadays, getting a fair price for housing?

Also, people live in coliving places and have roommates at older ages. Unlike movies that relate the phenomenon to people’s formative years (like L’Auberge Espagnole, a movie where several Erasmus students share an apartment in Barcelona’s old center), in Friends, the characters are supposed to be in their mid-twenties to their early thirties at the beginning of the series.

Our expensive reality

In real life, nowadays, many people who are well into their thirties decide to extend their formative years and experiment with life arrangements that allow them to stay in the city.

Generation X escapist content (Friends, Melrose Place et al.) presented the world with a positive version of trying to make ends meet in the city while young and trying to find one’s way, though shared living in financially strained times, especially among likeminded people, often from the same gender, is an arrangement so common during and right after college over the decades that nobody finds anything extraordinary about it. Many coliving tenants describe it precisely as “college dorms for people in their 30’s.”

There’s a caveat, however, that might explain the series’ popularity: not all shared arrangements are created equal, and some thrive, whereas others are ways to get by due to a lack of working alternatives in a tight real estate market. Merely shared housing is prone to creating more friction as amenities (bathroom, kitchen) are shared among flatmates, whereas coliving allows tenants to have their own bathroom and kitchen and tends to be more spacious.

As rents and home prices get prohibitive to many at the beginning of their career or amid the growing share of those seeking unconventional career arrangements, shared arrangements gain popularity, although there’s a fundamental difference between shared arrangements between strangers who are merely looking for a temporary place to stay they can pay (the boarding houses of yesteryear) and arrangements in which people sharing a place foster socialization and conviviality with commonly agreed mechanisms, like pre-established communal services, from shared amenities to social activities to foster a sense of community.

The vanity of sitcoms

In a way, Friends offered, although informally, the type of bonding that goes beyond merely sharing the same roof and is built upon trust around negotiating the boundaries amid friends and colleagues that define early adulthood.

Unlike shared housing, coliving places want to curate a lifestyle around similar values and ways of seeing human interaction, and the environment where they want to thrive has been designed to ease the upsides of living together while alleviating the friction around chores—by, for example, professionally managing common events and amenities. As if people interested in coliving wanted the conviviality aspect of Friends while knowing that life is more complicated than a TV series, they want to ease the behind-the-scenes aspects of conviviality, from chores to shared moments to privacy.

Changes in work and housing have deeply affected how people live together in stronger ties than mere cohabitation. Housing affordability or unstable careers may not explain the whole picture: When we hear about terms such as “loneliness epidemic” or “deaths of despair,” we rarely identify such trends with people perceived as successful in life, but these phenomena go beyond class and education boundaries.

And, again, the sitcom Friends shows a telling example. Or, in this case, what lies behind the scenes. As the series became a global sensation, one of his stars, Matthew Perry, struggled in life with addiction and a chronic lack of meaningful, relatable support off the stage, which can come from close relatives but also friends and relations. The fact that Perry craved non-predatory social and living arrangements was hardly a secret for years. He never quite made it out of a spiral of loneliness and addiction.

The reality we help build

Perhaps what all adults see in friendship and sharing life with others, irrespective of their age or cohabitation status, is a peek into how communities lived before postmodernity, which has created more wealth for almost everyone and a more fragmented and disconnected reality. Pop culture sitcoms around shared houses and apartments are a way for many people to rediscover what used to be one of many rites of passage into adulthood.

In Friends and Melrose Place, Generation X characters navigate life’s uncertainties by relying on each other; New Girl tried to replicate the formula with millennials; as millennials reach their forties, we’ll see what time brings for Gen Z and the teenagers of today, Generation Alpha. They seem to have seen enough alienation and are ready to find workarounds despite social media highlighting extreme behaviors and housing at an all-time high.

Perhaps, with alternative arrangements such as coliving, some men find spaces where bonds with other men are emotionally supportive and non-competitive, in contrast with the hyper-masculine archetypes frequently favored by influencers. Any experiment or temporary solution to counter high housing costs and alienation seems like a challenge worth fighting for.