You're listening to life kit from NPR.
Hey, everybody, it's Marielle.
If you needed to borrow a cup of sugar or, I don't know, needed someone to sign for a package for you or bring your prescription when you're sick, do you have those people?
Are you that person for anyone?
What about if you wanted to have some spontaneous fun?
You know, the kind that doesn't require a calendar invite, grab a bunch of friends and play Frisbee in the park or order a pizza and watch a movie?
I'm talking about community, a group of people who enjoy each other's company, rely on each other, and create lives that are intertwined in some way.
A lot of people don't have this, but they'd like to.
Last year, the surgeon general called loneliness and isolation a public health crisis and said we need relationships so community to live healthier, more fulfilled, more productive lives.
There are lots of ways to build community, and on today's show, we're going to talk about one of them.
It's called co living.
That means living among a group and sharing space with people beyond your nuclear family, whether that space is an apartment or a house or a building or even a city block.
I think co living is a real return to a way that we used to live.
That's Gillian Morris.
She lives with about ten people in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Now, if that just sounds like your classic roommate situation, co living often goes a bit beyond that.
Jillian says that generally when people are co living, they're doing it not primarily for convenience or cost savings, but because they want to live communally and to tie their lives together.
And she says, actually, in the US, this concept that we should aspire to live alone or with only our nuclear families, that's pretty new, really.
Only in the last hundred years or so in America, this rise of the single family home, this idea that we should all be siloed into our own apartments, that, in fact, if you don't live alone, you're a little weird, that you need to have your own place to have made it, that, you know, if you happen to live with your parents or if you live with other people, it's failure to launch or something like this.
And that's a really recent phenomenon.