I've spent a lot of my life working with older adults.
And one of the things I've seen over and over again is how much loneliness and isolation can change a life.
We know it's a problem. We study it. We create programs to address it. We encourage people to get out, join something, meet people, stay connected.
All good things.
But I've always wondered why we wait until someone is lonely.
Maybe we've got the order wrong.
We prepare financially for the future. We think about our health. We exercise. We try to eat reasonably well. Some of us spend an astonishing amount of time looking at numbers on our watches.
But we don't really think about preparing our social lives for the future.
We assume the people will be there.
And then life changes.
Work changes. People move. Children grow up. Friendships evolve. The structures that once put us in regular contact with other people change too.
Maybe community deserves the same kind of attention we give everything else we hope to carry with us.
What if we built it while our lives are already full?
People to eat with.
Learn with.
Make things with.
Go places with.
People who introduce us to new ideas and new people.
People who notice when we don't show up.
And people we'd miss if they didn't.
That's one of the ideas underneath GenHouse that matters enormously to me.
We're thinking about a stage of life that could last twenty or thirty years.
I don't want to wait until people are isolated to start creating connection.
I want the relationships to already be there.
The habits.
The places we go.
The people who know us.
The sense that we belong somewhere.
Find your people before you need to find your people.
Because community shouldn't be the intervention.
It should be the infrastructure.