Changing the Current
What if we made places where flourishing is easier?
Imagine two ordinary Tuesdays.
In one, you walk out to your garage, strap your kid into a car seat, drive to preschool, then work, drive to a chain restaurant for lunch, stop at a big grocery store on the way home, pull back into your garage, and close the door. You may live fifty feet from another family for years and barely know their names.
In the other, you step outside and walk your four-year-old to preschool as the sun glows through the morning mist and birds chirp. You say hello to the same horse each morning. Your kid spots another kid and runs ahead. You stop a few doors over for coffee and walk a few minutes more to work. You say hi to a neighbor watering something. You stop for an onion and a fresh baguette on the way home. Your kid pulls a small handful of blueberries off a bush and finds another friend to play with. Someone is sitting under a tree, and you end up talking for ten minutes longer than you meant to.
I have lived both of these lives. Both are real possibilities.
In the second, nobody scheduled a community-building activity. Nobody checked off movement, sunlight, social interaction, and nature on a wellness plan.
It was just an ordinary Tuesday.
That's what fascinates me.
We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to convince ourselves to exercise more, get outside, know our neighbors, eat well, let our children be independent, drive less, participate in community.
What if those things didn't require quite so much effort?
What if a good life wasn't something we had to try so hard to do?
I don't mean that individuals have no agency—agency is a key part of flourishing.
I just don't want to spend my life convincing people to swim harder against the current.
I'm interested in changing the current.
A place doesn't determine what its people will do. But it makes some patterns of life easier and others harder.
At a good zoo, we'll spend enormous amounts of time asking what a penguin needs to thrive. How much space? What temperature? What social group? What light? What water? What stimulation? Then we'll design the environment around those needs.
Why don't we bring even half that curiosity or effort to an ordinary human Tuesday?
Maybe beauty isn't frivolous
I grew up in the sprawling suburbs of Atlanta, but I’ve also gotten to see radically different ways people live.
My dad took me into some of the hardest places in the world. I lived for a while with a remote tribe in the Amazon. I studied art in Florence, where beauty seemed woven into ordinary civic life. Then I spent years designing destination weddings for some of the wealthiest people in the world, in some of the most beautiful places you can imagine.
It’s been a strange education in what humans can make and how we live.
I’ve seen people create beauty with almost nothing. I’ve seen people spend fortunes creating beauty that disappeared overnight. And I kept coming home wondering why ordinary daily life couldn't be more beautiful for everyone.
So I started looking.
And what I found was incredibly hopeful!
People were figuring out so many amazing pieces of it.
Buildings that needed radically less energy. Ways of treating water and waste as resources. Farms rebuilding soil. Streets where children could move independently. Better materials. Different ways of sharing resources. Different approaches to ownership and governance that gave people more agency.
So many of the pieces of a better way to live already existed.
But two things kept bothering me.
The pieces didn’t seem to be put together.
And too often, the better way wasn't being made particularly desirable.
Too often, the more responsible option seemed to come with an implicit bargain: be a good person and accept a little less. Use less. Give something up. Accept the inconvenient thing. Buy the uglier thing. Live this way because you should.
I'm not convinced that's our best strategy.
Because I'd already watched a completely different mechanism at work.
In the wedding world, ideas could move astonishingly fast—and persist.
Someone made a tablescape, a ceremony entrance, a way of lighting a tent. Someone else saw it and loved it. Magazines published it. People shared it. Designers adapted it. Soon versions were showing up at weddings thousands of miles away, for years.
Nobody had to be lectured into it.
They saw something they wanted and made their own version.
Desire moved faster than instruction ever could.
And I started wondering:
What if we pointed that mechanism at something that mattered more?
What if we made a better way of living wildly desirable?
What if walking wasn't something you did because you were reducing your carbon footprint, but because the walk was beautiful and the place you wanted to go was four minutes away?
What if your kid could run out the door because there were actually places they could safely go?
What if the best tomato you'd ever eaten grew three minutes from your house?
What if your eighty-year-old mother could still walk to dinner after she stopped driving?
What if rain became something beautiful the landscape received instead of something we rushed into a pipe?
What if you could see the stars?
And what if it was gorgeous?
Maybe the future we need doesn't have to feel like a punishment for the one we built.
Maybe it could actually be better.
Systemic Flourishing
And here's the really exciting part: the good things compound.
Trees make walking more pleasant.
Walking puts you in contact with people.
Seeing people repeatedly makes strangers familiar.
Familiarity can become relationship.
People who feel connected to a place are more likely to care for it.
Walking supports local businesses.
Local businesses give people somewhere to walk.
And those same trees making the walk pleasant are cooling the street, holding water, creating habitat, storing carbon, and making the whole place more beautiful.
A child who can move around without an adult gains independence, sees friends, gets exercise, knows the place where they live—and needs less chauffeuring from an exhausted parent.
One good condition begins supporting another.
We often call these transportation problems and public-health problems and ecological problems and economic-development problems and loneliness problems.
But life doesn't know about our departments.
It's all happening in the same place.
Which means a place gives us an extraordinary opportunity:
One good move can do more than one good thing.
The same compounding runs the other way, too. Isolation makes connection harder. Car dependence makes walking harder.
But if one set of choices helped create the downward spiral, another set of choices can change its direction.
One good condition can support another, which supports another, which begins supporting the first.
Maybe that's what systemic flourishing looks like.
Not a place where everyone flourishes because the master plan or marketing says they will.
A place where flourishing gets easier because the conditions themselves begin reinforcing one another.
That's the current I'm interested in.
A place where flourishing is the natural current because more of the conditions for it are already built into the day.
Where movement and sunlight and nature and relationship aren't extracurricular activities requiring heroic individual effort, but woven into an ordinary Tuesday.
This is the sandbox I want to play in
Imagine somebody hands you a thousand acres.
My brain lights up.
Not because I immediately see a thousand acres of houses—I don’t.
I see the chance to ask:
How good could ordinary life be here?
Could a seven-year-old have a world they could explore—and somewhere they could walk to buy a popsicle?
Could you hear frogs?
Could the creek get healthier because people lived here instead of worse?
Could someone start with very little and find a way into the economic life of the place?
Could someone afford to stay when their life changed?
Could architecture actually belong to this particular ground?
Could residents have real agency in what the place became?
Could beauty be ordinary?
And what if all those things started reinforcing one another?
Could we make the whole thing so damn good that the sustainable choice wasn't really a choice at all?
You'd choose it because that's where you wanted to live.
That's the possibility that gets me excited.
Not one perfect community, and not a set of buildings for someone else to copy.
A place in Georgia should become more fully Georgia. A place in Kenya should become more fully itself. A place in the mountains should be different from a place on the coast. The expression changes with the people, climate, ecology, culture, materials, and history of each place.
The life has a say. So does the ground it grows in.
It's the same reason terroir matters in wine. The particularity of the place is a part of what makes it good.
What I'd love to see spread are the deeper patterns.
Someone comes, spends a Tuesday, and goes home thinking:
Wait. Why aren't we doing this where I live?
And then makes their own version.
That's the kind of trend I'd like to help start.
