Now that I’m nearing the end of my studies, I’ve reflected a lot on the value of having a tight-knit community, as you always hear recent graduates say they miss the sense of community from college.

I’m mainly interested in communities sharing most aspects of life, ranging from professional to personal – the urban analogue of a kibbutz; I’ll call such communities ’life circles’. Life circles involve standing social events, often at a third space, and its members share a sense of community.

Life circles arise naturally within some Eastern cultures, where they’re usually centered around the family unit, though you’ll also find life circles among creatives, entrepreneurs and other people ‘with character’ in the West. Examples of life circles in the West include Arcadia, Emerge Lakefront and Feytopia. However, a circle doesn’t need to entail co-living: Fractal is just a housing network.

Having a life circle gives you a professional edge. Political, artistic and scientific movements are collective endeavours, and they cannot be carried out by a single person, however smart. Famous examples of life circles include the Bloomsbury group and the Vienna Circle. Similarly, you cannot successfully run a company without having some very good friends – not just coffee-machine acquaintances, but friends you can rely on no matter what. There’s a real sense, then, in which world history wasn’t shaped by individuals, but by groups of individuals.

But above all, feeling a sense of belonging is important for overall life satisfaction, and a life circle provides just that.

Of course – you don’t need a life circle to live well: you can have different friendship groups for the various areas of your life. This creates more overhead, though, and requires you to be both agentic and good with people (I’m neither).

Though Stockholm has among the highest proportions of one-person households in the world (a staggering 60%)¹, there are several life circle initiatives here. The startup ecosystem finds itself in a chicken-egg relationship with life circles, and there are various innovation hubs with life circle vibes: A House, Knackeriet, Alma, Norrsken, Slottsbacken. There are also co-living communities like Emerge Lakefront, K9 and Udda (more examples here).

More broadly, it’s worth mentioning the student apartments and co-living spaces of Stockholms studentbostäder (SSSB), which provide natural meeting hubs for students and young professionals. There’s also a long-standing tradition of study circles in Sweden, some of which also have a life circle ring to them.

Soon-to-be graduates find themselves somewhere between communities based around student apartments and exclusive co-working spaces. If you don’t want to live in a shared apartment, you’re not part of a life circle by default. Or even if you have access to an exclusive co-working space, perhaps you wish to be part of a more diverse community. And there’s no obvious life circle in Stockholm for such people. Problem.

Partial solution (feel free to submit your own solutions here): as a very minimal life circle implementation, you could create a Luma calendar with friends with both standing events and casual one-offs – see e.g. the calendar of Fractal Geneva. I imagine people adding their own events (casual dinners, vibe-coding afternoons, museum visits), as well as events they plan on attending (seminars, plays, concerts). Subscribers of the Luma calendar will then be notified when someone adds an event and can mark whether they’ll join. In addition to the calendar, you may want group chat or a Slack for casual meet-ups.

While you could technically do all event managing through a group chat, group chats don’t scale as well, and they don’t allow for the automatic creation of recurring events. Recurring events form an integral part of any kind of life circle: I wouldn’t count on people organising casual gatherings to keep the circle together. Oh, and you’d also be missing out on the beautiful Luma interface.

I just created a calendar; let me know if I should add you.

This post was inspired by conversations with Agatha Duzan, Elias Koschier, Chiara Gerosa, Konrad Seifert and Åke Lindblom.