Back at our Island Time residency, we had the lovely opportunity to interview Gillian Morris, co-founder of Supernuclear: a guide to going beyond the nuclear family. She is a pillar of the co-living movement and has spent more than a decade living in shared houses from Istanbul to New York to the Bay Area to Puerto Rico. Most importantly, she’s a brilliant, inspiring, and genuinely kind person!
For most of human history we lived in tribes and villages, tangled up in each other’s daily lives. Somewhere in the last hundred years we traded that for the single-family home. Gillian argues: we’ve been quietly paying for it ever since.
Filmed at a dope art warehouse, Shipwreck Studios (check it out if you’re in San Juan, Puerto Rico), we get into why we drifted apart, what it actually takes to live well together, and the future that becomes possible when we do…
Gillian opens with a statistic that reframes the whole conversation:
The health effects of loneliness were the equivalent of smoking 17 cigarettes a day.
The nuclear household, she explains, isn’t some timeless natural unit, it was engineered. Cars and cheap land let people spread out, standardized building supplies made it cheap, and a deliberate marketing campaign (part anticommunist, part anti-feminist) sold the private home as the mark of a good citizen. It worked out beautifully for banks and real estate, and far less well for the rest of us: fractured families, polarization, and homes most people can no longer afford.
Ask people about co-living and they picture the worst roommate they had at 22. Gillian’s counter is that adults are not that roommate:
You actually get so many benefits and you don’t get tragedy of the commons, you get abundance of the commons.
She’s clear-eyed about conflict: it’s inevitable, and sometimes the answer is simply to find the people who also want the thermostat at 68. What keeps a community alive isn’t the absence of friction but how it handles it: do-ocracy over endless consensus, restorative justice over exile, and a refusal to read every ending as a failure.
Stasis and lack of things happening is one of the ways that communities die.
Gillian has no interest in becoming a landlord at the top of a co-living empire. Her model is smaller and more alive, a house that’s one node among many:
I want to live with my friends in a node that is connected to a bunch of other nodes in this decentralized world of communal spaces where people are crafting the thing that works for them.
From there the conversation opens into the pillars Agartha cares about:
loving community as the foundation
planetary regeneration: Gillian’s vision of agriculture that is “truly regenerating the Earth and living in harmony with nature”
communal models for education like Fractal‘s peer-to-peer university in New York,
a long, genuinely unresolved riff on ethical technology: whether you could ever mint a token to measure who cooked, cleaned, or watched the kids, and why attaching a number to care might quietly cheapen it.
Gillian is writing a book, experimenting with reels, and dreaming of a few families she can raise kids alongside: sending them between homes and islands to learn oceanography one month and something else the next. Her closest-to-the-heart future is also the simplest:
I believe in a future where we are living in abundance... living in these interconnected villages. And when I say village, it doesn’t have to be rural. It can be a village that’s vertical in an apartment building.
Her advice for anyone who feels the pull is not to overthink it. Have a dinner, start a study group, be the instigator.
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