A Converted Hostel With Hammocks Is Not a Coliving
Why the coliving category is fracturing, what the good operators are actually building, plus recommended reads on community, leaving, and what we don't talk about enough.
Midlife Nomads explores how people are redesigning work, travel, and life in our 40s, 50s & beyond. This week’s newsletter is open to all, thanks to our sponsor SafetyWing — our trusted partner for Nomad Insurance.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about coliving, and how poorly the word is being used in some circles right now.
If you're new to the concept: it's a shared home, usually with private rooms and shared common spaces, designed for people who want community and infrastructure that supports working remotely — fast internet, dedicated desks, a kitchen that functions, a community manager who actually knows the area, and people you'd want to share a coffee with in the morning.
At its best, coliving is answering one of the harder questions of this lifestyle: how do you have a real life on the road without the loneliness?
The problem is that the word has gotten popular, and a lot of investors are entering the market right now seeing "coliving" as a real estate trend to capitalize on.
Slap the word on a converted hostel or hotel, photograph a few hammocks, charge premium prices, hire someone to call themselves a community manager.
The result is a category that's increasingly uneven, and a lot of people who book their first coliving have an experience that doesn't match what the good operators have spent years building.
The ones doing it well are genuinely different. A French castle in Normandy run as a coliving, where dinners run long because the conversation is worth it. A design-led property in inland Portugal where the silence between conversations is part of the offer. A three-house community in Florianópolis where one team holds the rhythm across all of them.
Investors aren’t racing to build this type of coliving, and they’re increasingly calling the shots in new spaces.
Building and managing real community (especially with people moving in and out) is real work, and that work may seem like an inconvenient budget line item to VCs and funders more accustomed to straight real estate plays.
It creates a lot of distrust and confusion for those of us in search of real coliving experiences. The biggest topic of conversation in any coliving I’ve stayed in was which colivings are actually worth staying in; which ones deliver on the promise on the website?
There are all kinds of options out there, but “well-managed community” is a lot more difficult to verify than the condition of the property, or whether it has a pool.
I'm not the only one paying attention to this. There's a small group of people in the industry who've been working on what coliving standards could actually look like — what the baseline should be, how operators should be evaluated, what readers and bookers should be able to expect.
I spoke with Katia Dimova, co-founder of Europe’s top coliving, about what it takes to run a successful coliving a few months back, and it's a conversation I plan to stay involved in. The work matters, because right now there's no real signal between the operators who've spent years building this well and the ones who've been at it for six months and a renovation loan.
I'm curious: if you've stayed at a coliving you'd recommend, what made it work? And if you've been burned by one that didn't deliver, what was missing?
Hit reply — I read every response, and your input helps shape what I write about next.
Which brings us to something else I’m excited about…
The specific operators worth booking is the kind of question that needs more than a newsletter can hold, which is part of why I’ve been working on building something special for full subscribers.
It’s a curated long-stay resource organized by month and region, looking six months out to help you plan your next steps.
Every pick is somewhere I’ve stayed personally or vetted through my network. It’s not a database or directory. It’s a hand-chosen, opinionated set of recommendations for midlife nomads who want options for reasonable cost, comfort, reliable internet — plus real community when you crave it, and solitude when you don’t.
More on that launch soon.
This week’s sponsor: SafetyWing
I've used SafetyWing Nomad Insurance for years. It's the one piece of nomad infrastructure I genuinely don't think about anymore. Their newest plan, Nomad Insurance Complete, is perfect for anyone living abroad or moving between countries. It's an annual health and travel insurance plan, valid in 175 countries including your home country. You can get coverage up to 1.5 million per year with no deductible, no co-payment, and no network restrictions. They are sponsoring this week's newsletter, but I'd be recommending them either way.
From Midlife Nomads
In case you missed them — three pieces from this past week:
When the Roles That Organized Your Life Have Gone Quiet
·The lack of direction, fulfillment, and purpose many women describe in midlife isn't always loneliness. Sometimes it's underuse — and the prescriptions are different.
The First Client Problem: Why the Website is Finished But Your Inbox is Empty
·Why too many attempts to transition to consulting or freelance stall before the first client — and the outreach approach that actually works, with scripts and pricing.
When You're Ready for Nomad Life But Your Partner Isn't: Let's Go There
·Three years of "not yet" isn't waiting... it's an answer. Here's the conversation that surfaces what's actually true, and the three ways it's most likely to go.
What’s On My Radar
Sara at Freelancing Females on why under-billing isn't generosity, it's letting your client live in a fantasy about what the work actually costs. The scripts she offers for handling scope creep without sounding like a contract robot are the most useful I've read on this — friendly, direct, and possible to actually say out loud.
Landon on the difference between earned success and lucky success — and why the lucky kind is often the more dangerous one, because it lets you skip building the muscle of figuring out why something worked. Reminded me of what I wrote about luck a few weeks back, from a different angle.
Also worth your time this week:
Your Chosen Family Isn't Coming by Salwa — an honest, slightly uncomfortable piece about what community actually requires versus what we tell ourselves about it. Reads differently after the conversation about coliving above.
Nobody Warns You About the Lonely Part — a podcast conversation between host Simo D. and Rosamaria Mancini that pairs well with the Salwa piece above: friend-making as an adult in a new country, grief at a distance, and the case for planning in seasons rather than forevers. About an hour of your listening time.
What Happens When Americans Realize How Miserable We Are? by Paul Krugman — a Nobel-laureate economist making the case that GDP isn't the whole story, with the data to back it up.
We Blew Up a Good Life in One Morning (Again) by Elias on the harder version of the leaving question — not how you leave somewhere that's failing you, but how you decide to leave somewhere that's working.
See you next week,
✌️ Miranda
P.S. November’s Nomad Cruise spots are filling up fast! Several people here at Chateau Coliving just booked this week, and one of you replied to last week's letter to tell me you'd booked, too. If you've been thinking about it, here's the link and use the code MIDLIFENOMADS to get €100 off your cabin.
It struck me reading this how travellers and users of coliving spaces (and possibly AirBnB - like accommodation as well) are likely to choose places that have some standardization or regulation to ensure a better experience and have more confidence in the booking. We used to have BnBs that had to follow standards and meet local regulation. AirBnB put many out of business but as investors have enshittified AirBnB I am more often looking for a hotel or the tradition BnB experience again. I have more confidence it will be a better experience. This sounds like it’s going to go a similar route.
How do you find the coliving situations you stay at?