Cabin is building a network city around three guiding principles, supported by six obvious truths. These truths are informed by observed behaviors from the community:
- Live in Community
- We are our best selves when we live with people we admire
- We can find our people online and gather in person
- Integrate with Nature
- Touching grass is good for our wellbeing
- Regenerative local communities are the best store of value
- Create Together
- Creating means doing
- Co-creation grows culture
Live in Community
We are our best selves when we live with people we admire.
Spend any time in a well-organized coliving community and it’s immediately evident how different of a lifestyle it can be for human connection, novelty, and happiness. Living together in community is a deeply natural thing for humans to do; it’s how most people who have ever existed have lived. If you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, then you should choose to live around the kind of people that you aspire to be.
At Cabin, you can choose who is around your campfire. We choose to surround ourselves with kind, thoughtful, creative, open-minded, playful, generous people. We are a mix of creators, builders, gatherers, naturalists, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and doers. We are highly motivated, easy-going people who want to do good in the world and have fun doing it. We connect, root for, and learn from one another. We build squad wealth when the whole squad is winning. We help each other set and achieve ambitious goals.
We can find our people online and gather in person.
People used to meet in person and then become “friends” on Facebook. But it makes more sense to do the opposite: find values and vibe-aligned friends online and then meet up IRL. There are 100x more people to choose from online than in the largest cities, and they gather into easily identifiable tribes. Once you find your tribe, you can colocate to break bread, build relationships, and experience the world together. This is possible because cities no longer have all of the best jobs—those have moved online too. Remote work has increased 5x in the past 5 years and this has enabled more people to explore flexible lifestyles.
At Cabin, we work remotely and live intentionally. It used to be the case that we spent our days with coworkers from the same company, and lived near wherever the office happened to be. Now, we can spend our days surrounded by a community of our choosing, cross-pollinating our work and lives alongside other creative professionals.
Integrate with Nature
Touching grass is good for our wellbeing.
Spending time in nature is crucial for mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. You probably don’t need science to tell you this, but the evidence is there if you want it. Spending your life in front of screens in a concrete jungle doesn’t feel good.
At Cabin, we live in places with nature out the front door so that we can easily unplug and spend time touching grass. Billions of years of evolution have created interconnected systems of emergent beauty. We draw inspiration from nature’s long time horizons, peaceful tranquility, cooperative ecosystems, biodiversity, and evolutionary progress.
Regenerative local communities are the best store of value.
Regenerative systems grow sustainable capacity and resilience. Natural ecosystems regenerate through feedback loops that improve the soil and water, recycle nutrients, and increase biodiversity. Small communities can practice regeneration by providing for human needs in close collaboration with the local environment. We can build a globally resilient network of these local communities.
At Cabin, we believe that the best compounding store of value is a regenerative local community. Our neighborhoods aim to build housing, grow food, produce energy, regenerate natural resources, develop relationships, and make meaning together. By growing these systems from the ground up, we can create better homes in less time using fewer resources. Regenerative practices, off-grid renewable energy, satellite internet, low rural land costs and regulation, solarpunk development, and coliving make it feasible for our community to create better and cheaper lifestyles for ourselves—while contributing positive externalities to the environment.
Create Together
Creating means doing.
Creation is the feedback loop between ideas and actions. If you really want to understand ideas, you have to try them. Mental models are misleading, and the real world is always more complicated than the version in your head. Great creation happens when you can figure out how to translate big ideas into small practices. This means developing habits of consistent experimentation, starting at small scales — Gall’s law states that complex systems can only work when they evolve from working simple systems.
At Cabin, we value actions over abstract ideas. We make, test, build, and create things. We practice do-ocracy: the art of being the change you want to see. We enjoy philosophy, but we value people and processes that make positive tangible changes in the real world.
Co-creation grows culture.
Co-creation builds trust among collaborators through transparency and empowerment. Co-creating culture naturally happens at small, local scales where people can interact directly and develop trust. Humans have developed coordination technologies like shared language, culture, economies, governance, and cities to more effectively coordinate at the scale of civilization. It’s now possible to coordinate and co-create globally using a new type of leviathan that puts capture-resistant governance directly in the hands of a community.
At Cabin, we practice co-creation, cooperation, and reciprocity to promote a culture of positive-sum coordination. This culture is co-created at gatherings where we come together to build connections, coherence, practices, traditions, memes, and lore. We practice “Yes, and” by taking others’ contributions and helping make them better. We self-govern autonomously and transparently to make organizational decisions without the need for a trusted central authority. This starts with the smallest and most important questions, like “how are we doing the dishes?”
If you also find these truths to be obvious, we invite you to join us in living in accordance with our guiding principles. We do this at Cabin neighborhoods: coliving properties in nature where remote workers co-create the future we want to live in.
You can find out more at cabin.city. We’ll see you on the trail.
