Feÿ’s Magic

by Conor Colwell

For the past 7 years I’ve been living out of a duffel bag and backpack, bouncing between different places around the globe. I’ve tried all sorts of community live/work environments, from months alone in run down motels to brand new haunted Airbnbs with business partners to empty luxury workspace hotels in the jungle to 60 person hacker houses in the center of San Francisco. Between living completely solo or surrounded by way too many people, it’s easy to identify when the setting, culture and humans have found an ideal resonance. 

Fey moves this ideal of resonance to an entirely new plain. Never before have I found myself surrounded by such an engaging and welcoming group from such a broad spectrum of backgrounds, expertise, and vision. Community atmosphere is most comparable to a future focused self governing Hogwarts style academy. Roles and responsibilities, prep of elaborate meals, seminar style salons, and even large scale dishwashing, are all done with utmost pleasure and care.

The warmth of Fey’s community is well contrasted with its relative isolation as a hilltop island citadel in a sea of quiet farm fields and medieval forests. One is able to dip in and out of continuous social activity and global digital engagement and escape to personal exploration surrounded by nature and emptiness. The grounds themselves are thick with such a deep history that adds even more meaning to our current stewardship of the location.

At core, our ability to comfortably work, collaborate and form new connections around the world is essential to help address and solve some of the biggest challenges our civilization and environment face. Ability to mix work and play - alone or together - in new environments with new faces and new perspectives is something that I now find nearly impossible to decouple from. For me Fey represents an energetic density that aggregates and connects incredible individuals from around the world to explore a multidisciplinary approach to how we move forward as humanity. Not just to solve the problems at hand, but to engage new edges of what life can be without conventionally rigid expectations of productivity and happiness..

My wish for Fey is that its model can grow to a global scale without compromising what it has been able to do in a lab setting. There are already many similar experiments around the world that have found varied degrees of success. I hope that all of these experiments can work together to help develop this emergent new way to work and live without borders to help foster collaboration on the most pressing issues in a world that needs it more than ever. And not just solve the problems at hand, but push forward all of the questions about who we are and who we want to be as a civilization.