Gillian Morris

On the surface I’m a conventional yuppie millennial. I founded a tech company. My hobbies include hiking, reading, and I just did my first half Ironman. I spend too much time on Instagram. I wear athleisure. But I’ve also spent the last five years living in community homes that ranged in size from five to sixteen people. I started one, Gramercy House, in NYC, and spent time in several others in the Bay Area, Berlin, and Puerto Rico, where I live now. I’ve had some of my happiest moments — and worked through some gnarly lows — with people I’ve come to regard as family. There are simple pleasures, like coming off a red eye flight to a home cooked breakfast (Das Konsulat, Berlin). There are collisions you don’t expect, like when the guest in the room next to yours happens to be Liberia’s Minister of Education (the Embassy, San Francisco). And there are so, so many things that money can’t buy, like a group of people you’ve just met coming together to nurse you back to health after a horrible bike accident leaves you temporarily with no short term memory (the Icebreaker, San Francisco). I’m sure I’m a better person because of coliving. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but I do think it is something that would make sense for many more people than are practicing it right now. Which is why I’m teaming up with Phil Levin to write Supernuclear. We want to distill the years of hard work we’ve put into figuring out what makes communities function into a resource for anyone who’s interested in coliving.