 Welcome to Quest for a Meaningful Life on the Road here in Quebec City where I'll be spending the winter trying out this whole work from anywhere experience now that the lockdown of so much of organic real life has led to this opening up of working online. This idea of doing business through a screen and in fact doing almost everything through a screen and this has led me to think about what it means to have community. Now hopefully we all have some friends and family and it's important to have some people around us but what about having a larger community they don't always have to be they don't all have to be people that we are friends with even people that we like even but it seems like there is value in having some kind of a community having people around us other than some kind of anonymous collection of people that we have no interaction with. Now of course growing up in a city I'm used to being anonymous ever since there are big cities of thousands millions of people certainly that can't really be a true community because you can't actually know any of them or really even interact with thousands and thousands of people so we're used to this kind of anonymous feeling living in a big city but now it's become even more so as the world's become even more urbanized and the cities are getting bigger more people living in the cities and beyond that this kind of global city of the internet where we've all been gradually moving more and more into it does feel like being part of one giant city that spans the world and we we've been moving more and more of our lives into this this world where it leaves me to wonder what's left outside this world of the internet the world of actual humans face-to-face having some kind of interaction in some kind of physical space because of the concerns one might say panic about health risks we now no longer have very much interaction person to person in the physical world and leaves me to wonder what can or how can we have a community if we can't have it in the physical world if where we're not really having physical interactions then we have to do it through this online imaginary screen world and that leaves me to wonder how it can even be done so when I when I look back at history and the way that communities once were there would simply be people around you if you had your your village your your part of the world there would be people living there and you would to some degree know them and this certainly has both advantages and disadvantages as anybody living in a small town can attest that it's not all positive to have this community you also have people that are in your business all the time and people that have a lot of very strong opinions about what you should and shouldn't be doing and they're there in your face whereas the the city and the mega city of the internet even more so allowing us to be anonymous one of the best descriptions I've heard of it is that or the one of the best positive things about it is that people will just leave you alone to do what you choose to do and know the the downside of that is that everybody's leaving you alone so actually nobody actually cares what you're doing but the upside is that you do have that openness and freedom to do what you choose whereas in traditional community it seems like you're always answering to other people and there's they're always a presence but still as much as it's good to be free and undisturbed it seems like we can't really have a complete meaningful life without having some kind of community and in the mega city internet world we don't have any automatic community we can find people through that maybe they have a shared interest somehow but with the interaction being through a screen it leaves me to wonder how can we make actual community how can we have a community in this new internet mega city landscape and so I would like to hear some ideas of how you find community is it just the community that you had you know outside the internet from your family maybe school friend group that becomes your community and it simply moves online or do you have ways that you develop a true feeling of community out of the online world so I'd be curious to hear how you're doing this