We spent ten days at NS, in Forest City. A new society, built from scratch, for people who believed the old ones were beyond saving.
The meals were designed by Bryan Johnson, the longevity guru — two a day, always on disposable plates with disposable cutlery. Breakfast was hotel buffet style, so that one sat outside the pattern. Lunch and dinner didn't. There was no recycling. Whatever went uneaten simply went in the bin, with the rest.
The connections were real. Some of the best conversations I've had in years happened there, in those ten days — with founders, with dreamers, with a few locals who let us into their world a little. I don't say this to soften what comes next. I say it because it's true, and because both things being true at once is closer to how most places actually are.
On the tenth day, the business license was revoked. The Forest City chapter ended the next day.
I'm not going to draw the line between those two facts. I'll just leave them here, next to each other, the way they sat next to each other in those ten days.
Here is what I keep circling back to.
A place can be warm in one direction and unconscious in another. That isn't hypocrisy. It's just where an edge of awareness happened to fall — for a founder, for an institution, for any of us. The question isn't whether NS was good or bad. The question is older, and quieter, and it follows me long after Forest City.
Is this kind? And who might this exclude — including parts of myself?
There's a difference between a taker and a steward.
A taker asks what a place can give. A steward asks what they're safeguarding, even after they've gone. Not a trace left behind — a wholeness kept intact.
At NS, the care went as far as the body. It never reached the plate.
I don't think that was cruelty. I think it was a boundary — quietly drawn, rarely questioned — around where "self" ends. For most of us, that boundary sits somewhere around the skin. We are careful with our own nourishment, and careless with the water, the soil, the systems that made the nourishment possible in the first place.
But we were never two things, held together in an ethical arrangement. We are one thing. The environment isn't something I am kind to. It's already a part of what I mean when I say I.
The same question turns inward, if I let it.
Which parts of a day get excused — edited out, quietly, because they didn't turn into anything Instagram-worthy? The unfinished thought. The ordinary hour. The version of me that didn't resolve into a caption.
An authentic life doesn't perform. It doesn't need constant revision to stay presentable. Nothing in it waits outside the frame, hoping to be let back in.
Inauthenticity, I'm starting to think, is simply a life under permanent edit. A self treated the way NS treated its plates — used, then discarded, because it was never really counted as part of the whole to begin with.
There's a word for what grows when nothing has to be excused. Regeneration.
Not the striving kind. Not another way to optimize a life that was never broken. A forest doesn't regenerate because it's trying to become a better forest. It regenerates because nothing is blocking it.
Care, extended all the way — to the plate, to the parts of a day left out of the story, to the pieces of a person still filed under unfinished — doesn't deplete anything. It leaves the place, and the self, enriched for the encounter.
That's the difference between sustaining and regenerating. Sustaining asks you to take less. Regenerating asks what you're willing to give back — to a place, to a person, to yourself — simply by staying whole while you're there.
NS, as it turns out, isn't finished. Forest City closed, but the community is still evolving — a new cohort opens September 1st, in Astana.
Maybe that's fitting. Nothing in this piece was ever really about an ending.
This whole summer of moving through places has taught me something similar, over and over. We've had encounters — with strangers, with cities, with each other — that were genuinely kind, that enriched us in ways we didn't expect. And we've met the opposite, just as often. In cities, in places, in developments built with half an awareness. In ourselves, too, on the days we were too tired to offer kindness even to the people we love most, let alone to ourselves.
Maybe that's the real noticing. Not whether we're kind or unkind, as if it were a fixed trait. But the moment itself — the moment "we" quietly contracts. When the circle that a generous hour could include shrinks down to almost nothing, and someone, or something, or some tired, depleted part of ourselves, ends up standing just outside it.
That edge is going to recede. It probably recedes every day, in small ways we don't clock at the time. The practice was never to keep it from happening. It's to notice when it has — and then, gently, without punishing the contraction, to expand again. To let the edge come back out, and widen, until even the tired part of you standing outside it is let back in.
Is this kind? And who might this exclude — including parts of myself?
I don't think it's a question with an answer. I think it's a question you keep asking, the way you'd keep a door open — not because someone is currently standing there, but because you'd rather not find out, later, who you left outside.
