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Electric flesh-arrows … traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm. ~ Anais Nin

Creativity is like sex. You fumble your way through, you get lost in it, you fall in love. Both are passionate, rhythmic, pleasurable, and flowing. Both can bear fruit. And both can rack your soul with vulnerability, bliss, fear and awkwardness.

Talk to a monkey. Explain what you’re really trying to say to a stuffed animal.

In today’s America, almost 50 percent of adults in the United States are single, and more than a quarter of “households” are just an individual living alone. An increasing amount of social interaction happens online, rather than face-to-face. Living alone may allow us to focus on our own goals without distraction, but it robs us of the type of communication that only happens when people are relaxed and at home together. The spaces between work and life — which, in decades past, would have been filled with conversations over the dinner table — are collapsing. Coliving hacks this trend, infusing the blurring boundaries of work and leisure with new opportunities for inspiration, learning, and social innovation. Here, “home” is reinvented with a new purpose. It’s a community, an ethos, a series of opportunities for collaboration. And while most young professionals are flocking to urban centers like San Francisco to live in modest apartments, some are building a new American dream in once empty suburban McMansions and luxury downtown digs. In this new scheme, your network isn’t just your Facebook friends or business contacts; It includes your friends, influencers, ad hoc family, and your shared home.

The coliving movement may freely use terms like “commune” and “cooperative”, but this ain’t your grandma’s commune. Contemporary coliving builds on communal living practices, embracing a networked tech, business and science-fueled culture built upon innovation and realizing a better world through collaborative design.

Coliving has clear similarities to traditional communes and co-ops. Langton Labs, in particular, bears a strong resemblance to 20th-century cooperative living. It has a flat organizational structure, and most decisions are made on a group email list. “In building a community, we didn't pick an existing model and emulate it,” says Todd Huffman. “We designed everything from the ground up, and in doing so, have ended up evolving in parallel and developing mechanisms that are very similar to cooperatives or communes.” Unlike many prior communal living experiments, coliving spaces are externally oriented. They’re generally located in urban areas, often open to the public on a regular basis, and easy to move in and out of. The ideas brewing behind these doors are quickly realized and implemented in the world outside. Much of this is related to the 21st-century vision of sharing, which allows for a high level of individualism and experimentation. Previous community models were focused on equality, with participants renouncing privileges to adopt a group-oriented mentality. In today’s open-source world, collaboration relies on contributions from a diverse pool of individuals, and welcomes exceptionality.

The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks by al-Qaida were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama Bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush's response to the attacks compromised America's basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.

The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to al-Qaida—as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive—orders of magnitude beyond the $60 billion claimed at the beginning—as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation.

Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America's future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2 percent of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today. Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion—$17,000 for every U.S. household—with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50 percent.Moreover, as Bilmes and I argued in our book The Three Trillion Dollar War, the wars contributed to America's macroeconomic weaknesses, which exacerbated its deficits and debt burden. Then, as now, disruption in the Middle East led to higher oil prices, forcing Americans to spend money on oil imports that they otherwise could have spent buying goods produced in the U.S. The Federal Reserve hid these weaknesses by engineering a housing bubble that led to a consumption boom. It will take years to overcome the excessive indebtedness and real-estate overhang that resulted.