We hear about “living together” as if it were an ideal. In conferences, debates, LinkedIn posts. It’s sold to us with polite words: inclusion, respect, diversity, kindness, the recipe for being a good citizen.
But what no one tells you is that real “living together,” the one you experience every day, doesn’t happen in lecture halls or codes of conduct. It happens in a slightly messy kitchen, way too early in the morning, when you realize someone ate your breakfast.
A13 is an experimental lab for living together, a house in Thessaloniki, about twenty European volunteers, five fridges, three showers, and a lot of compromise. After living there for several months, I learned that living together isn’t an idea. It’s someone blasting music while you’re trying to nap. It’s waiting in line for the shower, sharing hallways, and enduring awkward silences.
It’s anything but a theoretical concept. It’s messy, sometimes annoying, often funny, but always beautiful. Not because everyone loves each other, but because we learn — to tolerate each other, to face a bit of friction, and above all, to understand.
Living together isn’t a hashtag. It’s an experience. A real-life cohabitation, made up of small victories: like managing to clean the toilet together without fighting.
The myth of “kind” coexistence
At conferences, they talk about consensus. In real life, there are people who slam doors, leave hair in the shower, hoard every mug in their room, talk loudly all the time, or don’t talk at all. People who avoid you when they’re upset. Or, on the contrary, want to solve everything right away, even when all you want is to lock yourself in your room and ignore the world.
No one prepares you for that. No one teaches you how to deal with the passive irritation of dirty dishes left in the sink. Or how to live with people who don’t tidy like you, don’t eat like you, don’t sleep like you. And yet, we live together. Every single day. Whether we want to or not.
The little things that reveal us
The truth is, living together often starts with the tiniest details. Minuscule. Insignificant. But when repeated daily, they become huge.
Snoring at night. A used pan left unwashed. A bathroom monopolized for an hour. An ignored “hello.” A chore left undone. These things don’t make it into speeches. But they’re what test our patience, our tolerance, our nerves, and our ability not to explode over nothing.
And that’s exactly where living together begins: in that microscopic moment when you choose not to chuck the dirty pan out the window.
Conflict as a bond-builder
The problem is, we often confuse “living together” with “getting along perfectly.” But no. Living together means being around people you don’t always understand. People you may never have chosen. And it’s not the absence of conflict that creates bonds, but the way we move through it. You have to compromise. Adapt. Sometimes give in. Sometimes hold your ground.
It’s political. And emotional. It’s learning how to make space for others without disappearing yourself. It’s learning to speak without hurting. To listen without trying to convince. It’s learning to negotiate space, time, words, and silence.
It’s not easy, but that’s what makes it real.
When it works, despite everything
And then, sometimes, out of nowhere, it works. A spontaneous dinner where everyone stays at the table a bit longer. A deep 3 a.m. chat in the kitchen. A movie night in the living room on a hungover Sunday. Someone doing your chore without saying anything. Someone really listening to you, not interrupting, not judging, when you weren’t doing great.
Those moments aren’t scheduled. They don’t happen because of a flatmate meeting. It’s a quiet solidarity that builds through everything you’ve already overcome together.
Living together can’t be learned in conferences. There’s no recipe. No perfect method. Just attempts, failures, and small wins.
Living together means accepting that it’s sometimes uncomfortable, often tiring, but always human. Because it’s not a fixed ideal. It’s a constant construction. A simple, daily effort made of compromises, tensions, laughter, and small gestures that matter more than we think.
And sometimes, when everyone gathers on the rooftop, someone puts on a playlist we can all more or less tolerate, and we all team up to barely manage to light a barbecue — then living together looks a bit like the idea we had of it. Not perfect. Not spectacular. But truly nice.
