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It’s 2045, and I’ll describe it as if it already exists, because that is how it begins. What changed is small and total at once: we stopped treating belonging as a private achievement and started treating it as shared infrastructure — built, funded, maintained, like roads.

Loneliness did not vanish. It simply stopped being the default setting. The third places came back — libraries that stay open, courtyards instead of corridors, time that isn’t sold by the hour. People learned, again, to be unimpressive in company: to sit with each other without performing.

What would I build if I knew it would not fail? Exactly this — and then I would tell no one it was mine.