It seems to have something to say about the times we're living through—about the risks of drifting along with the social tides and the promise of coming together to experiment with what else is possible.

For over a century, bohemia harbored a counter-imaginary for how a modern life could look. It coalesced not around an ideology but around individuals who chose to make art, community and freedom the organizing principles for their days. In exchange for material security, it offered an intoxicating feeling of aliveness.

As the possibility of prioritizing anything other than income-maximizing work vanishes, our access to such aliveness is fading too. When we respond to economic precarity and never-ending crises by running faster, bending further, jumping higher, something is lost. When we allow external forces to dictate how we spend our time, it isn't long before they dictate the content of our imaginations.

I spent years building a life that looked successful to everyone but me. What ultimately pulled me out was the discovery that others had wrestled with the same tensions, had learned how to live more adventurously, and had left behind artifacts of their transformation.

More of us are searching for new ways to exist than we realize. Bohemia offered a stage upon which anyone could cast aside their assigned uniforms and leap into the improvisational theater of life. Where are such stages today? Where can we learn how to live more creatively? How do we insulate ourselves from a culture that seeks our submission, summon the courage to become free despite the risks?

Searching for Bohemia is an attempt to revive a conversation that is anything but new. This project will evolve with time, but for now it takes the form of a newsletter and walks through Greenwich Village where the spirit of bohemia first erupted onto the American stage.