And most importantly, THANK YOU for listening and walking with me on this beautiful journey. You rock (you weirdo).

Join Eleven Dunbar - The Human-Only Internet For Genuine Connection & Creativity

A global community, capped at 150 - small enough to allow meaningful, lasting relationships to form, playful enough to overcome the Resistance keeping you from discovering and expressing your soul’s creative purpose.

Apply here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

This week, we sit down to explore what it actually means to live a creative life, and why your inner creativity doesn't need healing; it just needs to be remembered.

Also, we are hosting our FIRST ‘The 11D Gathering Of The Elfs’ on June 24, 12 pm ET, a free one-hour event for people who want to have more creativity and genuine connections in their lives.

Grab your ticket here: https://www.elevendunbar.com/11d-gathering

Join Eleven Dunbar - The Human-Only Internet For Genuine Connection & Creativity

A global community, capped at 150 - small enough to allow meaningful, lasting relationships to form, playful enough to overcome the Resistance keeping you from discovering and expressing your soul's creative purpose.

Apply here: https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

It was a wild and stormy night when Ashley the Lumberjack, Finch the Banned Doctor, Magda the Thief, Linda the Unpublished Poet, and Mox Folder the Failed Detective approached an island with a mysteriously looking lighthouse on a rocky and hole-ridden boat. They were shivering, strangers in a boat bound by a common mission: reach the lighthouse and find out what was going on.

Little did they know of the horror that was taking place on the island, but soon they would find out, and it would even cost Ashley the Lumberjack his life in an epic battle - a pure act of bravery so others could live. All combined with a never-ending stream of laughter and silliness.

These are not real people, but characters played by our Eleven Dunbar founding members Emily (Ashley), Vincent (Finch), Florence (Magda), Ilan (Mox Folder), and co-founder (Linda). It may just look like another Google Meet meeting, but it was a three-hour co-created adventure that transcended time & space, and bound them together through the vehicle of play.

It didn’t matter that it was purely digital, and it didn’t require a special physical location or fancy technology (although Google Meet is quite something if you think about it) - it required presence, curiosity, and the magic behind play.

So, what is the magic behind play that allows for genuine human connection and creativity, and can make digital meaningful (again)?

What Dungeons & Dragons Actually Is

If you have never played, the easiest way to picture it is this: Dungeons & Dragons is a story you build together out loud, with no screen full of graphics, just a handful of people and their imaginations.

One person, the Game Master, narrates the world into being, describing what you see, playing everyone who isn’t you, and telling you how the world answers back. While everyone else plays a single character living inside that world, deciding what they would do, what they would say, and where they would go, as if they were truly there.

The game loop is simple:

• The Game Master says what’s happening.

• The players talk it over and decide what to try, and then it all begins again.

Whenever something is genuinely difficult or risky, the dice get the final word: a low roll for misfortune, a medium one for the messy in-between, a high one for things in your favor.

There is no winning here, no finish line to cross, only the invitation to be curious, to investigate, to look after each other, and, ideally, to survive.

You may know Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) from the cult series Stranger Things, but it dates way back to 1974, when Tactical Studies Rules published it. There are many ways to play D&D, and it can look frankly quite intimidating with rulebooks & character sheets thick enough to prop open a door. Which is why we got Sebastian from to be our Game Master, who masterfully strips the experience to its essence: pure storytelling, giggles, silliness, and imagination.

Because underneath all the rulebooks and dice, the thing itself is astonishingly simple; a reminder of what we are capable of through shared storytelling, that we are all, every one of us, wildly imaginative beings able to conjure whole worlds together with nothing more than conversation.

Can the Digital Be Meaningful (Again)?

We live in a world that is as connected as it has ever been and also, somehow, as lonely, and the usual response is to point at the screen and say there is your culprit, and as if the solution were simply to step away, to go outside, to find a third/fourth place, to rebuild in person what the digital world has quietly hollowed out.

I do not want to dismiss that impulse, because there is something that moves me about the co-working spaces, co-living arrangements, and co-playing communities that have been quietly popping up over the last decade in cities.

It’s almost a renaissance of remembering we were always meant to share space and that the architecture of modern life has made that harder than it should be, and I find it exciting to see them popping up.

But I also think we misread the loneliness problem when we point at the technology rather than at our relationship with it, how we use it, with what intention, in what kind of setting, because the technology is not doing anything to us that we have not asked it to do.

And there is a more practical problem with the in-person answer, which is that these spaces exist, almost without exception, in cities, which are available primarily to people who choose to live in cities.

Yet, we know that physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness:

“The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It’s psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it’s reversed. Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices-TV, jets, freeways and so on-but I hope it’s been made plain that the real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity.” - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig

Consider the parent who chose remote work so they could be home when their child comes through the door, and who now wants to pursue meaningful work without wasting hours of commute every day, or being stuck in an office.

Or the digital nomad who moves every few months and is therefore perpetually three days away from having a real community wherever they happen to be.

Or the solopreneur running something small and ambitious from a market town that has no co-working space and no plans to build one.

We have learned that these people are in as much need of genuine connection, play, and creative nourishment as people who live in cities, and to focus on reducing the psychic distance, rather than the physical distance.

So the question I keep returning to is not whether the in-person world has good things to offer, it obviously does, but whether the digital space can be built with enough intention and enough structure to carry the thing that connection actually runs on.

Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question all along, blaming the screen for what is really an absence of the right kind of frame.

What is going on here?

Play has been studied extensively and has been part of humans since the dawn of time. Play as a vehicle to learn, connect, create, or navigate life.

When I studied game design, I read Huizinga's work Homo Ludens1, where he talks about how play happens inside a special, temporary world with its own rules, set apart from ordinary life. He coined it the magic circle - it is a beautiful image, and I have never stopped using it in conversation, but I always found it hard to describe what is actually happening inside the circle, or what breaks the magic of this circle.

It was when I stumbled upon Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis2 that I found the concept I had been looking for, because Goffman starts from the simplest possible question: what is going on here?

A frame is what answers that question in any given situation, the invisible context that tells everyone present what the rules are, what roles are available, and what behaviour is expected, not something invented fresh each time but already embedded in the social context, waiting for people to step into it, often without realising that is what they are doing.

I’d argue that a frame is not only something that is always already embedded, but can be designed and engineered to create a certain feeling, or state of being3.

This is why game designers are masters of designing playful frames, which allow people to step out of their day-to-day persona, and suddenly turn into hyper-curious and resilient learners/adventurers, who eat failure for breakfast, but also connect through shared play.

Consider what happened to Google Meet on that Friday night. For most of us, it carries a particular weight: the platform of the pandemic, of the back-to-back calls, of the muted microphone, and staring into the middle distance. For many, not a place to be intellectually, creatively, and emotionally nourished.

However, nothing about the software changed when Sebastian opened the session: the same grid of rectangles, the same mute button, the same slightly unflattering angle.

But the frame changed entirely, the rules were different, the roles were different, the behaviour expected of everyone in those rectangles was different, and so Google Meet stopped being a place where you report on your quarterly objectives and became, for three hours, a lighthouse on a stormy island where something terrible was about to happen.

That is what a frame designed for play, creativity, and connection does, and it is why Gary Alan Fine, in his work Shared Fantasy, decided to look very closely at what was happening around ordinary tables where ordinary people were playing Dungeons & Dragons4.

What Fine noticed was that everyone playing is quietly holding three selves at once:

• The person they actually are.

• The player who knows it’s a game and weighs the odds.

• The character living inside the story.

The whole fragile thing only works because everyone agrees to keep all three in the air at the same time, which is, when you think about it, a small miracle of coordination dressed up as a Friday-night hobby.

Sarah Lynne Bowman5, a researcher who has spent years studying what actually happens to people inside roleplaying games, calls it bleed: the emotional spillover between the player and the character, the moments when what the character is feeling begins to colour the person playing them, and what the person is feeling finds its way into the choices the character makes.

It is neither a malfunction nor something to be avoided, and for many players it is precisely the point, the place where the pretend world and the real one stop running parallel and start, quietly, to become one.

Which is exactly what happened when Emily decided, somewhere in the middle of a lighthouse horror story on a Google Meet, to have her character, Ashley the Lumberjack, sacrifice his life by battling the strongest opponent in the game, so the rest of the party could live.

She wasn’t only making a tactical call inside the game, she was choosing, as herself, to give something up for the people in the other rectangles on her screen, and the feeling in the room in that moment, the hush, and then the laughter breaking through, wasn’t quite the feeling of watching a fictional character do a fictional thing, it was closer to the feeling of watching someone actually be brave, which is a strange and warm thing to experience on a Friday night through a video call.

And if that weren’t enough, Emily also spent a considerable portion of the session attempting to destabilise Sebastian, our Game Master, with a relentless cheerful silliness that was very much her own and that leaked into every choice Ashley made, which is bleed moving in the other direction, the real person colouring the character, and somehow making the whole thing more alive rather than less.

Ashley the Lumberjack has been a running thread at Eleven Dunbar ever since, a shared reference that surfaces between people who were there and people who have only heard the story, and what strikes me about that is that the thing being remembered is not a dice roll or a game mechanic:

It is a human moment, an act of generosity dressed in fiction that outlasts the session.

The frame held for three hours on a Google Meet, and what moved between the frames, the laughter, the bravery, the silliness, the grief that wasn’t quite grief, was entirely, unmistakably human.

The medium, the technology, the digital-only, it turned out, had nothing to do with it.

A Human-Only Internet For Genuine Connection and Creativity

In my last article Don’t Panic, Be Playful I reignited my hunger to understand play, and to show, rather than tell, how to bring more playfulness into one’s life, in the hope of making it less of a philosophical discussion, but an action-oriented way of living.

To actually help people navigate their life better, to breathe better, to parent better, to create authentically, to laugh harder, and to be seen and see others fully.

Something I have been missing dearly in the spiritual circles, where it has become more of an intellectual exercise than a grounded embodiment practice to help people navigate life better.

Not only is play, combined with interdependence, an incredibly powerful vehicle for genuine connection and creativity, but also an antidote against the inner battles (Resistance6) that stand between you and your soul’s creative purpose.

So, if this is true, then I firmly believe that technology, or the digital space, has never been the root problem of today’s consumer culture that is more lonely that ever.

It has been our relationship with technology, especially the Internet, that has made us more disconnected from ourselves and, therefore, from each other. And as a result, disconnected from our soul’s creative purpose.

And don’t get me wrong, in real life, experiences and connections can never be fully replaced. Replacing in real life was not the goal of creating a human-only Internet for genuine connection and creativity, but the possibility of the Internet as a place where genuine connection and creativity lead to real life - that is what gets me excited.

Technology used with enough intention that the connections formed through a screen eventually find their way off it, into a meal, into a room, into a life.

Because the one ingredient connection actually runs on is not proximity, it is presence and the felt sense of actually being with someone inside a shared world, and that, as a fictional lumberjack on a Google Meet once proved, travels perfectly well through a screen.

Thus, a digital container built with enough intention is a real answer for the parent at home, the nomad, or any person three hours from a city, who experiences psychic loneliness.

Eleven Dunbar is our attempt at it, to create a human-only internet for genuine connection and creativity, capped at 150 people.

A place where we help each other overcome the Resistance to discover and express our soul’s creative purpose.

Even if, occasionally, it costs Ashley the Lumberjack his life.

Join Eleven Dunbar - The Human-Only Internet

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.

The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.

The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

If this resonates, apply here: https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

Around age 13 or 14, I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Even though it is a sci-fi novel, I like to believe that Douglas Adams wrote a spiritual book in disguise. I always jokingly say, for me, that was my first spiritual book.

Douglas Adams took two things that don't obviously belong together, playfulness and profundity, and married them into a story about the absurdity of existence.

A man gets picked up by an alien spaceship the same morning Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. The answer to life, the universe, and everything turns out to be 42, yet nobody knows what the question was.

It sounds like a joke, it is, and yet something in that book quietly rewired me. It said: the universe is fundamentally ridiculous, and the most honest response to that is not anxiety, not hustle, not optimisation...it's delight.

To be playful and profound at the same time has always been the natural way of navigating this world. I guess this book gave me the allowance I needed to read to fully embrace it.

Because I don't think play is what you do when the serious work is done. I think play is the mode of being that makes serious work possible and meaningful.

Playfulness is not a personality trait or a leisure activity; it's a way of navigating, seeing, and experiencing the world.

And I think most of us knew this once, before we got buried under deadlines, under performance, under the accumulated weight of who we think we're supposed to be.

The self that knew how to play never really left, I guess it just got quieter as we grew up?

This is the shared philosophy that brought and me together to start Eleven Dunbar. And the more we build it, the more we realise what it's really for: to remind people of this intuitive way of being.

To give them the same allowance that Douglas Adams gave me: the permission to come home to the natural way of being they never really lost.

It is funny that Eleven Dunbar reminds me of this more than I like to admit. What I mean by this is that it reminds me of my own nature, which I am returning to, which was always there, yet buried in the noise of one’s own mind.

I spent a good chunk of my 20s dedicated to understanding, experiencing, and researching play. During my short stint as a PhD researcher at the University of Helsinki, I published a book chapter on the role of the teacher in game-based learning, arguing that games should not be seen merely as tools to motivate students, but as a genuine opportunity for learning, empowerment, and ownership in the classroom. 1

With Eleven Dunbar, I get a chance to close this circle, which I never thought I would get to do, but this time it is not for education; it is for people like you and me.

Realising this brings me tears, as it feels like coming home after years of wandering. I am still wandering in the gravity world, but I have arrived back home in the sacred world.

Just the other day, I stumbled upon research that I find quietly revelatory. Wulf, Bowman, and colleagues published a study titled Video Games as Time Machines: Video Game Nostalgia and the Success of Retro Gaming, which found that the reason adults return to childhood games has nothing to do with fun. 2 It is about self-continuity, an unconscious attempt to reconnect with a version of yourself that still exists somewhere underneath all the adult noise. What makes retro games more powerful than old songs or films is the interactivity. You do not simply observe the past; you re-experience it. Motor memory, spatial memory, the whole embodied archive of who you were fires at once.

This connects to something psychologists call the Reminiscence Bump, the phenomenon where memories from roughly ages 10 to 25 are stored neurochemically deeper than anything that comes after, because they are formed during the period when identity itself is being shaped. 3 The 90s were not just a time period for those of us who grew up in them. They are literally fused into who we became, and the reason that era feels like more than nostalgia is that it is closer to identity than memory.

Which means the self you are trying to find was never really gone. It did not disappear. It got buried, slowly and quietly, under deadlines and performance and the accumulated weight of who we think we are supposed to be. What feels like searching is actually closer to remembering. And what feels like becoming is actually closer to returning.

It was this research and a conversation with that reminded me to write about play with more rigor. To show, not just tell, that play is nature’s truism. It is how the universe operates, and it is a more powerful vehicle for navigating life than most of us have been given permission to believe.

Not as a philosophy to admire from a distance, but as something lived and felt; a vehicle to help others breathe better, to create authentically, to parent better, to love deeper, to laugh harder, and to help people be seen, and to see each other.

Far more powerful, I would argue, than any guru, any elevation of Jungian consciousness, or any intellectual/mystical framework that keeps the insight safely in the head and out of the body. I call this intellectual masturbation that feels confident and sounds smart, but keeps living in the realm of the mind, and never closes the bridge to full embodiment. (Sorry for that last one - I couldn’t resist).

That is what Eleven Dunbar is really for. The same permission Douglas Adams gave me at 13, to be playful and profound at the same time, to take life seriously without taking yourself too seriously, to trust that delight is not a distraction from the work but the very source of it, given not to one person through a book, but to a community of people, together.

This is not Justin’s vision, nor is it mine. It is older than both of us. It is a truism of nature that humans come alive in play, in genuine connection, in creative expression, and in the company of others who give them permission to remember who they already are.

The next generation won’t be disconnected specialists, but Adaptivists: humans who can feel, connect, create, and synthesize. People who remember that growth is not a solo project, and that becoming extraordinary was never the real goal, but rather remembering what was always already there.

Eleven Dunbar exists to help this generation find each other; to move from isolated individuals into a living network, from self-optimization to shared evolution, and from performance to presence.

A vibrant field of humans who play, build, reflect, and rise together.

So, don’t panic, be playful.

A new week, a new founding member episode! This week we sit down with Chad Hammock: sales leader, sneakerhead, and the man with a sourdough-based business philosophy that somehow explains everything.

We get into the concept of Quality, AI, baseball, and what a bread starter has to do with building great teams. Enjoy!

Join Eleven Dunbar

We only have a limited number of spots open.

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.

The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.

The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

If this resonates, apply here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

Welcome back.

Parts one and two were about the world we’re living in, and the feeling many of us carry that something essential got left behind.

We ended Part 2 by coining the term “The Adaptivist”, who is an expert generalist.

Someone who understands how to marry the dichotomy of doing and non-doing, when to take action, when to surrender, and to have complete trust in life and the outcome of one’s action.

Life becomes more like a dance than a journey, or a pilgrimage with a destination at the end of it.

It becomes participatory.

We’re aware this next part sounds like we’ve spent a lot of time in the mountains - we might have, so bear with us.

The Adaptivist understands that they rely on other humans.

They tune their antenna: their body, emotions, mind, and soul to stay connected to themselves, to others, and to the source of life.

They remember why they are here. And they help others remember why they are here, so we can mature and evolve together.

They understand that two stories are always unfolding in parallel: the world story, and the sacred story.

The world story is this lifetime: identity, vocation, relationships, failures, successes, achievements, losses, and gains. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The sacred story is the soul’s story. It spans time and space and connects us to something beyond us, call it the source, God, Life, or Love.

The Adaptivist stays connected to the heart, so insights from the sacred story can inform the world story, and vice versa.

They care for the body physically, emotionally, and mentally, keeping the antenna clear and receptive. This allows connection to oneself, to others, to the universe, and to life as a whole.

The Adaptivist moves from “I think, therefore I am” toward “I feel, therefore I am.” There is no need for excessive explanation. Their actions speak. And when they speak, they speak from the heart and with embodied truth.

The Adaptivist is a generalist by design.

They do not specialize in narrow fragments of life. They cultivate breadth across mind, body, creativity, relationships, systems, and soul. Because it is at the intersections that aliveness appears.

They develop depth in at least one human dimension, psychology, story, aesthetics, systems, community, philosophy, and weave the rest together with taste.

In a world of accelerating tools and artificial intelligence, the Adaptivist becomes the integrator. Not the one who knows everything, but the one who can connect what matters.

They orchestrate intuitively. Rising tides raise all boats. No one teaches alone. We evolve each other.

They understand that polarity exists within. Love and hate coexist in every human, as if each of us holds a key to the gates of heaven, and the same key opens the gates of hell.

To love fully requires acknowledging one’s own shadow and the hate that also lives within us. By facing it rather than projecting it, we learn to love ourselves and others unconditionally. In others, we recognize ourselves: mortal humans capable of love and hate. And we choose love. As love begets love.

By choosing love, we heal collectively. We do not project our shadows onto the world. We befriend them, carry them, and refuse to let them unconsciously shape the world story.

Our attention becomes our prayer. Where and how we direct it becomes our unique way of expressing love.

This is our creative expression: an expression of love, joy, peace, and mutual evolution.

A finely tuned antenna allows us to receive ideas, visions, and original thoughts. Ideas do not belong to individuals. They move through us, and if not acted upon, they move on, because ideas want to be manifested.

The Adaptivist knows that life is not a journey with a destination, but a dance that requires careful listening: knowing when to surrender and when to act. An active participation in life, and an ongoing conversation with the source and everyone around you.

The question shifts from “What do I want from life?” to “What is life asking of me?” This is a lifelong process, approached with humility, gratitude, curiosity, and humor.

The Adaptivist embraces being human. They are here to experience life fully: failure and success, beauty and difficulty, heartbreak and growth, and the never-ending process of becoming.

They do not escape into spiritual bypassing or spiritual ego. They tune the antenna not to rise above life, but to participate in it more fully.

Be here. Be human.

The Adaptivist plays, creates, and connects.

These are not hobbies; they are the last remaining human superpowers.

They strive for emotional maturity. Not to be ruled by emotions, but to listen to them and work with them.

They take responsibility for their inner world. When triggered, they pause before reacting. Their pain is not an excuse to wound others, but an invitation to grow. They communicate honestly, even when it is uncomfortable.

They know how to hold space for themselves and for others. They can sit with tears without fixing. They can face conflict without collapsing or attacking. Their strength is not hardness, but grounded softness: the ability to remain open when things become difficult.

They lead through integrity. They say what they mean and do what they say. They keep their word, especially to themselves. Their ambition is not to dominate, but to serve: to build, protect, and nurture what truly matters.

They are in a relationship with something greater. They may call it God, Life, the Universe, or simply Love. Success is not measured by status or possessions, but by how much truth and love flow through them.

Independence alone leads to isolation. Codependence leads to collapse. The Adaptivist practices interdependence, the dance between individualism and togetherness.

And they will slip on some days, and be more mature in some areas and immature in others. They are not perfect; they are becoming.

Every mistake refines character, every heartbreak deepens compassion, and every challenge is an initiation.

Emotional maturity is not a destination. It is a lifelong dance between awareness, humility, and courage.

The Adaptivist commits to community and to something beyond themselves.

Perhaps, our founding member Emily captured it in the best way:

“The market punishes you for being a generalist. People want specialization, they want certainty. But maybe we’ve missed out on 50 Leonardo da Vincis because they were told: pick one thing.” - Emily, founding member Eleven Dunbar

None of this is a prescription; it is a direction we trust as it feels more like remembering than becoming anything.

The Adaptivist is not a finished person, but someone who is in motion, curious, open, a little weird, and committed to remembering how to be more alive in the company of others.

Someone who has decided that life and growth are not a solo project.

That is exactly who Eleven Dunbar is built around.

Next week, we will share more about the vision of Eleven Dunbar, and the beautiful thing is, it is less about Justin’s and my vision, and more about the vision of our founding members.

Love,
Gerhard & Justin

ps. If you want to join this awesome squad of people and build something meaningful together, where playful and profound experiences meet, then apply here: https://elevendunbar.com/ - We have a few limited spots open!

A new week, a new founding member episode! This week, we sit down with Sumo and Ami, two unbelievably amazing and interesting humans in the Eleven Dunbar universe.

Dancing, childhood dreams, healing journeys, manifestation, and somehow Google Sheets all made it in. Enjoy!

Join Eleven Dunbar

We only have a limited number of spots open.

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.

The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.

The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

If this resonates, apply here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

This one is different, warmer, and has a healthy dose of 90s and early 2000s nostalgia, back when we experienced this beautiful intersection of the analog and digital world. New tech met old ways of interacting, connecting, and creating.

Let’s go.

There was a time when connection felt slower, more human, and strangely alive.

When the Internet felt like a bridge, not a destination. When people met through shared interests, long conversations, late nights, and curiosity. Not through metrics, feeds, or performance.

We laughed more then, we played, and we made things for the joy of making them.

Creativity was not content, and play was not productivity.

Connection did not need to justify itself.

Many of us grew up at that edge, the late 90s and early 2000s. A brief intersection between the analog and the digital. Technology helped us find one another online, and then we showed up in real life.

Somewhere along the way, that feeling faded. Connection became constant, but thinner. Life became faster, louder, and more optimized. We learned to perform, to stay busy, and to quietly numb the parts of us that needed depth, reflection, and real presence.

Eleven Dunbar exists for people who feel this loss, not as nostalgia, but as a signal. A sense that something essential about how humans connect was left behind, and it does not have to stay that way.

That is why Eleven Dunbar exists: as a modern third space that brings the best of both worlds together. Human-scale, intentional, and relational.

A place where independence matures into interdependence.

Where real, long-lasting relationships can grow again.

An alive network made of original, expressive individuals, who commit to togetherness and to contributing to something greater through their uniqueness.

A decentralized network of interdependence, where fully alive nodes grow together, and where becoming extraordinary is a shared process.

We no longer ask what the world needs. We do what makes us come alive, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

As more people come alive, the network comes alive. As the network comes alive, society does too.

This community lives by one universal truth: love.

Love is the foundation of collaboration, peace, joy, and creativity. Without love, none of these can exist. And without them, love cannot be expressed.

A node is alive when it can play.

When it follows curiosity. When it helps others, when it expresses originality, and contributes to the shared canvas.

Because play is the soul of creativity, and creativity is the soul of life.

At this point, the node becomes an adaptive generalist: an Adaptivist.

The Adapativist is someone who understands that they rely on other humans, but more about this in part 3 :)

So what does this actually look like in practice?

Eleven Dunbar is built around three spaces:

How We Connect - The Relational Space A trusted inner circle where real relationships form, and ideas, opportunities, and collaborations naturally emerge. You’re placed in a pod of 3–5 members, with private WhatsApp spaces, epic IRL events, and virtual gatherings. And we’re building something a little unusual: a 2D digital world, just for Eleven Dunbar. A pixel space that’s always on, part home base, part playground, part the thing you didn’t know you were missing. No feeds, no algorithms. Just humans, showing up for each other.

How We Play - The Eleventh Space Expanded thinking, renewed curiosity, and the creative edge to reimagine what’s next, through play and storytelling. We experiment with AI for creative expression, run community-led experiences, and occasionally disappear into what we call Imagination Land. We won’t explain what that is yet. You’ll have to show up and find out.

How We Transform - The Integration Space Gain more clarity, presence, and alignment in how you lead, work, and live. Peer-to-peer learning, a marketplace for rituals and routines, weekly AMAs, and workshops that are actually worth your time.

This is not a platform, it’s a place, and places only work when the right people are in them.

In the next post, we look at the kind of person this place is built around. Not a user, not a follower, not a member of a tribe. We call this person The Adaptivist, who is an expert generalist.

We opened a limited number of spots for the next round of members at Eleven Dunbar.

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.

The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.

The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

(We are not looking for people who want to optimize their network. They will be gently redirected.)

If any of this resonates, you can apply here: elevendunbar.com

Love,
Gerhard & Justin

Pasi Joronen, founding member, startup-builder-and-investor-turned-musician-and-family-man, and who fell into boiling mud in Iceland (and lived to laugh about it), joins us for this member episode of How to Unreasonable.

We go deep on rediscovering your creative self after 50, the alter ego you didn’t know you needed, and what it really means to stop doing what others expect of you.

Meet Pasi and his other half, Bruce.

Join Eleven Dunbar as an Early Bird

We only have a limited number of spots in the May cohort.

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.
The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.
The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

If this resonates, apply here: https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

Over the past six months, Justin and I worked on a manifesto for Eleven Dunbar.

It was built through shared laughs, sink bread, long stretches of boredom, at least a dozen donuts, bursts of creativity, and a healthy amount of weirdness.

The way most good things get made.

So, welcome to a four-part series based on the Eleven Dunbar manifesto. We’re going to go on a bit of a journey together, through what’s broken, what we remember, who we’re becoming, and where we’re going.

Fair warning: this first post is the heaviest of the four. We have to name the thing before we can move through it. So bear with us through the diagnosis; the rest of the series gets lighter, more alive, more us. There’s play and laughter on the other side.

Okay. Deep breath. Here we go.

Hope you got your favorite towel somewhere close by.

Engaging a serious tone in 3…2…1…

When we look around, we see a disconnected, fractured, polarized, and lonely society. A society defined by distrust and confusion: a network of people more connected than ever, yet less connected than before - to themselves, and others.

It is worth distinguishing between physical and psychic loneliness. Physical distance has very little to do with it. In our cities, in our homes, in our friend circles, people surround us, and we can still feel lonely. It is the loneliness of not being known, understood, or seen.

The loneliness we are pointing to is psychic; Intellectual, creative, emotional, and spiritual. It is the loneliness of not being known, of not being met. Of moving through your days surrounded by signals and screens and small talk, and rarely encountering another soul who sees you, and who lets you see them.

This is the loneliness Eleven Dunbar is built to answer.

This fracture begins with the individual.

An individual who is confused, emotionally immature, lonely, and disconnected from themselves, and therefore from others and from the world around them. We see rising mental health struggles, rising suicide rates, and a quiet spiritual crisis shaped by the loss of shared purpose, shared stories, comradeship, and community.

In the absence of common meaning, we drift toward zero-sum thinking. We forget how to strive together. We forget how difference can be used to create something larger than ourselves.

This is the legacy of hyper-individualism.

Once, it was a necessary rebellion against suffocating collectives and rigid tribal structures that suppressed individual expression. But the pendulum has swung too far. What we see now is an over-inflated self and a weakened collective. The illusion that we do not rely on one another.

The result is an imbalance, a degradation of the human person, and a forgetting of the soul.

In this state, belonging is replaced by substitutes: consumerism, hyper-productivity, achievement, status, and conditional love. Worth becomes something to earn. Love becomes transactional. Often, what we call “the world’s expectations” are inherited voices: parents, authority figures, unhealed pasts.

Hyper-individualism numbs our deepest longings: connection, service to something greater than ourselves, loving interdependence, and the surrender to a common good.

We sense that something essential is missing from our lives, but many of us no longer know how to name it.

This numbness blocks us from truly feeling. It disconnects us from our hearts, and it buries the inner child along with joy, creativity, and curiosity for life and for others.

Deep inside, we long for unconditional love. Yet we have forgotten a fundamental truth: we can only heal, mature, and grow in relationship. Emotional immaturity leads us to project our inner confusion outward. Instead of taking responsibility for our wounds, we blame others and demand change from the world.

The outcome is often a shallow and unsatisfying life. Some become collectors of pleasant experiences that never accumulate into meaning, because they are not in service of anything larger. Others become insecure overachievers, trying to win love through success. Yet no amount of achievement delivers the belonging they crave.

At the collective level, we see the rise of tribalism: the dark twin of community. Whereas community is grounded in shared humanity, tribalism is built on walls, friend-enemy distinctions, and a “us vs them” warrior mentality. It promises belonging, but cannot deliver it, because it is not rooted in love, comradeship, or common purpose.

Today’s dominant companies and products reflect this inner state.

The largest social platforms promise connection and purpose, yet often deliver addiction, comparison, and distraction. You do not consume social media: it consumes the lonely, confused, and disconnected individual. What remains is a relationship with an algorithm that demands attention, but cannot offer meaning.

These systems are not accidents, but mirrors.

They reflect the inner condition of those who created them, and of the society that sustains them. The result is more noise, more confusion, more disconnection, and less purpose.

Exiting serious tone in 3… 2… 1…

Okay. We made it through the diagnosis. Towel down, shoulders down, you can unclench your jaw now.

This is the world Eleven Dunbar is being built for.

Eleven Dunbar is a modern third space, human-only, playful, a little wicked and weird, intentional, and relational. A place where independence matures into interdependence, and where real, long-lasting relationships grow again.

A community of people who play, create, and connect, who follow curiosity, and help each other come alive, and let what happens between us ripple outward into the world.

This is the first of a four-part series. In the next post, we return to something many of us still carry: the memory of when connection felt different. Slower, more human, and strangely alive.

We opened a limited number of spots for the next round of members at Eleven Dunbar.

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.

The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.

The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

(We are not looking for people who want to optimize their network. They will be gently redirected.)

If any of this resonates, you can apply here: elevendunbar.com

Love,
Gerhard & Justin

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Emily Cabrera, founding member, lawyer-turned-AI-agent-builder, and certified adaptivist, joins us for the first-ever member episode of The Unreasonable Art of Living Eleven Dunbar series. We go deep on the renaissance of the human as ever-evolving adaptivist, why safety is the precondition for creativity, and what it means to stop explaining yourself to the world.

This one’s warm, funny, and genuinely hard to stop listening to.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Join Eleven Dunbar as an Early Bird

We opened 20 spots for the Eleven Dunbar non-founding member round.

We’re looking for the engineer who secretly writes poetry.
The leader/CEO who wants to learn how to play again.
The artist who is curious about how AI can expand their soul’s expression.

Apply here: https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

Not the one we have now, the feed, the algorithm, the carefully curated self, but the earlier one. The one that felt like showing up somewhere. You’d dial in, find a forum or a chat room or a weird little website, and discover that some stranger on the other side of the world was into the exact same obscure thing you were. Not because an algorithm matched you. Because you both wandered there.

The Internet was a place to meet people. It had texture, accidents, and it had the specific electricity of genuine human surprise.

There was a term I came across recently that stopped me: psychic distance.

The idea is that physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. Two people can share a wall and feel miles apart. A stranger on the other side of the world can feel like home. What separates us isn’t geography; it’s something interior. A way of seeing each other. Whether we’re willing actually to show up, or whether we keep each other at arm’s length by treating everything, and everyone, as an object to be optimized, measured, consumed.

The Internet didn’t create psychic distance, but it got very good at scaling it.

Somewhere along the way, we traded that in. Connection became constant but thinner. The platforms got bigger, the feeds got faster, and somewhere in all that optimization, the humans got a little smaller.

That feeling, the loss of it, is actually what Eleven Dunbar is about.

Three months ago, Justin and I put up the bat signal. We wanted to know: are there people out there who, like us, dream of a pocket on the Internet that is human-only? Genuine, playful, creative, and a little wicked.

Not another productivity community, nor a network to grow your brand. Something closer to a treehouse, where you have to know the right knock to get in, and once you’re inside, nobody’s performing.

The response blew us away.

We exceeded our founding member target within the first month. And the two months since have been some of the most energizing of this whole journey, refining the mission and values with those early members, building out the programming and experiences, watching genuinely great people find genuine comfort with each other fast.

That last part still surprises me every time. When curious, weird, real people are in the right space together, trust doesn’t take years. It takes a few good conversations.

Today, we’re opening 20 spots for the first wave of non-founding members.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: the things that made you weird as a kid are the things that can make you great as an adult.

Not the curated, LinkedIn-optimized version of you. The actual you, the one who got way too into something for no good reason, who asked questions that made adults uncomfortable, who made stuff just because making it felt good.

Most of us spent years sanding that down. Learning to be legible, productive, and to appropriate.

11D is partly a reminder that you don’t have to stay sanded down.

The founding members who’ve grown the most in these three months aren’t the ones who came in with the best pitch or the most impressive background. They’re the ones who let themselves be a little weird again. Who followed a thread of curiosity without knowing where it led, who played.

Play is a superpower. Creativity is a superpower. Real human connection is a superpower.

And, we forget this constantly, they’re all the same superpower.

If any of this resonates, come check us out. We’re deliberate about who we bring in, not because we’re exclusive for exclusivity’s sake, but because a human-scale community only works if the people in it actually want to be in it.

Twenty spots, first wave.

👾 Apply here: elevendunbar.com

We’d love to meet you.

Love,
Gerhard & Justin

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

We’re recording from a treehouse in Asheville, where the spiders are bold, the ceilings are enormous, and one shoe may already be lost forever. Between bear sightings, exploding bird-window mysteries, Bojangles fried chicken, and suspiciously meaningful house numbers, things get strange quickly. We also share what’s really happening inside Eleven Dunbar as the next wave of members prepares to join. Somehow this episode is chaos, comfort, and optimism all at once.

Join Eleven Dunbar as an Early Bird

We closed the founding member round and opened *drumroll* the early bird waitlist!

You can sign up here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Hey everyone!

Tomorrow I fly to the USA for 2 months. I also accidentally learned far, far too much about funerals, discovered a new passion for artistic expression, and crowned a new dark chocolate champion.

Enjoy <3

Join Eleven Dunbar as an Early Bird

We closed the founding member round and opened *drumroll* the early bird waitlist!

You can sign up here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

From Eleven Dunbar's one-month survey results to dangerous staircases, barking dogs, and the quiet weirdness of life in the woods, this one drifts between building a community and questioning every sound outside your window.

Somewhere in between, “anything could happen” starts to feel less like a promise and more like a perfectly reasonable warning, especially once you realize that knowing how to behave around black, brown, grizzly, and even polar bears might actually come in handy.

Join Eleven Dunbar as an Early Bird

We closed the founding member round and opened *drumroll* the early bird waitlist!

You can sign up here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Justin moves to bear country, Gerhard counts wrong, and Eleven Dunbar's first month delivers more learnings, surprises, and reasons to be excited than they could have planned for.

Join Eleven Dunbar as an Early Bird

We closed the founding member round and opened *drumroll* the early bird waitlist!

You can sign up here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

The struggle phase in any creative process was never the problem; it was always the point. Also, running shoes are insane now.

Podcast ramble ratio: 60/40 (it was almost too little ramble).

Join Eleven Dunbar as an Early Bird

We closed the founding member round and opened *drumroll* the early bird waitlist! You can sign up here: https://elevendunbar.com/

Somewhere in there: a reworked version of the lumii method for the Eleven Dunbar community, noticing what feels expansive vs. contracting, and a question I keep coming back to that’s quietly reshaping how I move through life.

Join Eleven Dunbar as an Early Bird

We closed the founding member round and opened *drumroll* the early bird waitlist!

You can sign up here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

A solo ramble on jet lag, an unreasonable airline dream, and the discovery that changed how I understand my creativity, vision, and the way I move through life.

Join Eleven Dunbar as an Early Bird

We closed the founding member round and opened *drumroll* the early bird waitlist!

You can sign up here: https://elevendunbar.com/