"I think I'm going to work in a coffee place for a year."

There is nothing wrong with working in a coffee place.

But hearing several highly educated young professionals say this, and then actually watching them do it, made me pause.

Their stories follow a familiar pattern. They graduate, land a promising first job, work incredibly hard for two, three or four years... and then they leave.

The work is too heavy.
Too target-driven.
Too lonely.
Too political.
Too disconnected from real life.

The coffee place is rarely their dream career.

It represents something else.

Community.
Belonging.
Being part of people's everyday lives.

Many organisations no longer offer that. I'm generalising, of course, but it is a pattern I see again and again.

I was fortunate to start my own career in a fashion company of around 150 people. Later I learned that this number is significant. Around 150 people is often considered the point where everyone can still know one another personally.

What made that company special wasn't the size.

It was the culture.

The owners felt more like mentors than distant managers. Their door was always open. No question was too strange. If you had a good idea, and were willing to take responsibility for making it happen, you were encouraged to try.

I hardly remember endless meetings.

We worked. Hard.

And while working, we laughed. We travelled together. Long dinners kept us connected after the working day had ended.

Was it perfect? Of course not.

There was gossip. There were difficult bosses. There were exhausting travel schedules.

But it felt like a community.

This weekend I read an anthropological study about one of Amsterdam's poorest neighbourhoods.

What struck me wasn't the poverty.

It was the local community centres.

Despite the challenges people faced, many residents possessed something that has become surprisingly rare: a genuine sense of belonging.

But the research revealed something even more important.

Not everyone experienced that sense of community.

The people who did had one thing in common.

They participated.

They volunteered.
They organised activities.
They showed up.
They helped.

They didn't simply enjoy the community.

They helped create it.

That made me reflect on my own life here in my small Italian hamlet.

When I first arrived, I had so many ideas.

A monthly "bring your own food" dinner.

Reactivating the old communal bread oven so we could bake together once a week.

Finding ways to share the fruit from our orchards and gardens.

Opening the old village bar once a week/month, not as a business, but simply as a place where neighbours could meet.

They are all good ideas.

But nothing changes if I keep waiting for someone else to organise them.

The responsibility is mine too.

And perhaps that is exactly what has shifted in many parts of our society.

We say we miss community.

But somewhere along the way, we outsourced the responsibility for creating it.

In organisations, responsibility has increasingly become something different.

We are given targets.
Deadlines.
KPIs.
Assignments.

We feel responsible for delivering them well.

But that isn't the same as taking responsibility for the culture we create together.

The same is true for clubs, neighbourhoods, volunteer organisations, even friendships.

Showing up is valuable.

Initiating is something else.

I don't think the greatest challenge of our time is finding the right job.

I think it is learning how to build lives, organisations and communities in which people feel responsible not only for what they produce, but also for one another.

That feels like a conversation worth having.