About - Fieldwork

Hey, my name is Zac, and I’m the author of Fieldwork.

Three years ago, I found myself standing on the edge of a new life, in a city I had never known. I had never lived in a place like this before. I had no friends there. I was alone.

So I started hosting gatherings. Just small things at first. A few strangers in my living room. And over time those small gatherings grew. They became bigger. And bigger still. What started as a few tentative conversations morphed into something else—a community. A place where people could let down their guard, where they could be seen—not for what they did or how much they earned—but for who they really were.

I hosted over 140 events in those first three years. There were big events, with five hundred people. There were small ones, with just a handful of faces. There were dinners, yoga classes, book clubs, workshops—each one a tiny experiment in what it means to connect.

And what I learned, in the midst of all this was: no matter how successful, no matter how accomplished, no matter how happy people seemed on the surface, they, too, felt alone. They, too, were searching for something.

And this is where the tragedy of modernity lies. It has given us so much—comforts, conveniences, control—but it has taken away something far more precious: a sense of purpose, of belonging to something bigger than ourselves. While many of us are well fed and well payed, most of us live every day starving for meaning.

This newsletter, in a way, is an attempt to reckon with that loss. To understand what we’ve let slip through our fingers, and to explore what it might look like to reclaim it.

So, here are a few of my most popular posts, to give you a sense of where this journey might take us.