There’s a specific grief no one warns you about when you choose a creative life. You spend years building the richest, most exciting network you’ll ever have - the people you trained with, created with, stayed up arguing about films with - and then, almost overnight, you lose most of them. Not to any falling-out. To geography. To life. To the simple fact that the thing that brought you together - the course, the school, the summer - ends, and everyone goes home.
If that’s happened to you, you’re not doing anything wrong. It’s built into how this industry works. But it doesn’t have to be permanent.
How creatives actually find each other
For most of history, creative people found each other in places. The cafes of Paris where writers and filmmakers gathered night after night. The bars where a play got planned on a napkin. The workshop, the summer intensive, the evening class. And above all, school - the drama school, the film program, the conservatoire - where for a few years you’re surrounded by exactly the people you’d want to make work with for the rest of your life.
Sociologists have a name for these in-between gathering spots, the ones that aren’t home and aren’t work: third places. They’re where community actually happens. And for creatives, third places have always been where careers begin - where you meet your future collaborators, your future producer, the director who’ll cast you in five years, the co-writer you don’t know you need yet.
The problem is that third places, by their nature, are temporary. The course ends. The summer finishes. The workshop wraps. And then comes the scatter.
The scatter
Train somewhere serious - LAMDA or RADA in London, a top film school anywhere - and look around the room. Your classmates came from Australia, France, Spain, Chile, California, Canada. It’s wonderful and it’s international and it’s the best network you’ll ever have. And in a matter of weeks, it’s going to be spread across ten countries and every time zone on earth.
You go to New York for a summer intensive, meet ten people you’d work with in a heartbeat, and then fly home and try to “stay in touch.” You add each other on Instagram. You connect on LinkedIn, which was never built for this - it’s for CVs and recruiters, not for the slow, ongoing work of making things together. You promise to meet at a festival next year. Sometimes you manage it.
And here’s the part that surprises people: even if you don’t move away, you still lose the network. You stay in your city, and life quietly shrinks your world anyway. You find a partner. You take the job at the theatre. You get busy. The web of people you built dissolves not because anyone chose it, but through distance and time and the sheer friction of keeping up. You keep the handful who matter most, of course. But the wider ecosystem - the loose, generative network that leads to unexpected work - just evaporates.
Third places are moving online, and that’s not a bad thing
Here’s the shift we’re living through. We now spend half our lives on screens. The old physical third places still matter, and they always will - you should still go to the bar, the workshop, the festival, the class, and meet people in the flesh. Nothing replaces that.
But a growing share of where community actually happens has moved online. And creatives already know this instinctively - it’s why people have spent years keeping their networks alive in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and Facebook groups. The instinct is right: if third places are going digital, then creatives deserve a good digital third place - one built for them, not borrowed from tools designed for something else.
Because that’s the real question, isn’t it? Not “how do I meet people” - the workshops and festivals and courses do that beautifully. The question is: what do you do the day after the course finishes? When the intensive ends and everyone flies home, where does that network go? Right now, it goes into a dozen apps that weren’t built to hold it, and slowly fades.
How to actually keep your people
You can’t stop the scatter. But you can build a practice of staying connected through it.
- Have one home for your network, not ten. The reason people lose touch isn’t lack of care - it’s friction. If your classmate in Berlin, the DP you met in New York, and the producer from that festival all live in one place you actually check, they stay reachable. Scattered across five platforms, they vanish.
- Stay loosely visible. You don’t have to keep up deep individual friendships with everyone. You just need a way to remain on each other’s radar, to see what people are making, so that when the right project comes, you know who to call.
- Turn moments into continuity. The festival, the workshop, the course - treat these as the start of a connection, not the whole of it. The value isn’t the week itself; it’s whether the week leads anywhere.
- Protect the in-person, too. Go to the thing. Meet in the flesh when you can. Digital keeps the network alive across distance; in-person deepens it. You need both.
Why we built a home for this
This is close to the heart of why FLIK exists. We watched brilliant, tight-knit creative communities form, and then scatter, over and over, and lose the thing that made them powerful. We wanted to build the place that holds a creative network after the course ends: a professional home that travels with you, so moving cities or graduating doesn’t mean starting from scratch. Somewhere your people stay reachable, where you can see what everyone’s working on, and where a connection made at a festival in one country can turn into a collaboration across three.
Not instead of the bar, the workshop, the drama school. Alongside them. Those are where you find your people. FLIK is where you keep them. Because the network you build in this life is one of the most valuable things you’ll ever have. You shouldn’t have to lose it every time the world moves you somewhere new.