The idea of what ‘home’ means is changing rapidly as Gen Z looks for creative solutions to another systemic crisis. 

What about the rats? How do you deal with isolation? Can you still get a takeaway delivered? 

As @thefloatinghome, Adam Lind travels the lengths of Britain’s waterways in a 59ft narrowboat with wife Lauren and dog Shanti, answering questions like this and delivering wholesome content to a combined 800k social followers. They may interview fellow boat-dwellers met along the journey, other times share a recipe for daal learned from family homes while living in India. Their carefree optimism, even when describing the many hardships of an amphibious life, could thaw the most treacherous winter freeze. The public seems to agree. Their most popular TikTok video, a simple run-through of an average day tending their vegetable patch and baking a lemon cake, currently stands at 7 million views. 

In documenting their move to the narrowboat during lockdown, the couple have unexpectedly become figureheads for a surge of interest in life on the waterways: there are now more boats on Britain’s canals than during the industrial revolution, while the number of people living on one in London has doubled since 2012. 

As idyllic as Adam and Lauren’s life seems, their popularity undoubtedly speaks to the wider housing crisis currently being faced in the UK and US, especially in urban areas, where a lack of affordable homes to buy or rent is driving many to explore living options once considered fringe. House prices in the UK have risen by 2,534% in the last 50 years, while salaries have only increased by 1,791% – almost half the pace of growth.

Canal boats aren’t the only response to the housing crisis peaking interest online. Social media is currently awash with creators living in vans, pre-packed homes, tiny spaces and warehouses. One example, North Carolina resident Julie Johnson, bought her mobile home second hand on Facebook Marketplace. Now she clocks up millions of TikTok views answering questions from curious people allured by the affordability. 

What does this tell us about culture? 

Canal boat living has always been about more than pragmatic questions of cost. Those who’ve lived on the waterways talk about a shared sense of community, a closer connection to nature and a renewed sense of gratitude for life’s small luxuries, themes that clearly run through Adam and Lauren’s videos and others like them.

The interesting thing here is how, after existing happily on society’s fringes for decades, a collective crisis is pulling this subculture towards the mainstream, as more people look to the niches for the answers to life’s problems. 

Having been raised during various crises, crashes and challenges, Gen Z are primed to attempt to fix broken systems by rejecting traditional thought. Seen together with the shift to remote working, we could be seeing the early stages of a new approach to housing, less about ownership of ageing, resource-draining buildings, with a greater focus on adaptability and sustainability. 

• WFB (working from barge): every day sees a new headline about the RTO, but flexible working is not only plausible for many industries, but preferable. With a newly mobile class of casual workers, how can your business change how it works with talent and teams to apply a much more fluid approach (I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it).
• New approaches to property: the saying used to go that ‘a man’s home is his castle’, but if they never made it past the moat, how does that affect principles of property ownership, or, away from the rational, how do we think about ‘putting down roots’ and permanence? While we don’t expect the whole world to take to the water, this trend does tell us something about changing beliefs about how a life should be lived. If the pursuit of permanence is in decline, what services and products might your brand introduce to help people where they are today, rather than what they may previously have thought about for tomorrow?

To unlock more insights, email discover@culturelab.co 

^{(Sources: CultureLab CultureIndex, March 2025)}