There’s a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. You feel it after a week of back-to-back calls, a phone that never stops buzzing, and an evening spent scrolling through everyone else’s highlight reel. You’re surrounded by notifications, and somehow you’ve never felt more alone.
Hannah Corbett noticed it—and decided to build the antidote. Tucked onto Main Street in Reading, her social club in Massachusetts, Presence&Co, is a well-being-focused workspace, community, and gathering place with a refreshingly simple mission: less scrolling, more living, in real life.
The Problem Hiding Behind Your Screen
Ask Hannah why a place like Presence&Co needs to exist, and she’ll give it to you straight—with a laugh.
“If you are waiting for someone to break into your house and make friends with you on your couch, those are not your friends,” she says. “And you don’t want them to be your friends.”
Her point lands because we all recognize the pattern. As Hannah describes it, we’ve quietly engineered the friction out of daily life. Groceries arrive in the trunk of the car. The hardware-store visit that used to come with a laugh and a little advice has been replaced by an online order and a how-to video. Even the delivery driver texts a photo instead of knocking. Convenient? Absolutely. But in Hannah’s view, every small transaction we automate is a conversation we no longer have.
“We’re just pulling out the human interactions,” she says. And the cost of that, she believes, is showing up as something bigger: burnout. “The underlying feeling behind burnout is loneliness—because you think no one understands what you’re going through.”
Rediscovering the “Third Space”
The idea at the heart of Presence&Co is one Hannah returns to often: the “third space.” It’s a concept sociologists have long described—your first place is home, your second is work, and your third is where you go to find community. For generations, Hannah notes, that third place was a bar, a bowling league, a church hall, a neighbor’s front porch.
Many of those spaces have quietly faded. And what’s filled the gap—the phone in our pocket—can make the loneliness worse. Hannah describes the phone as a “shield” we hide behind: the thing we pull out at a networking event so we look busy instead of approachable, the device we reach for the moment a conversation gets a little vulnerable.
“Discomfort is where the growth happens,” she says. So at Presence&Co, phones go away. It’s a small rule with an outsized effect. Shoulders drop. Eye contact returns. Conversations go deeper than the same handful of questions everyone recycles at a cocktail party.
A Space Built for the Present Moment
Step inside the Reading space and you’ll find it’s genuinely multi-purpose. There’s co-working and private offices for the workday, a bright lobby made for lingering, and flexible rooms that can shift into settings for classes, workshops, and gatherings. The space is also available to rent for parties, business off-sites and professional gatherings.
But the real draw, Hannah says, is what happens when people simply stay. Recent listings on the club’s calendar have ranged from dance fitness and mahjong nights to craft evenings and seasonal socials—low-pressure, in-person, come-as-you-are events designed to get you out of the house and into the room.
Hannah’s favorite moments aren’t the flashy ones. They’re the afternoons when someone arrives wound tight and, hours later, realizes they’ve unclenched.
“One woman came in very excited but also really nervous—her shoulders were up at her ears,” Hannah recalls. “Over the course of the afternoon, sitting in the living room, talking and laughing, her shoulders just went down. Finally she said, ‘I don’t think I’ve been this relaxed in a long time.’ That’s what embodiment feels like. That’s what it feels like to be safe in your body.”
Who It’s For
Presence&Co welcomes everyone, but Hannah is especially focused on a group she feels the culture has overlooked: the working professionals in the thick of it. The people building careers and juggling life, who are starting to notice that their days feel a little less full than they look on Instagram.
“That’s when we need to come back to the present moment,” she says. “To give ourselves that grace. That, to me, is self-care.”
According to Hannah, the appeal reaches well beyond Reading, drawing guests from surrounding towns and even southern New Hampshire—some traveling more than an hour for a single event.
Why Showing Up Matters
Hannah grounds the whole philosophy in research on connection. She points to Harvard’s long-running study on happiness, which she says has repeatedly found that strong social relationships are among the biggest predictors of a long, healthy life. And meaningful friendship, she notes, takes real time—which is exactly why one-off events, lovely as they are, rarely turn into lasting bonds. Return to the same space, see the same faces, and connection has room to deepen. That’s the thinking behind the club’s membership, the Presence Pass.
“You want to be happy?” Hannah says. “Go outside your house, meet some people, make some friends. Keep doing that until you are. It’s not that hard.”
In a world sprinting toward ever more automation, that might be the most quietly radical idea of all: choosing to take up space in your own community, in person, with your whole imperfect self.
As Hannah puts it: “We can pull the humanness out of every interaction, or we can decide to be members of our communities in a way that’s real and tangible and present.”
It’s a mission that fits right in with the communities we cover across the North of Boston area—and one more reason to close the laptop and show up.
Visit Presence&Co
Presence&Co is located at 557 Main Street, Reading, MA 01867, offering co-working, private offices, event rentals, and a full calendar of local events. To see what’s coming up or learn about the Presence Pass, visit presenceandco.net.
Less scrolling. More living. In real life.
Communities we cover across the North of Boston area” →Communities
