Loneliness affects 1 in 2 Americans and causes profoundly negative health outcomes. To turn the tide, we need to get people out of the house and into the real world with technology built to facilitate meaningful in-person interactions.
"The key is to find ways in which Internet technology can reinforce—rather than supplant— place-based, face-to-face, enduring social networks."
-Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
I’ve struggled with loneliness at various stages in my adult life: moving to a new city, trying to find groups that shared my interests, and the dark days where I just didn’t get enough facetime with other humans.
Each brush with loneliness led me back to the same questions: Why is it so hard to make friends in a new place? Why does it seem to entirely depend on who I already know? And once I have them, why does it feel so draining to make plans?
A year ago, I set out on a mission to answer these questions and perhaps most importantly, “What life could look like if these problems were solved?”
The end of loneliness
You walk out the door and a car is waiting to bring you to your favorite restaurant. You pull up to the curb and beam at 4 of your closest friends— and nobody had to lift a finger to make it happen.
Later, you get a text that one of your favorite artists has a show next week. None of your friends are free, but there’s a new high compatibility group going that wants you to come along.
You’re about to head home when you see that one of your new friends from volunteering is looking for a pickleball partner this Saturday. Want to join?
You look around the table at your friends and realize your social calendar has never felt so right—and you’ve never been so happy.
You live in a world where all your social needs are completely taken care of. Your communities support you, you have a stimulating mix of light and deep interactions, and there’s a perfect balance of new and continued relationships in your life.
You no longer have to think about:
who you want to see
when you want to see them
what you want to do
where you want to go
how to get everyone together
All you need to do is show up.
It sounds impossible, but this is what we’re building at Culture.
What’s the current state of loneliness?
We live in the age of ‘social’ media and yet we find ourselves more isolated than ever before. There’s a pervasive and growing sense of loneliness that’s been gnawing at our social connections for years. I had felt this in my own life, but I didn’t understand how many other people were affected until I read the Surgeon General’s Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation Advisory.
As I noted before, 1 in 2 Americans are lonely, but this trend is particularly pronounced in the younger generations:
80% of young adults age 18–24 reported “feeling lonely”
Over 40% of adults age 18–35 reported “always feeling left out”
The powerful link between loneliness and mental health has created a cascade of issues throughout society. One of the most frightening is the rapidly rising rates of depressed young adults, who should be experiencing the most social period in their entire life (see below).
In the CDC's youth risk assessment (17,508 respondants across 152 schools), 42% of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. 22% had seriously contemplated suicide. This is a life-or-death problem that we can’t afford to ignore.
“Social isolation is arguably the strongest and most reliable predictor of suicidal ideation, attempts, and lethal suicidal behavior among samples varying in age, nationality, and clinical severity.”
-A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of a Decade of Cross-National Research
What are the effects of loneliness?
Loneliness isn’t just bad for your mental health—it can damage your body, too.
Research has shown that social isolation:
“is as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day”
“is associated with a 29% increase in the risk of heart disease”
“can increase the risk of developing dementia by approximately 50% in older adults”
Over four decades of research has produced robust evidence that lacking social connection — and in particular, scoring high on measures of social isolation — is associated with a significantly increased risk for early death from all causes.” 2020 Consensus Study Report, National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine
The good news is that the reverse is also true. Research has shown that social connectivity is incredibly good for you. It might not let you live forever, but it can get you close.
An in-depth study of the behavioral patterns, diets, environments, etc. of the world’s Blue Zones (places where people frequently live 100+ years) found that their deep connection to local communities directly contributed to longevity and positive health outcomes.
Researchers from Harvard had similar findings in a long-term study of men that followed participants from college to their passing 8 decades later. They found that participants’ relationships with their community, family, and friends were the greatest predictor of physical health outcomes in the long term.
“When we gathered together everything we knew about them about at age 50, it wasn’t their middle-age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.”
- Robert J. Waldinger, M.D., Director of the Harvard 2nd Generation Study
What is loneliness and what causes it?
Loneliness is social hunger. It’s the distressing mental experience that occurs when people’s social needs aren’t being met. Social isolation and insufficient relationships (in terms of both quantity and quality) are the most common causes.
Let's look at how we got here:
Declining close relationships — the number of Americans with less than 3 close friends rose from 27% in 1990 to 49% in 2021, which makes perfect sense considering Americans went from spending an average of 7 hours per week with their friends in 2003 to 4 hours per week in 2019. That’s 150+ lost hours of socialization per year, or a month of socializing if it was your full time job. Post-COVID, it’s only gotten worse.
Rising digital media consumption — Americans spend an average of 6 hours a day consuming digital media (e.g., “social” media, Netflix, games,). That’s almost half of the time we spend awake.
In a 2018 study cited by the surgeon general, 2 of the top 3 predictors of greater loneliness were “expressing worry about social media replacing time that could be spent with others”, and “daily use of Twitter.”
Collapsing social infrastructure — in the 1960s and 1970s, social clubs, leagues, volunteer organizations, churches, etc. helped facilitate community cohesion by giving people a structural (consistent, enduring, organized) reason to interact.
When work shifted to become the focus of American life in the 1980s and 1990s led to a rapid decline in social organization membership as more people built their social circles around their jobs.
Today, the post-COVID remote work era has made socializing on the job harder than ever.
Outside of work, historically weak social institutions are struggling to adapt to the needs of new generations.
These causes are all related.
We spend less time investing in our relationships, fueling feelings of social isolation that push us back to the quick dopamine hit of digital media. With such effortless entertainment in your pocket, the energy required to make plans is higher than ever because the alternative is so easy.
The result is that social inertia is at an all time high: a person at rest stays at rest until acted upon by an outside force.
What are some potential solutions?
Lower the effort required to socialize in person. With demanding work / school schedules, dozens of communication channels, and countless activity options, just deciding when and where to interact can kill plans in action. Removing coordination and planning from the equation are necessary to facilitate more socializing. In the past, the planned gatherings of social organizations and open gathering points made these problems less significant.
Encourage participation in third spaces. The third space is a place distinct from home (first) and work (second) where people congregate and interact. It's important for people to have a place to consistently exchange ideas, meet new people, and spend time socializing away from family / work. These can be interest groups, sports leagues, performance spaces, and the like. There is discussion of digital forums providing a new third space, but the only proven method for alleviating loneliness is direct, in-person interaction.
Use technology to bring new people together. We have data. Lots of it. But we just use it to push ads and content. Permissioned, ethical use of data to intelligently connect people to social institutions, activities, groups, and other individuals should be the gold standard of new social applications. We must use the breakthrough technology at our disposal to solve the loneliness problem that’s been building for generations.
How my cofounder and I are trying to solve this problem:
We're building a personal social assistant to help coordinate all your social plans. Remember that time you were sitting on the couch, thought of someone you wanted to get dinner with, sent a text, then forgot to respond? Us too. Remember that time you asked the group chat when they were free to do something and no one responded? Us too.
Planning is rough, so we're building ‘someone’ to handle it just for you. You can send a text to your assistant and they'll handle the reach out, follow up, and send reminders to your friends.
We're adding a network of organizations and activities to connect people. I’ve had multiple instances where I wanted to get out of the house and do something, but I got stuck trying to figure out what to do. We’re building a platform that has plans and groups in one platform with an understanding of what you like and when you’re free. The goal is to reinforce existing social groups and help people build new ones organically.
We’re trying to help compatible people meet at the right time in the right place. Want to play pickleball but can’t find a friend that's free? Trying to go to a concert but don't have a group? It’s 2023 and that shouldn't still be happening, so we’re working to build the infrastructure to bring new people together. We’re asking “how can we make an educated guess on who would get along with who, doing what?”
The future of social is tech-enabled: we fundamentally believe socializing should happen in the real world, and we plan to support it with digital tools.
A few ways you can help us:
Connecting us with interesting people: my cofounder and I are early stage, so we’d love to meet with any advisors, experts, mentors, and investors interested in this problem and consumer tech more broadly
Talking about your experience: as we dive deeper into this problem, we’d love to get more perspectives and data points. If you have something you want to share or just want to learn more about our concept, let’s chat
Sending us any content you’ve found helpful: as we continue to dive deeper into the space, any and all book / article / blog / video recommendations are welcome.
And more generally:
Be neighborly. Smiling at people on the street seems odd, but it matters. If everyone who reads this decides to get involved in their local communities, attempt one random act of kindness, and have a conversation in line instead of scrolling through their phone, loneliness gets that much smaller.
Forward together.