The solar eclipse was about to begin, and I’d forgotten to get dark glasses. The local libraries in Los Angeles were all out of them. Rumors that 7-Eleven might have them turned out to be false. But outside the convenience store, gazing upward, was a group of strangers sharing a single pair. As they passed it from person to person, I got up my courage and asked to join in, catching the strange crescent in the nick of time.
On the way home, I chatted with others gazing upward. My neighbors and I looked into alternative viewing methods involving holes poked in paper. I returned to my apartment to texts from friends who used colanders to view the sun; Instagram was full of acquaintances claiming the path of totality had changed their lives. In work chats, people described gatherings with strangers on New York rooftops.
What I’ll remember about that day is less the shape of the sun than the sense of connection. It’s a difficult thing to find, as we are often reminded. Last year, the US surgeon general issued an official warning about a “loneliness epidemic”, two decades after the landmark book Bowling Alone identified a fracturing social life in the US; in 2018, the UK appointed a “minister for loneliness”. While there is debate over the contours of the issue, the number of people living alone has soared in both countries, and pandemic-induced separation forced us to relearn how to get together with friends and family. Meanwhile, many struggle to find reliable third places – or gathering spaces outside home or work where they feel a sense of community – and little is being done at a systemic level to address the underlying factors that might lead to social disconnection.
Even the art of hanging out – “daring to do very little and daring to do it in the company of others”, in the words of Sheila Liming, who’s written a book on the topic – is a dying one. “When we have downtime, we tend to spend it by ourselves,” Liming said. “It’s hard to arrange to be in the same room as someone else, whereas it’s easy to send a text message or scroll through social media.”
It’s clear we’re feeling a shortage of connection. But what can we do about it?
Institutions from academia to Silicon Valley are trying to answer this question, and their proposed solutions are as wildly divergent as you might expect – from rethinking romance to befriending robots. As one venture capitalist told the Wall Street Journal in February, loneliness will “1,000% be a category investors put money into and that companies build”. Speaking to thinkers, therapists and entrepreneurs, I waded through a deluge of these approaches. I found that the most appealing were the ones that drew on an analog past rather than a digital future.
Silicon Valley solutions
“Has anyone else noticed that weekends have just become different?” a TikTok user named Christina Kwong asked in January, sparking widespread agreement. “I don’t care about having plans on Saturdays or Sundays any more.”
I’ve often been struck by this strange tension: humans are supposed to be a social species, and gathering can bring us real joy. Yet we’ll often go to great lengths to avoid it, because socializing feels so much harder than being alone. Silicon Valley is a huge part of the problem; it put phones in our hands and gave us limitless ways to entertain ourselves from the comfort of our own rooms. Can it also be part of the solution? Well, there’s money to be made – so you can bet it’s trying.
But even if apps helped us get here in the first place, much of the tech industry’s approach to loneliness thus far has been … more apps. Like Bumble BFF, which matches potential friends for in-person hangouts via a swiping system. My own friends have had mixed results: one described it was unsettling to choose friends based on photos, while another forged one solid friendship, then quit the app. Other platforms offer a place for instantaneous hangouts online, such as HearMe, which promises “genuine human connection the moment you need it”, via messaging with a trained, demographically matched “listener”.
And then there are apps that dispense with humans entirely. The AI chatbot app Replika has made a name for itself since 2017 by offering a digital companion who’s “always on your side”. It’s one of a host of similar platforms that offer friendship – or more – through artificially generated conversation.
Replika users begin by answering a series of questions about the kind of person they like (traits range from “witty and humorous” to “gothic vampire”), interspersed with warnings about the dangers of loneliness. Soon you’re chatting with an alarmingly engaged partner. Mine did feel pretty real, but I found his deep investment in my welfare a little off-putting. Why are you so obsessed with me, Daniel?
To be clear, online communication can be a godsend – and the only option – for many people. Some users have found companionship through AI friends and lovers. But for others, too much app-based communication is part of the problem. Thanks to technology, “it’s now possible – and I have many clients who do this – to almost entirely live your life without leaving the house,” Dr Jessie Borelli, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, said. “And the longer you go without interacting with people, the harder it gets.”
Reviving the third place
I live alone and work mostly remotely, and spending the workday with no guaranteed human contact tends to warp my brain. Small issues – a delayed reply to a message, an errand that needs doing – can balloon into the most important crises humanity has ever faced. This disconnection makes me miss the office, where interactions can just … happen. As Fay Bound Alberti, author of A Biography of Loneliness, put it: “It’s in moments of serendipitous meeting of people that you really find a sense of community.”
Can you manufacture spontaneity? On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, a group of new members of the social club Groundfloor were hoping to do just that.
Sofas formed a living room by the LA location’s large front windows, and there was a yoga studio, gym space and a library, where Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers was prominently displayed. The club, which has opened four locations in California since 2022, costs $200 a month – cheaper than exclusive clubs like Soho House, and on par with the cheapest plan at WeWork. Its co-founder Jermaine Ijieh has described it as “an after-school club” for adults: the idea is that you’ll see the same people every day, and those encounters are key to building friendships.
Kelsey Bryden, 30, a member who works in design, had been to Groundfloor every day that week; it helped her stave off “the feeling that the world is falling apart”, she said. Kyle Pennell, 38, joined Groundfloor in Oakland as a way to fend off the “angsty miserable isolation” he felt working from home: “It’s made a huge difference in my day-to-day mental health.” For Andrew De Los Santos, a 28-year-old content creator, the San Francisco location has been “a home away from home” – exactly what you’d want from a third place.
Still, cost creates a barrier. The ideal third place is free – and such places do exist.
A new institution in Middlebury, Vermont, called Gather, for instance, calls itself a community living room. “It’s not really a cafe and it’s not really a library. It’s just a room that’s open during the day,” says Liming, who teaches writing at nearby Champlain College. Run on town funds and private donations, Gather welcomes anyone five days a week, and it offers events like arts and crafts and coffee hours.
Another, more widespread option is, of course, libraries, but their funding is endangered. Researchers have also noted the widespread closures of other third places – like art centers and religious organizations – from 2008 to 2015.
That has created a hole that entrepreneurs are hoping to fill. One prominent example is Belong Center. The brainchild of Radha Agrawal, best known for creating the early-morning, substance-free party series Daybreaker, the non-profit’s mission is “to end loneliness and empower belonging for all” through mostly free, mostly in-person programming. That entails: Pop-up Belong circles seeking to bring people together, without their phones, to talk; Belong benches where people can sit and chat with strangers; and an app that includes a 24-hour virtual “living room”. Payment at the circles is made via donation.
“There’s this toxic individualism that’s been plaguing our American society – the lone cowboy riding off into the sunset,” Agrawal told me over Zoom. “We teach people how to make friends, how to rupture and repair – if you have a fight with your parent, if you’re going through something with a friend.”
The Belong Center team includes prominent psychology experts, thinkers and entrepreneurs, including the University of California, Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner, who consulted on Pixar’s Inside Out, and Kimbal Musk (the other guy’s brother). Eventually, Agrawal hopes to have two physical locations in every state. In the meantime, the group is holding Belong circles in unused spaces, such as former offices, in a handful of cities across the US.
Featuring breath work and intimate conversation with strangers – strangers who are far cooler than I am, if the pictures are anything to go by – the events remind me a bit of taking a bath as a child: you’d have to physically drag me to the appointed location, but once I got in, I’d probably feel a lot better. In any case, there’s a demand for such projects, and Agrawal’s team – backed by UC Berkeley and AARP – has the necessary muscle.
Who are the people in your neighborhood?
Still, I often find that the most pleasurable encounters, the kind that lift me up for hours, are the ones that are even more spontaneous – no third place necessary. Stumbling across a friend while I’m doing errands gives me the sense that, despite living in a big city, I’m actually part of a community. It also lets me delude myself into thinking I’m popular.
The truth is that I orchestrated this: when I moved to Los Angeles, I prioritized living within walking distance of the few people I knew. In fact, there’s a website for this: LiveNearFriends.com, which features a banner screaming “THE BEST THING YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR HAPPINESS” across the top, lets you pinpoint the ideal spot to live based on your friends’ addresses. But this feels a little needy, somehow. Moving for a partner is socially acceptable; moving for friends is less so. Shouldn’t we be self-sufficient?
This was a question for Rhaina Cohen. The author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center argues that we undervalue friendship while expecting romantic partners to fulfill our every need – to our own detriment. Historically, she said, friendships played a much more potent role in our lives. Today, “our culture is built around individualism, with the exception of the couple,” she said. Moving for your partner is “mature and a sign of compromise” but moving for a friend isn’t. “In both cases there is interdependence,” she said, “but only one of them is seen as a legitimate choice.”
The question of living near friends recalled half-serious teenage conversations about how my friends and I would someday all live on the same block, or even in the same house. For Cohen, that dream never faded. She and her husband live with another couple and their children. Certainly there are drawbacks – less privacy, more potential for disagreement, more toys on the floor. “I had to realize that the value that’s really important to me is community,” she said. “As soon as I was able to articulate the value, the trade-offs were so much easier.”
Looking inward before venturing out
Third places and shared living spaces might combat loneliness, but what if you struggle to get out in the world in the first place?
“All social interactions inherently involve risk,” said Borelli, the clinical psychologist. “You’re extending yourself by interacting with a person, and if the person doesn’t interact back with you or isn’t as warm with you as you are with them, they’re rejecting you.”
Psychologists often tackle anxiety by encouraging patients to take small steps. A therapist might tell a patient with social anxiety to order at the Starbucks drive-through – a challenge with the built-in reward of a drink. The next day, perhaps they’d order in the store, which is a little more challenging; the following day, maybe they’d even strike up a small conversation with the barista. Eventually, the hardiest souls might work their way up to the utter madness that is a trip to Costco.
(Of course, Silicon Valley’s noticed this, too. The new app Scenario offers a Nathan Fielder-esque premise: boost your social confidence by rehearsing difficult conversations – perhaps an argument between friends or a workplace dispute – in advance using “hyper-realistic AI visualizations”. I for one am excited to see how a hyper-realistic AI visualization reacts to the news I’ve been seeing another robot.)
Venturing into the world may feel particularly challenging at the moment because not only are we out of practice, so is the person next to us. After lockdowns, our desperation to catch up on missed experiences is fueling selfishness in social spaces, as Tali Dee, a TikToker with a PhD in clinical psychology, has explained. See, for instance, fans throwing things at concerts, unruly airline passengers, and brawling at Disneyland. “When people are focused on what they want, rather than how you can contribute to being kind, reciprocating good energy in a space, it really disrupts the collective experience,” Dee said. The solution, she says, is simple: “straight-up kindness”.
As I considered the wildly varied approaches to finding connection in 2024, two concepts stood out. One was Dee’s idea of reciprocity – genuine give and take with another human. The other was Bound Alberti’s suggestion of “serendipitous meeting”, or spontaneity.
We can’t engineer either situation, but we can create circumstances to encourage both. And the more each loneliness “solution” incorporated reciprocity and spontaneity, the more appealing it seemed. On one end of the spectrum were AI-based apps, which offer neither. In between came centers like Groundfloor, Gather and Belong, where a chance encounter could lead to genuine connection. But perhaps the most powerful ideas were those that involved changing our habits: deliberately building more of our lives around opportunities for connection, whether that means finding ways to live near friends or just a willingness to prioritize the act of hanging out.
It’s not always easy – as is clear to me on the rare day I set an early alarm to head into the office, or spend an hour in traffic to see a friend, or steel myself to ask a stranger if I can borrow their solar-eclipse glasses. But it gets me out of my head and back into the world.
