6 min readContrary to what it looks like from the outside, the world today is more disconnected than it has ever been. In 2023, the US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic, a crisis comparable in mortality risk to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The irony is that this happened at the peak of human connectivity. We have never had more ways to reach each other. And yet, we have never been more alone.
As someone born in 2001, I’m as Gen Z as it gets. I watched in awe as we grew up in a world with technology by our sides. And honestly, it was great. It let us stay in touch with friends and family hundreds or thousands of miles away through phone calls, texts and video calls that collapsed geography. Social media came along and enhanced this further, allowing us not only to hear what others were doing but to finally see it. It also broke the friends-and-family limitation entirely. Suddenly you could find your people: people who shared your obscure interests, your politics and your humour, even if you would never have crossed paths with them otherwise. For a lot of people, especially those who felt like outsiders where they lived or were too afraid to be themselves, this was genuinely life-changing.
But somewhere along the line, a realisation was made. Connection wasn’t the product. Connection was never going to be the product. The real money was in attention, in keeping eyes on screens for as long as possible and selling that time to advertisers. Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s founding presidents, admitted as much in 2017, saying the platform was deliberately built to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology” and to consume as much of your time and conscious attention as it possibly could. The business model didn’t just drift in this direction. It was a meticulous, calculated choice.
And it fucking worked. Look around you: on a train, in a café, in any public space. What do you see? People glued to their phones. I’m writing this on a train, facing a couple who, for the last three hours, have both sat in silence scrolling on their phones. The strategy of locking people to their devices succeeded beyond anything its architects could have publicly admitted to hoping for.
But what’s concerning is that the people you see out in public aren’t even the ones struggling most. There’s a loneliness epidemic running beneath the surface. A growing body of research points to Gen Z as the most affected, a generation that came of age with a smartphone already in hand, for whom the critical developmental window between twelve and eighteen happened on a screen. Psychologist Jean Twenge, who has tracked generational wellbeing data for decades, found that rates of loneliness, anxiety and depression among teenagers began climbing sharply around 2012, the year smartphone ownership crossed 50% among adolescents in the US.
The same social media that once got people excited about connecting with the world has now got them staring at screens inside their rooms. And it isn’t just social media. The same convenience economy that promised to make life easier (food, clothes, furniture, groceries and medicine delivered to your door) removed the last practical reasons many people had to leave the house. When you combine the fact that your social, material and survival needs can be met from a sofa with the reality that going out has never been more expensive, you have the conditions for a generation that retreats inward by default rather than by choice.
But the people still yearn for something real. The desire for community isn’t a preference. It’s genetic. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg spent decades documenting the importance of what he called “third places”: spaces that are neither home nor work, where community forms naturally, such as pubs, barbershops, town squares and libraries. Their decline, he argued, was one of the quiet catastrophes of modern life. And people feel that absence even if they can’t name it.
Job fairs are a striking example. Any reasonable person would have assumed that LinkedIn and one-click applications would have killed them entirely. Instead, they’re seeing a resurgence. Anti-dating-app events are another: people fed up with having their entire worth reduced to a couple of photos and some prompts. A human being is vastly more than what any profile can capture, and no one has yet built something good enough to change that. People just want to feel seen. Whether they’re looking for a partner, a job, or a friend, the need underneath is the same.
You could argue that this reversal isn’t new, that people have been complaining about phone zombies and the death of real connection for years, and yet here we still are. That’s fair. But I think something has shifted. A catalyst has emerged that changes the trajectory from here. AI is rewriting the internet, and the most significant damage is happening, again, to the social layer. For most of the internet’s history, there was a reasonable assumption that what you encountered online (a post, a comment, a photo, an account) was made by a human. That assumption is now gone. With the proliferation of AI-generated content, synthetic media and bot accounts operating at scale, the internet that once served as a refuge, a place to find real connection when the physical world felt closed off, is losing the one thing that made it valuable. The human on the other side.
So if the internet is filled with slop, where do we go? The natural first step feels like a resurgence in real-life events: hobby classes, walking groups, socials for strangers. And to be fair, the desire is clearly there. Living in London, I’m surrounded by options. If anything, the sheer volume of things to do creates its own paralysis.
But when I actually show up, something keeps going wrong, and it isn’t the effort or the intention. I went to a meetup for 20–35-year-olds and was by far the youngest person in the room, surrounded by people at a completely different life stage. I tried blind dating events, more than once, and couldn’t find a single person I genuinely clicked with. Each time, I left feeling more aware of the gap than before. And that kept nagging at me, because I don’t think the desire to connect was missing in me or anyone else.
Most of these events are essentially the same bet: put enough people in a room and hope chemistry does the rest. But a room full of variety isn’t the same as a room full of possibility. You still have to find your signal in the noise, and the event gives you nothing to help with that. My suspicion is that the people I’d actually have something real with were probably in some of those rooms. I just never found them. The whole thing felt like a game of chance with odds that weren’t particularly good. It made me wonder whether the problem isn’t getting people together at all. It’s that we still have no good mechanism for finding the right people once we’re there.
So I kept asking myself: what if we could remove that game of chance? What if, in a crowded room of strangers, you already knew who you should talk to? What if all you had to do was show up?
I don’t have all the answers. But I’ve been obsessed enough with the question that I’ve started trying to build one. I’m working on something early-stage to take the game of chance out of it. I’m not ready to say much more than that yet, because honestly, it’s still taking shape.
But if you read this and felt something, whether it’s the couple on the train, the meetup you left early, or just a general sense that something about all of this is broken and fixable, I’d genuinely love to talk. Not to pitch you anything. Just to hear whether your experience mirrors mine, and whether the thing I’m building might be worth building.
You can reach me at [email protected]