A bunch of new start-ups are hyping the loneliness epidemic and are, of course, happy to offer solutions.
In her own telling, every business Radha Agrawal has ever started or project she has dreamed up or mission she has embarked on was born of a persistent, lifelong desire to belong. She was a partner in Wild, her twin sister’s gluten-free-restaurant chain that became the Central Perk of their wide-ranging friend group.
It was Burning Man camp meets baby Davos meets a pleasure cruise. Agrawal invited entrepreneurs like Ken Howery ; downtown matchmaker Amy Van Doran; Lynne Twist, author of; as well as her former partner Eli Clark-Davis; her friend Timothy Patch; her friend Karine Plantadit, who leads the yoga portion of almost every Daybreaker; her sister Miki; her and Clark-Davis’s 6-year-old daughter. Every day there was morning yoga or a Daybreaker dance session.
“I don’t think we necessarily lost the way to connect. I think it’s more like a system or design problem,” says Maxime Barbier, a 40-year-old Paris-based entrepreneur. Whereas a century ago our network was all close by — our parents, our co-workers — now, though we may have more ability to stay in touch with far-flung friends and family, we’re less likely to have community built into our daily lives. “We don’t go to church on Sunday,” Barbier says. “We don’t go to the football game on Saturday.
“There are two existential threats we’ll experience in our lifetime,” says Nyborg. “One is the climate crisis; the other is loneliness. And I think loneliness is actually the one that we should be more worried about.” When Nyborg left Tinder in 2022, she was so discouraged that she considered leaving tech altogether: “I had been trying to use technology to help people connect and feel joy for over ten years, and I just saw things get worse and worse. Technology was making loneliness worse.
Her dream is that Belong Center will “eradicate loneliness and the shame of actually admitting our loneliness,” Agrawal said with unabashed earnestness. “There used to be a lot of shame around our periods, right? Like, ‘Oh my God, my period. Don’t tell anyone it’s my time of the month.’ Now you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m free-bleeding, whatever,’ because of Thinx.” Agrawal is proud of the revolution Thinx started around period awareness and feels Belong Center can accomplish the same for loneliness.
I don’t belong, therefore dot, dot, dot: I will rape and pillage the planet. I will be violent with guns. I will shoot a school. Somewhere in Agrawal’s explanation of what sets Belong Center apart is the suggestion that the problem is not just about a lack of community centers or churches or dinners at neighbors’ houses. We’ve lost the ability to carry on the kind of conversation that creates real connections with people who see us authentically and whom we see in return. It’s possible we’ve all been lonely zombies, confusing “medium friends” with real, close friends.
It wouldn’t matter if you went to a circle in any one of the 35 states where Belong Center is set to pop up over the next couple of months — wherever you go, the sound, smell , and feel of belonging would be the same. Our community architect was Holly Johnson, 36, a Michigan native, who found her way to the Belong Center through Daybreaker. Per the curriculum, Johnson offered hugs to those who wanted them . For those who didn’t, she thanked them for taking care of themselves by setting boundaries.
If that’s what people want, why not let it organically transmute into whatever connection people desire?
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