Loneliness isn’t just a lingering by-product of COVID lockdowns—it’s a public health crisis. The impacts of social isolation are said to be as detrimental to human health as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, according to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Loneliness can increase the risk of heart disease and strokes by roughly 30%, and dementia by about 50%.
In some ways, we’ve never been more connected thanks to online networks. Yet for many people, social media has fueled perceptions that others are living fuller, more vibrant lives in comparison to their own. Some have found that online interactions pale in comparison to in-person hang outs. Champagne sales are down, raising questions of whether party culture is dead. Overall, the downtrend of socialization in the U.S. paints a pretty bleak picture.
Companies have taken this public health diagnosis as a cue to step in, fill those cracks in our social fabric, and develop a cure for loneliness. At the Fast Company Grill at SXSW this month, business leaders shared how their companies are encouraging people to leverage online interfaces to—counterintuitively—get offline, or filling gaps in the market with products that account for new social trends and behaviors, like the sober curious movement.
Cultivating community at all life stages
When Andy Dunn moved to Chicago a few years ago to be closer to his family, he found it difficult to forge new friendships, joking that all he did was just “parent and work.”
This lack of infrastructure around simply finding things to do—and people to do them with—inspired him to create Pie, a social app aiming to combat social isolation.
Dunn, who is also the founder of clothing company Bonobos, said that between moving cities, switching jobs, marriage, starting a family, and other milestones, he estimates people go through anywhere from eight to 15 major life events that may upend their friend groups. This can leave people “at an inflection point where you have more social capacity than you have social opportunity.”
Pie creates those opportunities by using AI to bring together groups of six people—which the app takes its name from, as there are usually six slices in a pie—and help them discover events and activities they share a mutual interest in attending.
It’s led to lasting connections, Dunn said, because Pie takes the two ingredients necessary to forming meaningful friendships, “repeated social collision in a group setting, and then mutual disclosure of vulnerable information,” and uses an easily accessible platform to facilitate these interactions.
Developing the perfect recipe for get togethers
Melanie Masarin, CEO and founder of the nonalcoholic aperitif brand Ghia, built her company after she quit drinking.
“I stopped drinking for no particular reason, which is an important distinction. I wasn’t sick, I wasn’t pregnant, I just felt better without it,” she explained. “I was at a point in time where I hosted a lot. I always had my friends over for dinner, and I was constantly being questioned for why I wasn’t drinking. And I was like, ‘There’s more people in my apartment than there are chairs, and I cooked for everyone, and I feel so isolated because I’m not partaking in a social occasion.’”
Masarin says she became “obsessed” with the idea of creating a better-for-you drink that provided the same experience of imbibing alcohol. It’s an offering that’s struck a chord with Gen Z consumers in particular, who are drinking alcohol at far lower rates than previous generations but still want the fun of going out.
She pointed out that a number of cultures have long decentered alcohol in their social gatherings—for example, many Muslims choose not to drink—and that part of Ghia’s success has been reframing its customers as the “hero,” rather than its products.
“All of our products are just a catalyst for people coming together. They’re not necessarily trying to be the center of attention,” she said. “We’ve been conditioned to think that alcohol is the life of the party, and actually our customer is the life of the party.”
Masarin also noted that Ghia is not a product purely for people interested in practicing sobriety. Rather, its demand reflects the downward trend in alcohol consumption fueled by a desire for moderation that came out of the COVID-19 pandemic. She mentioned that 92% of Ghia drinkers also consume alcohol.
Preventing missed connections
Ev Williams, creator of the private social network Mozi and founder of Twitter, Medium, and Blogger, experienced a rude awakening in the years after lockdown ended.
“I’d spent my life building startups, mostly on the information and tech side. And around my 50th birthday I actually started to shift my priorities and realized that I had underinvested in relationships,” he said. “The best source of information I had was my contacts app, which [for most people] is full of outdated and incomplete information.”
Williams found himself wanting to start at the most basic level: understanding who his friends were and where they were located. That desire led to Mozi, which syncs with a user’s contacts app and allows them to share their location or plans with a curated network of individuals.
Mozi works best for people who travel often and may not realize when they’re overlapping with friends. Users are able to post the dates they’re traveling to a city or an event they’re planning to attend, as well as solicit travel advice from mutuals. Williams suggested the app can also take away some of the awkwardness that comes with asking someone you may not feel as close to yet to do something with you.
“If you were to individually text [a friend of a friend], you would make yourself vulnerable,” he said. “But if you were to say, ‘Oh, I’m going to this show,’ or ‘I’m going to this event and I’m happy for these people to see that I’m going to this and join me there,’ because it’s a public thing, it’s not in [their] house, it’s not risky.”
Williams is excited to see that using technology to facilitate offline interactions has become more mainstream.
“I love that there’s a new generation of social products that are actually social, and what we call social media is actually just media—and it’s been becoming media for a long time,” he said. “We’re less kidding ourselves that [social media] is where people connect. It’s not.”
