No Lonely People By 2030
Fighting the Loneliness Epidemic By Destigmatizing Digital Friend-Making.
The last two years have been the loneliest I’ve ever felt.
In 2018, I decided to leave my job as a senior executive in tech, along with my community of friends to move to New York City to complete my Masters in Clinical and Counseling Psychology. At the same time, I was taking my international retreat company, to the next level by trying to launch the largest women’s festival in Canada.
I landed in New York and hit the ground running. I spent 75% of my time alone writing essays all day, having zoom meetings all evening, and working all night until 3 or 4 AM. At first, I didn’t notice the effects this was having on my life, but after a few months, I started to feel a deep sense of loneliness and began to develop a whole host of mental health challenges.
I experienced intense bouts of anxiety and self-doubt along with debilitating sleeplessness, all of which perpetuated the development of unhealthy habits like binge-watching Netflix and drinking too much wine to try and turn my brain off. I thought that my accomplishments would replace my need for meaningful relationships, but I was absolutely wrong.
I spent my whole time in New York prioritizing my to-do list instead of prioritizing my friendships and well-being, and I ended up terribly damaging both. I learned through this experience, that I saw friendships as a luxury, but in truth, they are an absolute necessity.
As we get older, most of the systems that help us to build and maintain friendships disappear. Our days become filled with work, we devote our lives to our families, our practical responsibilities and forming new friends, even maintaining old friendships drops lower and lower on our priority lists until one day we wake up and we realize that we hardly have any friends.
Right now, many of us are waking up to this realization. We are living not only through a global pandemic but a loneliness epidemic.
Loneliness is not a new global challenge, people have been suffering in silence for as long as the word loneliness has existed. It is just the first time that society is holding space for us to have a collective conversation about it.
The thing about loneliness that makes it so challenging to talk about is that it is wrapped in shame. Research has even shown that lonely people are perceived as less competent, less attractive, less sincere, and less likable. Yet 1 in 5 Canadians and 3 in 5 Americans, self-report as feeling lonely. This essentially means that even if you don’t feel lonely you absolutely know someone close to you, who does.
The pandemic has forced millions of people around the world into physical isolation for extended periods of time. This has led many people to feel lonely for the first time due to prolonged aloneness. Also, the lack of external stimuli and activities that kept many of us distracted from questing our current relationships, before the pandemic, have mostly disappeared.
This removal of distractions has created an opportunity for many to realize and admit for the first time how lonely they truly are. How emotionally disconnected they feel from their friends, partners, family members, and colleagues. Acknowledging these feelings and voicing them is a really important first step not only toward reconnecting with the important people in your life and/or realizing that meaningful relationships are essential to your well-being but also in the broader de-stigmatization of loneliness.
The Main Contributing Factors to Loneliness
There are many contributing factors to loneliness and considering that even before the pandemic 3 in 5 Americans and 1 in 5 Canadians self-reported as feeling lonely, it is clear that the experience of loneliness is ordinary, not extraordinary. So what aspects of ordinary life contribute to loneliness?
Challenges in existing relationships are a big one. This can look like a lack of intimacy and feelings of safety and belonging, often caused by poor communication over time.
Difficulties developing new and meaningful connections is another contributor and is often caused by a lack of social-emotional intelligence, access to others, as well as mental and physical ailments that cause people to isolate and retreat, rather than seek social support.
One thing that is absolutely clear in a vast body of research is that we are hardwired for connection and that for our connections to feel fulfilling we must feel accepted, valued, and loved. When these needs are met, relationships become as important to our health as our diet, as they are a crucial factor for survival. Those who lack relationships that make them feel accepted, valued, and loved are at the highest risk for loneliness.
The 4 Elements of a Meaningful Friendship
So how do we foster and create friendships where we feel accepted, valued, and loved? And more importantly, how do we do that today, in a world of physical isolation?
After 7 years of running thousands of people through in-person and online retreats and founding a digital friend-making community and platform, I have learned that there are four components to the creation and maintenance of a meaningful friendship, regardless of whether that relationship is cultivated in-person or online.
Any relationship in your life that feels deeply nourishing to you will have these four tenants:
Mutual vulnerability, generosity, reciprocity, and consistency.
Mutual vulnerability allows you to feel accepted and loved for who you are. Generosity makes you feel valuable because you feel as though you are contributing to someone else’s life. Reciprocity makes you feel valued because you feel as though your needs are being met by the other person. And lastly, consistency ensures that you are growing together, rather than apart. One caveat to this is consistency. You need consistency when you are beginning a new relationship however, once you’ve established a strong foundation in which you have mutual vulnerability, generosity, and reciprocity, you may not need to be as consistent, though it does help to keep your relationship evolving.
When these four things are combined they lead to the experience of feeling loved and when you feel loved, your friendships feel meaningful, and you feel less lonely.
The Birth of Kinnd
My experience with loneliness led me to the question, “how can I better help people, myself included, to make deeply meaningful friendships online?” To answer this question, the Kinnd Facebook Group, and soon-to-be app, was born. Our North Star is to eradicate loneliness worldwide by 2030. We intend to do this by creating a new kind of digital environment that enables people to cultivate the four tenants of a strong friendship (mutual vulnerability, generosity, reciprocity, and consistency). These tenants have been identified as the key to deeply meaningful and nourishing relationships through my Master's research at Columbia University along with 6 years of experience running my prior retreat company, The Get Together, and now Kinnd.
In the last 10 months since founding Kinnd, we’ve seen our methodology for friendship work incredibly well as a mechanism to help people make new and lasting friendships online. In fact, our Facebook Group has over 9,000 members, 2,500 posts, 100,000 comments, and reactions with over 4,000 people coming to Kinnd each day to make friends.
A Kinnd Friendship Success Story
How Kinnd Works
Every member posts on the wall of the group introducing themselves and stating what they have to offer and what they are looking to receive. This can be a skill, knowledge or time exchange and we call this the icebreaker barter. Why this is so powerful is that it takes away the ambiguity and awkwardness of making the first move by giving people a tangible reason to connect. For example, an icebreaker barter could be someone offering Spanish lessons, web design tips or a shoulder to cry on and requesting podcast recommendations, recipes and digital marketing advice. Another member would see this and respond, I’d love to take you up on your Spanish lessons and I can help you with digital marketing.
Kinnd is trying to help people re-learn how to actually make meaningful connections online. We should not be judging our interest in getting to know someone based primarily on swiping the swipe of a picture or a few sentences in their bio, we are all so much more valuable than that. Research actually shows that images and even interests have very little to do with whether or not you are actually compatible with someone. Instead, if you have mutual vulnerability, generosity, reciprocity, and consistency in your relationship, you will most likely feel accepted, valued and loved and when you feel these things, your friendships feel meaningful and you feel less lonely.
How Kinnd Helped Me
Kinnd has been incredible for my own mental health because I’ve made so many new friends. I also met my entire app development and community management team through the platform! One great example is our lead developer Bruno. We began our friendship like every other member on Kinnd. Bruno made a post where he stated what he had to offer, which was technical advice and what he was looking to receive, which was to practice his english and find someone to play music with. I saw his post, reached out to him and said, I am actually looking to chat with someone about app development and I’m a musician so i’d love to play music with you! For the first month we chatted every week, exchanging ideas, playing music and developing a beautiful friendship which really helped to combat my own feelings of loneliness during COVID. Bruno is now the lead backend developer for the Kinnd app and one of my dearest friends.
Remote Friendships
One of the things I find so beautiful about my relationship with Bruno is that we became friends exclusively online! He lives in Brazil and I live in Canada. I realized that when we take away the need for proximity, we open up a world of potential new friends! I think that this is really important to realize and embrace. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to only making friends with people who live nearby. COVID-19 has shown us that it is possible to build and maintain important connections online.
Though I don’t think that digital connections can completely remove the need for real-life interaction, I do believe and have experienced that we find ourselves in digital environments that create the conditions for people to connect meaningfully, you can leave the digital conversation feeling nourished rather than drained / zoom fatigued.
The Future of Friendship
So what is the future of friendship? It is a world where digital friend-making has been destigmatized and people feel comfortable using technology to make meaningful and lasting friendships online.
Digital friend-making may just be the most powerful tool we have to combat the growing epidemic of loneliness. It is time we embrace it.
Join Kinnd
If you’re feeling lonely and looking for a community, join our Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Kinnd
And stay tuned for the App release by joining our Mailing List: https://mailchi.mp/a934337714ef/kinnd-mailing-list?fbclid=IwAR0AatQaZ_JyEDuVKkM6KkDWCLRUnLUA21qzlCD0bpdrS8J9JW6bblyv1d8
