There is a loneliness epidemic in modern societies. I wrote about it in my other essay, Modern loneliness.
This is a more detailed essay outlining the problem and a potential solution.
Problem outline: the current landscape
In the world today, technology has taken over every aspect of our lives, allowing us to live in cities alongside millions of people without having to interact with any of them.
The pyramid above illustrates Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
In the past, we fulfilled all of our needs in the physical world. We studied in classrooms, worked in offices, entertained ourselves in theatres, bought groceries at supermarkets and ate out at restaurants.
Today,
School is Google Classroom.
Office is Zoom.
Mall is Amazon.
Theatre is Netflix.
Grocery store is Instacart.
Food is DoorDash.
Social is social media and dating apps?
Every single level of the hierarchy of needs can seemingly be satisfied by services provided by technology. While bringing incredible convenience to our lives by allowing us to fulfill any needs by the tap of a button, these inventions come at the cost of real life, authentic and genuine interactions by removing many physical spaces where people can meet. Technology has reshaped our dynamic with life, and we live in a world where online interactions have become the norm.
With third spaces and physical venues increasingly replaced by online platforms, we are left with very limited ways to connect with people. While children and teenagers still have school and extracurricular activities, social media and dating apps are the only remaining ways left available for working adults to connect with people (try approaching people on the street today, it is not going to work). However, social media and dating apps are unable to fulfill our social needs as they do not actually connect us in a meaningful way.
Root of the problem
To dive deeper, we have to see that our world functions primarily in a capitalistic way. We believe in a religion of profit above all else.
Social media makes money from advertisements. The objective of these apps is then to influence users’ behavior by exploiting the human mind’s vulnerability to stimuli and attention. Algorithms behind the apps are optimized to capture attention and maximize users’ time spent on the app because the more time users spend on the app, the more content and advertisement they consume. Social media may have been designed to connect people, but its algorithm has evolved to focus solely on engagement and advertising. Instead of a platform connecting people together, it has become a gigantic advertisement platform designed to most effectively manipulate one’s behavior.
Another result of social media algorithms is the formation of echo chambers, presenting one-sided information in attempt to capture attention. In order to capture attention, content prioritized is sensational and extreme in nature, and that causes an exaggerated divergence of the audience. We see our differences instead of our similarities.
“When we think, ‘How can the other party be so stupid? How are they not seeing all this information?’ the answer is that they are simply not seeing it!” [1]
As for dating apps, the moment you get a good match and proceed to building the connection in real life is the moment you get off the apps, so the ideal user experience from the perspective of the apps is not to match you with the most compatible person, but to provide the experience of consuming by a similar endless scrolling of profiles, to the point the user gets fed up or impatient and purchase subscriptions to see and consume more profiles. We indulge in experiences of judging other human beings by first glance, instead of spending time to properly know and understand one another.
Think about the times when we meet people IRL, we do not immediately judge their worth based on superficial, quantifiable qualities like looks, height, the school they attended, the job they do. But on virtual platforms where we prioritize engagement and attention stimuli, the weight which we multiply to these superficial qualities are much greater. Dating apps and social media reduce people down to mere profiles and statistics like their looks, height, education background and social-economic status.
Those factors are not a comprehensive representation of people. Pictures, videos, and short captions uploaded on social media and dating apps platforms cannot capture the full human experience. Humans, finite by nature, possess the extraordinary capacity of perceiving the infinite. We are such beautifully complex beings that cannot be represented or judged by profiles.
What profiles do instead is allow us to form an expectation, this imagination of what the person is going to be like. Dating app profiles makes us see the person for who we want them to be, rather than who they actually are. And that is dangerous. No genuine connection can form two people living inside their heads and not seeing each other for who they really are.
Another fundamental issue that social media and dating apps share in common is the endless scrolling/swiping experience, which presents us with the paradox of choice, where having more options actually leaves us less satisfied. When the experience of matching involves scrolling through an apparently endless list of profiles, we adopt the mindset that we can ghost or abandon our matches at will, because even if that particular match does not work out, there is always a “better” profile coming right up. It is a gamified experience, where we don’t consciously realize that there is a living, breathing human being behind each profile. People are reduced to disposable options rather than unique individuals deserving respect and attention. There is something fundamentally wrong and dehumanizing about the attention economy and the kind of experience social media and dating apps provide.
A highly related concept in Buddhism is “cause and effect” (因缘 in Chinese. हेतुप्रत्यय in Sanskrit, pronounced hetu-pratyaya). When applied to human connections, it is the idea that each person we come across in life is the result of this interconnected web of past actions.
I met some of my best friends in high school because my parents decided to send me back to Singapore for school, and I was assigned to that specific class where I happened to sit beside them. Some call it a chance encounter. In the eye of the Buddha, it is more so a kind of fated inevitability. And it is this “cause and effect” with family members, partners and close friends, but it is also “cause and effect” with the people we walk past on the streets, the people we take the same elevator together and the people we take the same train with.
At the core of “cause and effect” is the idea to take each meeting seriously with respect and kindness. This is opposite of the fast, superficial, disposable and endless scrolling experience of social media and dating apps. And it should be promoted. After all, we are infinite. Being human is such a beautifully complex and rich experience that just cannot be gauge from a few words, pictures lined up in an incessant queue. The countless subtle, nuanced social cues in authentic human experiences (eye contact, body language, facial expressions, tone, energy …) just cannot be replicated through virtual interactions.
Connecting with people as an adult is much like taking one step toward someone when you see them, and if they see you and take one step toward you, a connection / relationship is formed. For a young adult living in today’s society, there are no third spaces or places where they can safely and easily take that step.
Pulling together the points mentioned thus far, it is no wonder that the loneliest age group are adults between 20 to 30 years old, whose only mode of meeting people are from online: social media and dating apps. Instead of the promise of connecting us together, dating apps and social media are pushing us further apart and contributing to modern loneliness because of this misalignment of profit model and the common interests!
This is a bigger problem than simply being hostile towards the forming of human connections (big enough problem on its own). This business model which social media and dating apps run on have evolved to the point of being destructive to human society.
We live in a world where a forest is worth more dead than alive. A whale is worth more dead than alive. And we are worth more spending all our time staring at a screen, than if we are spending that time living our live in a rich and fulfilling way.
And we are seeing the results of the misaligned business model today. The brightest minds of our society are going into consulting, finance and big tech in exchange for personal compensation; to spend each week trading financial derivatives invented to make some rich person or company richer, or to design smarter algorithms to better extract the population’s attention so that we can spend more time glued to the screen, instead of doing things that are most consistent with our goals, values and our lives.
It is a strange belief that each individual and each corporation pursuing their own profits is going to produce the best result for all of society. We have created a culture of prioritizing profits; prioritizing destroying of the planet, prioritizing fragmenting of society, and prioritizing destroying of fantastic, in-person human experiences [2].
At this point, you may think that technology is the root of all evil, and we should go back to the 80s or the medieval times when there was no Tiktok or Tinder. But that is not the case. Modern technology has brought about better infrastructures, healthcare and education, which contributed to the most profound betterment of human life around the globe in history since agriculture.
It is not technology itself that is the existential threat, but the design of technology. In other words, it is the business model that is the problem.
I am an optimist and I believe the way we choose to see the world creates the world we see. We can design and engineer technology in an ethical way that brings good. The fabric of a healthy society depends on abandoning the current destructive business model and moving away from the attention economy.
Instead of asking: how can we make people addicted to my product, the primary motivation could be: how do we make the world better.
How can I align the profit model with the interest of the people?
More specifically in the context of this essay, I want to ask: how can we facilitate the forming of genuine connections today using technology?
Solution: Rekindling human connection
I imagine an IRL social service that provides the four conditions for a genuine human connection and relationship to form:
- Common Space
- Shared Experience/Memory
- Attention/Energy
- Minimal Expectation
First of all, it has to be IRL.
There is already a noticeable trend moving away from online socializing. Bumble has lost 92% of its value, while Tinder and Hinge see a 79% drop. Users of dating apps are feeling burnt out from the dehumanizing app experience which comes inherently from their design. More and more IRL social initiatives or dating apps with IRL twists are emerging, with many attempts to depart from its unethical designs. In Spain, singles are flocking to supermarkets to seek partners by placing upside-down pineapples in their shopping carts to signal their intention. The magic of IRL interactions is, at the moment, practically impossible to replicate online. Genuine connections can happen online, but they are that much more likely to happen face-to-face in person.
The service would provide matching of members through activity. By matching through a physical event, both 1. Common Space and the making of 2. Share Experience for members to form connections with each other. These activities would be carefully designed foster the forming of genuine connections.
By bringing back classic experiences which people used to primarily socialize through such as lunch/dinner, bar, coffee, sociable activities (running, hiking, bouldering, dance, yoga), board games, museum and gallery visits. Other than providing a common space and the making of a shared experience, these activities are optimized such that 3. Attention/Energy can be channeled by its members onto one another and the topic of conversation. They would occur in safe and secure spaces where people can feel comfortable and be as authentic and open as possible.
The service would provide no means of interaction online. This ensures 4. Minimal Expectations. Other than location and time of activity, the members would not be provided with any other information. The complete opposite of dating apps, they would not know the names, the gender, race or appearance of their group members, ensuring absolutely minimal expectations are formed.
Taking the earlier analysis into account, another key element of the service is to give people limited options. Once members sign up for events, they are not given the freedom to choose who or what the experience will be like. It will be a personally curated activity designed to foster human connection. Members simply show up on time, be open and respectful to others and enjoy the authentic human interactions.
The app would also make clear to users that it is not a dating app, a friend making app or a networking app. When people meet other people with the expectation of dating, being friends or networking, it subjects the other parties to an overwhelming pressure to conform to that idea, and no genuine connections can be formed under heavy expectations. The service would set the expectation among members that they are simply participating in an activity with some people.
There is one big problem left to be addressed, and that is the specific arrangement of people, who should go into the same group and why?
I served in the Singapore Armed Forces as part of the two years of national service required of all Singaporean men, and the nature of mandatory conscripts is that you meet the full spectrum of people, the entire demographic. The assignment of people is almost completely arbitrary. After two years I hardly connected meaningfully with anyone.
You cannot just randomly assign people together and expect genuine connections to form. Even when all four conditions are provided and the expectations and number of choices are minimized to some degree, a completely random grouping of people partaking in activities is highly likely to be unpleasant for all parties involved.
It is a shame we cannot just get along with anyone. But the fact is that cultural differences, personality clashes, identity poltics and socio-economic disparities exists, and to some extent determine who we get along with.
There are some traits about Person A and Person B which determine whether or not they get along with each other. When I think about it, my closest friends and I do share a few traits in common: we are all oldest siblings (pretty cool if you think about it), we are all immigrants/ third culture kids, etc. There are also some opposite traits we possess: some of my friends are more risk adverse while I am more daring and adventurous. Among my friends in the same friend group, some are more storytellers while others are more listeners.
So, what are those key traits that determine the compatibility of people? These traits play a role in human connection and relationships, and the how is unknown. This is a largely unresolved problem that spans the fields of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, sociology and anthropology.
A promising approach is to utilize machine learning algorithms such as attentional graph neural networks to curate the groups based on members’ traits and beliefs. Neural networks have had extensive success on various problems. They are able to learn from feedback and improve accuracy in desired outputs given some type of input.
The product would begin with a detailed and validated personality test to outline traits of the user, which will be fed into the machine learning algorithm which puts people with the highest chance of compatibility in the same group.
After each experience, having done the activities and interacted with other members of the group, each member would be asked to rate and provide feedback on the other members. The feedback and then be fed back into the algorithm to train it to be more accurate in its predictions. Compatibility predictions will start from with heuristics and known correlations. For instance, pairing highly agreeable personalities or mixing introverts and extroverts. But with more data collected, it would be able to identify the traits that determine compatibility, and the traits that don’t.
Having a good model goes beyond getting better curated groups where members are more compatible, it is also valuable proprietary information which can potentially reveal fundamental truths about human connection.
In a sense, this product is equivalent to a big survey, where people with some traits would provide feedback on the experience and compatibility with other people after each interaction. Such architecture can empower research on human connection and relationships, and is valuable information for areas like public policies, education, organizational structure and so on. Here are just some guesses on its potential applications:
- Governments might want to know about their citizen’s social compatibility when it comes to public policies such as public housing allocation, and prevent conflicting personalities from living in proximity.
- Schools could better allocate teachers and students into classes and encourage stronger bonds among students.
- For companies, instead of doing personal fit interviews where an individual’s compatibility with the department/company is determined in a subjective, arbitrary and potentially biased way, simply have interviewee fill up a personal survey and predict the likelihood of edges between them and the co-workers.
Of course, having machines completely decide who you can be friends with or date is extremely dystopic and takes away the authenticity and inherent randomness of human connections. The algorithm would have a certain degree of randomness implemented which preserves the randomness of chance encounters [3]. On top of that, it is crucial we meet people outside the echo chamber, to be aware of the differences and diversity that exist in our world, and to learn to respect and empathize.
Once again, it is important to stress that algorithms are neutral in nature. The key is about what definition of success algorithms are optimized to. The emphasis is on alignment of incentives and objective and utilize technology in altruistic and ethical ways, instead of rejecting them entirely.
Make something people want. That is the motto of Y Combinator.
From some point onwards, we have started to make things that nobody except corporations and advertisers want. People are realizing how detrimental and destructive those business models are, and they are starting to get off them. However, many of such technology has become a key part of people’s lives. This idea is a small step in reversing that trend. To take back something precious we had lost.
Make something people want, and people want genuine connections.
Update (2025.05.01): The product envisioned in this essay is now real! We are building lemon, a IRL consumer social product curating IRL moments aimed at truely fostering genuine connections. I hope to bring back the precious things we have forgotten and lost, from Asia to the world.
Notes
[1] The Social Dilemma (2020)
[2] It is a horror seeing all the AI companion apps or attention extracting applications pop up in the world today.
[3] In the first place, it is a huge assumption that ML is capable of being highly accurate in predicting compatibility. After all, humans are incredibly inconsistent beings.