Loneliness isn’t just making us unhappy, it’s silently killing us: Social isolation is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If the situation is so critical, why aren’t we doing more to fix it? Because we’ve been collectively ashamed to talk about loneliness . Our silence has incubated one of the most insidious crises our society has to face. It’s time to act, but how?

I believe in technology and entrepreneurship to solve the world’s biggest problems. For the past couple of years, I’ve witnessed an uprising in startups waging a war on loneliness, COVID acting as a catalyst. In this article, I’ll cover 160+ companies leveraging AI, gaming, dating, and more to solve loneliness at scale, all sharing one core belief: Technology can help us belong.

Before we jump into what I believe will be a tidal shift in consumer habits and startup investment, let’s hit reverse for a sec to piece together the backstory. How did we get here?

Technology and the individual.

Throughout history, we’ve always been part of something greater than ourselves. A religion, a family, a village—belonging wasn’t something we chose but something we needed: It was impossible to survive as an individual. But belonging came at a cost: Dependency and lack of agency. As a result, a few institutions dominated our everyday existence, sometimes preventing us from becoming the architects of our own lives.

As technological progress advanced, the balance of power shifted: It used to take a village to raise a kid; it now takes an iPhone with an internet connection. The more leverage we have as individuals, the less dependence we have on others. We've been sacrificing human connection for years—transacting things that traditionally had to be done by someone who cared about us. Uber instead of our parents picking us up from the airport, Doordash instead of cooking with our roommates, and TikTok instead of hanging out with our friends.

Technology makes our lives easier. Convenience has, however, come at a cost.

We are free, independent, and sovereign.

But we are lonely...

It’s time to belong.

Yesterday, we were born as part of a community and had to find our way as individuals. Today, we are born as individuals, free to find our community. We have every reason to celebrate this new-found individual autonomy & freedom of choice. But if everything is going so well, why are we so addicted, stressed, and depressed?

In my opinion, loneliness is the root cause of our mental health crisis. Loneliness is now one of the most important problems our generation has to solve , alongside climate change and obesity. It’s time to find a balance between individualism and collectivism, between solitude and solidarity, between independence and interdependence. It’s time to remember that as individuals, we are the beginning but not the end. It’s time to belong, again.

This leads me to the central question of this article: How can technology help us belong? It’s very easy to blame technology for our loneliness and want less of it. But it’s important to remember that technology follows ideology, not the opposite. We’ve built our modern world on the dream of individual autonomy, and technology made it a reality. We are now wishing to become part of something bigger than ourselves, again. I believe technology will answer this call too.

from The Loneliness Economy: How can technology help us belong?