According to global public health data, 1 in 4 adults worldwide report feeling fairly lonely.
We’re more connected than ever, digitally speaking. And yet, we’ve never felt more separate from one another.
So naturally, the free market has responded to this in the most late-stage capitalist way possible: by putting a recurring monthly subscription fee on human connection. Welcome to the era of the financialization of loneliness.
If you actually look at the cultural landscape right now, connection is no longer something you organically stumble into at a local pub, a neighbourhood block party, or a hobby group. And it has now been productised.
Friendship-matching apps are raising tens of millions in venture capital, promising algorithms that can find you platonic intimacy. Highly gatekept, ticketed IRL singles clubs boast digital waitlists thousands of people long, charging premium entry fees just for the permission to speak to a stranger without it being weird. People are literally buying AI-powered wearable tech like sleek pucks and necklaces worn like jewellery just to have an ambient, artificial entity to talk to while they walk to get their morning espresso.
Yeah, it’s getting dystopian out here.
Say goodbye to simply selling a product's utility as a superficial status symbol. In our fragmented world, traditional community infrastructure has completely crumbled; and brands are increasingly being asked to sell belonging.
When basic human connection becomes a fkn business model, consumer scepticism naturally skyrockets. Because, like, wtf are we actually doing.
The internet has spent the last decade promising to bring us closer together, but it has ultimately left us more isolated than ever.
And trust, we’re all painfully aware of this irony. And the modern consumer is starting to push back aggressively against "bad actors" like subscription platforms or “community-focused” brands that actually just treat community as a transactional metric to pump up their user retention numbers.
Think about how standard digital spaces operate: they are engineered for digital retention. They want you trapped inside the app, scrolling, viewing ads, and refreshing your feed. But an online ecosystem built to optimise screen time inherently breeds more isolation. It isolates the user from their physical reality.
So maybe, as brands, its time to not strive to keep people locked behind a screen, and treat digital connection as a bridge to real-world friction.
True community cannot exist without shared friction. It requires a mutual objective, an active project, or a common "enemy" to rally against. If a brand attempts to build a community without this structural foundation, it isn't building a community at all, it's just building a glorified god damn mailing list.
To successfully market connection without triggering consumer disgust, brands must move away from top-down corporate community building. Look at the brands that command intense, cult-like loyalty. They don't force artificial interactions but instead create decentralised spaces where their consumers can find each other based on shared subcultural codes.
It’s time to lean into gatekeeping to protect the integrity of the group.
If your brand can naturally facilitate real-world, face-to-face community without forcing a gross transactional paywall into the middle of the conversation, you’re already ahead of the curve here.
But if you're just using "community" as a lazy, buzzword-heavy marketing tactic to increase your quarterly retention metrics, you’re kind of a dick, and your audience probably thinks so too x
