On loneliness, again

~3 min read.

Two weeks ago, I started researching on loneliness. I made a few posts on different social media and received lots of feedback (mostly from IH and reddit/digitalnomad). I've come to the following conclusions:

• Loneliness works as a negative feedback loop: feeling lonely affects your
  body and mind in such a way that you feel less capable of interacting
  with others. Higher perceived cost of interacting -> less interactions. This
  continuing lack of interactions makes you feel even lonelier.

• Physical interactions are a must. Hopefully, VR/AR/other technology will
  effectively replace social interactions, but nothing today seems to do the
  trick.

These two conclusions together indicate that a product/service that solves the loneliness problem should incentivize people to meet and interact in person. After researching, I’ve come up with the following conclusions of attributes that incentivize people to meet in person:

• Meetings in groups instead of 1on1s. 1on1s feel stressful/high-pressure
  People must have a main interest/hobby/sport/activity in common.

• Meeting for the sake of interacting, instead of to engage in a shared
  interest, puts too much pressure in the participants. It’s easier if
  interacting is not seen as the sole goal of the event/meeting/gathering.

• Details of the meeting must be clear and reliable. The time, place, and
  attendees of the meeting should be respected. Uncertainty about the
  meeting creates stressful speculations on the mind of a lonely person
  (what if no one shows up? What if I don’t find the people and have to bug
  them to tell me the exact location?)

Meetup.com satisfies most of the requirements. For those not familiar with meetup, it basically lets you create a location-based group around an interest/hobby like ‘Frisbee players NYC’. People can join groups and assist events or “meetups”. However, I have found it has the following shortcomings:

• Lack of accountability -> lots of people put ‘attending’ but don’t show up

• Lack of focus around people wanting to make new friends. Many
  meetups are work/career related. These aren’t ideal environments to
  make new friends. Many other meetups are around a hobby/interest, but
  the attendants aren’t necessarily looking to make new friends.

The attributes discussed above + meetup.com’s shortcomings made me come up with a meetup.com-like webapp with some additional features to solve the loneliness problem:

• A cost to not showing up to a meeting you said you would attend. This
  cost could be either monetary or social (i.e. your account’s assistance is
  known. Meetings could have an ‘assistance rate requirement’ for those
  who wish to attend).

• A group chat that helps people break some ice before they meet in
  person.

I know this is a long post with a kinda copycat solution, but I think a solution with these properties could help lonely people have meaningful interactions that would break their negative feedback loops. What do you think?