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By Annette Corsino-Blair
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We have never had more ways to reach another human being—yet meaningful connection is becoming remarkably difficult to find.
In 2025, the World Health Organization reported that roughly 1 in 6 people worldwide experience loneliness. Loneliness is also associated with an estimated 871,000 deaths annually.
Those numbers should change how we think about loneliness. This is not simply a private feeling that individuals should be expected to overcome on their own. It is partly a problem of how we have organized modern life.
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We have made communication almost instantaneous while allowing many of the places and rituals that once produced actual relationships to weaken.
Think about how ordinary connections used to happen. People lingered after religious services, met friends at malls, talked with neighbors, joined clubs, ate together, or became familiar faces at local businesses.
None of these encounters seemed particularly important at the time. That was precisely their strength.
Friendship did not always require planning. People repeatedly occupied the same spaces until strangers became acquaintances, and acquaintances became friends.
Today, too much social life has to be arranged. Remote work can remove workplace interaction. Families can live hundreds or thousands of miles apart. Phones fill moments that once invited conversation.
Younger people may spend enormous amounts of time communicating digitally without gaining the confidence that develops from sitting across from someone.
Older adults can become increasingly isolated as mobility, distance, and changing family structures narrow their social worlds.
The Importance of the Physical World
Research increasingly suggests that the physical environment matters. A 2025 study using a decade of American Time Use Survey data identified home, workplaces, and third places as important sources of everyday social connection.
Third places are the spaces outside home and work where people can gather informally, including libraries, parks, cafes, and community venues. The OECD has similarly identified this kind of social infrastructure as an important part of shaping social connection.
We should rebuild it.
I have spent years watching what happens when people are given somewhere they can simply show up.
They talk. They learn one another’s names. They notice when somebody has not been around. Younger people find mentors. Older people find companionship.
Someone going through a difficult week can walk into a familiar room and discover that another person remembers what they are carrying.
The activity that brought them through the door may eventually become secondary to the relationships keeping them there.
Technology does not have to work against this. Used well, digital communities can help people separated by geography discover common interests, maintain relationships, and eventually create connections offline.
The mistake is treating digital interaction as the destination rather than a bridge. A screen can introduce two people, but it cannot fully reproduce what happens when they share a table.
Transactional Relationships
The alternative is a society in which connection becomes increasingly transactional.
We schedule every interaction, purchase convenience that eliminates human contact, and retreat into personalized digital worlds. People can become surrounded by communication while feeling that nobody actually knows them.
The WHO now describes social connection as a global public health priority, with consequences extending across health, education, and economic well-being.
Reversing that trajectory does not require waiting for a sweeping government program. Businesses, libraries, schools, apartment communities, faith organizations, and civic groups can begin locally.
Every organization with a physical gathering place should commit to hosting at least one free or low-cost, phone-free community gathering each month for the next year.
It could be a game night, craft session, shared meal, discussion group, or open house. Measure attendance, repeat participation, and whether people return.
Individuals have a responsibility, too. Attend regularly. Learn three names. Introduce two people. Put the phone away.
We have spent years designing life for greater convenience. Now we need to deliberately design some of it for connection.
A healthier society may begin with something remarkably simple: creating places where people can keep showing up until they are no longer strangers.
Annette Corsino-Blair is an artist, educator, community builder, and co-founder of The Knitting Tree LA, an Inglewood, California, yarn retailer that sells products and classes and hosts community knitting events.
The views expressed are the author's own.
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