In July, Bumble, a dating app that also has a networking and friend-finding mode, completed the acquisition of Geneva, an app currently available in North America, Europe and Australia that helps people make new friends to spend time with offline. Bumble CEO Rhydian Jones said on an earnings call this month that fostering platonic connections is at the core of the company's future business. “What we're hearing from our younger users is that they're feeling lonely and isolated,” she said.
Maxime Barbier, co-founder and CEO of TimeLeft, an app that arranges Wednesday-night dinners for groups of six in 170 cities across 37 countries, including Auckland, said fatigue with dating apps is pushing people toward in-person meetups with friends. “We're seeing people yearning for something that's not a dating app,” he said.
These services have proliferated at a time when loneliness is becoming more common and city dwellers feel disconnected from their communities: One in five workers feel lonely, according to a February Gallup survey. Fully remote workers are more likely to feel lonely (25%) compared with fully on-site workers (16%) and hybrid employees (21%), according to the survey.
A 2023 Pew Research Center study found that urban Americans are less likely to feel connected to their hometowns: 49% of city dwellers feel close to people in their local community, compared with 55% of suburban residents and 58% of rural residents.
Raymond Ou is one of those city dwellers who has struggled to make friends. The 41-year-old used to attend tech events to meet people, but since he became an on-air producer at a local TV station, where his shift starts at 7 p.m., he no longer has time for happy hours or evening drinks. “I've sacrificed my social life for this job,” he said over tofu and vegetables at a Burmese restaurant in downtown San Francisco, adding that the sacrifices have been worth it but he still wants more friends, especially ones he can see during the day.
Oh signed up for the Creative Lunch Club app after seeing an ad on Instagram that connected people in similar industries. (The service is available in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch.) In his first three months as a member, he paid $11 for a small-group lunch with two people. On the day of the meeting, one of the people Oh was scheduled to meet with canceled, citing a work emergency. The Washington Post Reporter.
Ou, who is also a documentary filmmaker, said he wanted to try out Creative Lunch Club because it offers an alternative space to San Francisco's overflowing tech industry. “It gives us an opportunity to meet different kinds of people that we want to meet,” Ou said.
Ou told me that he usually eats lunch alone, a pattern that inspired Creative Lunch Club founder Klaus Heller to start the app. “We thought that this might be a good time to meet other people and get more out of it,” Heller said in a phone interview.
Heller, a freelance social media marketer based in Vienna, also had a hunch that people in the creative industries would find a lot in common. And that hunch turned out to be true for Oh and me.
Having spent most of my 20s working the night shift as a journalist, I was able to tell Oh that I knew all too well how an unconventional work schedule can make your social life difficult. We also talked about the challenges of convincing sources to trust journalists, how to foster trust with people you've barely met, and we bonded over our love of the Japanese clothing brand SOU・SOU. I enjoyed meeting Oh, but sometimes thought our conversations would have been more fulfilling in a larger group.
A social scientist, he has written The art and science of connection: Why social wellness is the missing key to living a longer, healthier, happier lifeIn a phone interview, Killam estimated that there are hundreds of apps aimed at addressing the loneliness epidemic and helping people connect with each other. Almost every week, she hears about a new one. It's easy to meet new people in college or in your 20s, Killam said, but “what happens when you move to a new city or go through a breakup? A lot of people struggle with that.” [regarding] Where can I turn to?”
Damien Jacobs, a 44-year-old lawyer, faced that conundrum after recently moving to San Francisco from Hong Kong, where his wife and children remain thousands of miles away, visiting only occasionally as the family finalizes their relocation plans.
Jacobs said she would go out to bars and restaurants and try to strike up conversations with strangers, but it didn't work. “Many people my age are married and have kids. They're not going to a bar on a Saturday night and mingling with strangers,” she said in a phone interview. “Everywhere I went, I found everyone was a lot younger than me and hanging out with their friends.”
The first dinner, arranged through TimeLeft, was a very different story: “Everyone at the table is there to meet strangers,” he says. Jacobs paid $25 to attend a month-long meetup that brought together a different group each week.
For each TimeLeft dinner, the group picks a location for an optional after-party. At the dinner Jacobs attended in San Francisco's Japantown, his diners, including this reporter, opted for a nearby karaoke bar. “If you'd told us we were going to a karaoke bar afterwards, I would have laughed it off,” says Jacobs, who normally dislikes the practice.
But he still went on stage I will be (500 miles) He watched the performance at the Proclaimers with his dinner companions and later called it “a testament to the power of peer pressure.”
He's not sure if he'll see that group again, but he has a three-month subscription to Timeleft and plans to go for dinner with a new group soon.