## The Modern World Welcome to the modern world. It's been 25 years since the internet boom of 2000 promised to revolutionize the way human beings connect. Now, several decades on, there's never been a time in human history when it was so difficult to make real human connections. And there's never been a time when so many people were hungry for them. All existing social apps, from dating apps to career apps to the large "social" networks, have made the world a dramatically less social and more lonely place. All existing physical businesses where human beings congregate, from restaurants, to coffee shops, to neighborhood bars, have failed in precisely the same way, though this fact is less often recognized or discussed. The modern world lacks even a loose approximation of the sort of [Third Places](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place) our parents and grandparents had. Not because the spaces themselves do not exist, but because mobile technology has given each of us own portable virtual world into which we can escape, and from which we can draw dopamine. The presence of such technology in every public location has dramatically changed the social defaults of what might otherwise have been social spaces. Both the virtual economy of bits and bytes, and the physical economy of brick and mortar have failed to address the crushing loneliness and social isolation of modern life. It's not hard to understand why. Running a business is extremely hard, so it's nearly impossible for most owners to avoid developing the symptoms of [[Business Autism]]. We don't know you. But we know you need more in life than another swipe app, or a slighty better burrito. And we know you need a better answer to "Where to meet new people" than some non-sequitur like "take a pottery class" or "talk to people at the gym." These are not luxuries or the entitled demands of a soft generation. They are some of the most fundamental of all human needs. Speaking of which, let's step back. What do us humans _actually_ need? ## The Fundamental Human Needs What do humans need most? The most fundamental needs of all are arguably: - Survival. (Shelter, Food, Work, Money.) - Mating. (Dating, Marriage, Children.) - Group. (Family, Friends, Community.) All animals need the first two. Humans need the third, perhaps more than any other animal. As a social species, our minds are designed to use the third 一 a small scale, tight knit coalition 一 as a foundation within which to find the first two. It is the "background spacetime," against which the laws of social physics play themselves out. Without a coalition 一 a group of humans of all ages who see each other every day and night 一 the default human mind is lost at sea, hoping against hope to find the first two on one's own, in lonely pools of strangers on the worst apps ever to exist on your phone: the hellscapes known by spooky names like Tinder and LinkedIn. This was not the world we signed up for. In other words, society no longer works. It got too big, and the internet made it orders of magnitude bigger. Now, society being big isn't a problem in itself. But when the big group of millions replaces the small groups that our minds evolved to be hungry for, then society has ceased to serve the function for which it was created: namely, to help us find those three big needs up at the top of this page. The briefest look at the predicaments now faced by Gen Z and millenials show that using the existing institutions of society no longer help the youth to get the things past generations used to get from participating in those institutions. For example: - 50% of single men between 18 and 30 have not approached a girl in the past year. Despite this, 90% of women in the same age group say they would prefer the man to approach first, when meeting someone new. - However, of the 50% who did approach someone, between 50% and 70% got a date. - Unsurprisingly, given the above, from 2008 to 2018, the number of men between 18 and 30 reporting no sex in the past year more than tripled, from 8% to 28% - There's between a 3:1 and 7:1 ratio of males to females on dating apps. - The divorce rate per unit time for couples who meet on dating apps is 6 times higher than it is for couples who met in the real world. - The common perception that "long term relationships are decreasing and casual sex is increasing" is incorrect: both committed relationships AND casual sex are now less frequent than they were 10 years ago. - Thirty years ago, the places where people met their mates were 1/3 at work, 1/3 through friends, 1/3 at school. Now most relationships begin online. - Despite that, dating apps don't work for about 80% of men. - For that 80% of men, the only option is to meet someone in the real world. But more than half of Gen Z men believe that it's not socially acceptable to go up to girls at parties and talk to them. - There's some evidence that people are dating less because of a decrease of alcohol consumption. Gen Z is lonely as hell. So is every generation, but Gen Z is especially fucked. They want to meet people, and they have no idea how. And it's not their fault for not knowing. The institutions, apps, and methods they were handed have entirely stopped working for nearly everyone. We cannot fix the larger society. It's too heavy, and like all large dead animals, it no longer listens to requests, and it's quite difficult to move. We can, however, build something new, smaller, and most importantly, local. --- _(The document ends here.)_