We Were Never Meant To Be This Lonely

Is there a word that accurately describes what the last six years have felt like?

“Lonely” 

“Isolated” 

“Disconnected”

 “Insular”

None of these feel specific enough. They all seem to graze the surface of something that goes much deeper than a moment in history.

Just over six years ago to this day, we were locked inside our homes, hoping for the best: two weeks of quarantine, and then back to “normal.”

Little did we know that those two weeks would turn into a kind of loss we’re still trying to name.

We were never meant to be this lonely. Loneliness is the kind of thing that's easy to write off as a feeling: formless, unprovable, too big to pin down. The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory did the pinning. 

The numbers were stark. Half of American adults reported experiencing significant loneliness. A health risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A crisis hiding in plain sight.

Six years later, we are able to look back and see what we’ve quietly lost. People don’t interact in public the way we used to. Going out places used to feel wondrous. We’d ask ourselves: who were we going to meet on a beautiful Saturday night? What kind of interactions awaited us? Now, folks stay in the assigned groups that they walked in with. Co-mingling has become a rare occurrence. Dating rituals have moved almost entirely online. Spontaneity has escaped our lexicon. We don’t interact with those regulars we’d see at the coffee shop every week or the co-worker we’d occasionally grab lunch with. 

Being around people used to feel more natural. Now? It’s something a lot of us have to work up the energy and courage to do. 

Some might say the antidote is to go back to the old ways of simply connecting with people again. Understandable. We remember what connection felt like. We're less sure how to make it happen now. And nostalgia lets us sit in that uncertainty without having to move through it. 

So how do we move through it? How do we start finding each other again without pretending the world we're finding each other in now is the same one from six years ago?

That’s where six degrees of separation comes in. 

The concept of six degrees of separation tells us that any two people on earth are linked through no more than six connections. Which means someone who is lonely, someone who needs to be found, is never as far away as they may feel. It’s also the idea behind SixDegrees.org.

Whether we are connecting folks with local grassroots nonprofits for BKxKB kit builds or pairing nonprofits with ad agencies to receive pro bono ad campaigns through our Purpose, Produced initiative, the six degrees framework isn't just a concept for us. It's how we operate. 

And the data is starting to catch up to what community organizers have known all along: people are hungry for this. Apps like Eventbrite and Partiful are booming precisely because people are planning with intention now. Not waiting to run into each other, but actively building the conditions for it. The numbers speak for themselves: according to Eventbrite’s 2026 Social Study, 79% of young adults (ages 18-35) plan to attend more in-person events in 2026. 

Connection in a post-quarantine landscape is being fostered through things like run clubs, silent book clubs, and opting out of the smartphone culture altogether for screenless, app-less “dumb phones.” These shifts are low-pressure. Notice how the clubs don’t necessarily require anyone to talk to anyone. Just run or read. There are over 200 run clubs in New York City alone. Most of them are free. None of them require you to say a word. Just being on a route running—or in a room reading—with someone who shares just that one thing with you is enough to crack something open. And swapping a smartphone for something simpler is a reclamation of attention in spite of living in the attention economy. 

We were never meant to be this lonely. But we were never meant to stay this way, either. As the days get longer and more opportunities to show up for each other present themselves—show up. It may feel intimidating at first to show up to that run club. But once your shoes hit the pavement and the sound of heavy breathing and laughter surrounds you, the last thing you'll feel is regret.