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Loneliness isn’t just a lingering by-product of COVID lockdownsit’s a public health crisis. The impacts of social isolation are said to be as detrimental to human health as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, according to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Loneliness can increase the risk of heart disease and strokes by roughly 30%, and dementia by about 50%. In some ways, weve never been more connected thanks to online networks. Yet for many people, social media has fueled perceptions that others are living fuller, more vibrant lives in comparison to their own. Some have found that online interactions pale in comparison to in-person hang outs. Champagne sales are down, raising questions of whether party culture is dead. Overall, the downtrend of socialization in the U.S. paints a pretty bleak picture. Companies have taken this public health diagnosis as a cue to step in, fill those cracks in our social fabric, and develop a cure for loneliness. At the Fast Company Grill at SXSW this month, business leaders shared how their companies are encouraging people to leverage online interfaces tocounterintuitivelyget offline, or filling gaps in the market with products that account for new social trends and behaviors, like the sober curious movement. Cultivating community at all life stages When Andy Dunn moved to Chicago a few years ago to be closer to his family, he found it difficult to forge new friendships, joking that all he did was just “parent and work.” This lack of infrastructure around simply finding things to doand people to do them withinspired him to create Pie, a social app aiming to combat social isolation. Dunn, who is also the founder of clothing company Bonobos, said that between moving cities, switching jobs, marriage, starting a family, and other milestones, he estimates people go through anywhere from eight to 15 major life events that may upend their friend groups. This can leave people at an inflection point where you have more social capacity than you have social opportunity. Pie creates those opportunities by using AI to bring together groups of six peoplewhich the app takes its name from, as there are usually six slices in a pieand help them discover events and activities they share a mutual interest in attending. Its led to lasting connections, Dunn said, because Pie takes the two ingredients necessary to forming meaningful friendships, repeated social collision in a group setting, and then mutual disclosure of vulnerable information, and uses an easily accessible platform to facilitate these interactions. Developing the perfect recipe for get togethers Melanie Masarin, CEO and founder of the nonalcoholic aperitif brand Ghia, built her company after she quit drinking. I stopped drinking for no particular reason, which is an important distinction. I wasn’t sick, I wasn’t pregnant, I just felt better without it, she explained. “I was at a point in time where I hosted a lot. I always had my friends over for dinner, and I was constantly being questioned for why I wasn’t drinking. And I was like, ‘There’s more people in my apartment than there are chairs, and I cooked for everyone, and I feel so isolated because I’m not partaking in a social occasion. Masarin says she became obsessed with the idea of creating a better-for-you drink that provided the same experience of imbibing alcohol. It’s an offering thats struck a chord with Gen Z consumers in particular, who are drinking alcohol at far lower rates than previous generations but still want the fun of going out. She pointed out that a number of cultures have long decentered alcohol in their social gatheringsfor example, many Muslims choose not to drinkand that part of Ghias success has been reframing its customers as the hero, rather than its products. All of our products are just a catalyst for people coming together. They’re not necessarily trying to be the center of attention, she said. We’ve been conditioned to think that alcohol is the life of the party, and actually our customer is the life of the party. Masarin also noted that Ghia is not a product purely for people interested in practicing sobriety. Rather, its demand reflects the downward trend in alcohol consumption fueled by a desire for moderation that came out of the COVID-19 pandemic. She mentioned that 92% of Ghia drinkers also consume alcohol. Preventing missed connections Ev Williams, creator of the private social network Mozi and founder of Twitter, Medium, and Blogger, experienced a rude awakening in the years after lockdown ended. I’d spent my life building startups, mostly on the information and tech side. And around my 50th birthday I actually started to shift my priorities and realized that I had underinvested in relationships, he said. The best source of information I had was my contacts app, which [for most people] is full of outdated and incomplete information. Williams found himself wanting to start at the most basic level: understanding who his friends were and where they were located. That desire led to Mozi, which syncs with a users contacts app and allows them to share their location or plans with a curated network of individuals. Mozi works best for people who travel often and may not realize when theyre overlapping with friends. Users are able to post the dates theyre traveling to a city or an event theyre planning to attend, as well as solicit travel advice from mutuals. Williams suggested the app can also take away some of the awkwardness that comes with asking someone you may not feel as close to yet to do something with you. If you were to individually text [a friend of a friend], you would make yourself vulnerable,” he said. “But if you were to say, Oh, I’m going to this show, or I’m going to this event and I’m happy for these people to see that I’m going to this and join me there, because it’s a public thing, it’s not in [their] house, it’s not risky.” Williams is excited to see that using technology to facilitate offline interactions has become more mainstream. I love that there’s a new generation of social products that are actually social, and what we call social media is actually just mediaand it’s been becoming media for a long time, he said. Were less kidding ourselves that [social media] is where people connect. Its not.
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Earlier this month, Apple officially announced that it would be postponing the launch of some planned Apple Intelligence features to a later, unspecified date in the future. These features mainly revolved around an AI-supercharged Siri. The news of the delay sent the tech press into a frenzy, with many writers criticizing the company for failing to deliver on its promises. Additionally, people speculated that the delay of these features could impact iPhone sales this year. While the criticism is justified, I think the prediction that the delay will impact iPhone sales places too much faith in the appeal of AI. Apple delays new Siri AI features As noted by 9to5Mac, the delayed features include Siri’s ability to understand queries based on personal context (What time does dads train get in?), consider what you are doing on your screen when you ask it to carry out a certain task (Make a reservation at this restaurant), and perform in-app actions (Crop this photo using a square aspect ratio). When the news officially droppedApple made the announcement in a statement to well-known tech blogger John Gruberthere was a big reaction from the tech media, including my colleague Harry McCracken, who wrote a smart response in his newsletter, Plugged In. Reporters and Apple fans alike werent merely disappointed that Apple delayed the features; they were upset that Apple purportedly showcased the features working last yearbut in reality, that demonstration was nothing more than an animated mockup. Theres a name for products like that: vaporware, McCracken said. The tech industry is rife with examples. Apple, in its modern history, has been atypically disciplined about avoiding themwhich makes this incident only more striking. When evaluating Apples actions from this perspective, I agree. You dont expect a company of Apples caliber and market cap of over $3.2 trillion to show off what are essentially just concepts. Other companies, yes, but not Apple. What I dont necessarily agree with is the belief by some Wall Street analysts that Apples delay of some of its AI features will negatively affect iPhone sales in the near termor even into next year, when some of these features are now expected. That argument doesnt make a lot of sense to mefor two big reasons. The average consumer doesnt seem to care about AI smartphone features too much While I know that tech enthusiasts like me seem to care a lot about Apples AI offerings, I dont believe that the same holds true for average consumers (e.g. those who don’t follow tech news or consider tech gadgets to be a very important aspect of their lives). Why do I think that average consumers care so little about Apple Intelligence? Because ever since Apple announced Apple Intelligence last June and rolled it out in October, Ive never met a single person who said Apples new AI platform is why they are planning on buying a new iPhone. Ive had people tell me they bought a new iPhone 16 Pro because of the camera upgrades or because they wanted a bigger screen or a faster device. But not once has anyone ever cited Apple Intelligence as the reason for their purchase. Ive also had people tell me that they can’t wait to buy the iPhone 17 Air, rumored to be released this fall, but only because of its ultra-slim design, not because of Apple Intelligence. It’s not just my anecdotal observations that support my belief. As CNET reported in December 2024, a survey from trade journal SellCell found that 73% of iPhone owners and 87% of Samsung owners said that AI features “add little to no value to their smartphone experiences. This was on top of an earlier CNET survey that found that among the 10 things that motivate consumers to upgrade their smartphone, AI integrations took 7th place, with only 18% of respondents saying it matters (beating out phone color). The most motivating factor spurring upgrades was longer battery life (61%), followed by more storage (46%), camera features (38%), phone display/screen size (32%), keeping the ecosystem (i.e., iOS to iOS, Android to Android) (24%), and a new product release (23%). Meanwhile, in January, TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuoone of the most reputable and respected Apple analystspublished a blog post stating that there was no evidence that Apple Intelligence was actually driving hardware upgrade cycles. If Kuo, SellCell, CNET, and my observations are correctand I think they arethen Apples delay of Apple Intelligence features wont have much of an impact on iPhone sales in the near term. The iPhone is already one of the most versatile AI smartphones on the market But lets say I’m wrong. Lets say the average consumer really does care that their smartphone is packed with AI. I still dont think Apples delay of some Apple Intelligence features matters that muchat least when it comes to the delays impact on iPhone sales. Why? Because the iPhone is already a powerful AI smartphoneand it has been for years. Not only are the majority of previously announced Apple Intelligence features already integrated into supported iPhones, but the App Store is filled with hundreds of AI apps, all of which allow you to expand the iPhone’s AI capabilities. These apps include chatbots like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity, plus myriad AI image-generation apps, like DaVinci and WOMBO, and AI note-taking apps like Otter. Like other tech enthusiasts, Im looking forward to the complete rollout of Apple Intelligence. But the iPhone doesnt depend on it for its AI capabilities. The iPhone is already a platform on which hundreds of AI apps and services can runand Apples delay in releasing its own AI offerings doesnt change that.
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E-Commerce
Ever get a feeling that something isnt right? An internal voice that is trying to tell you something? It could be your intuition bubbling up. Or maybe its anxiety. Or both. Learning to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition can help you determine if that feeling is something you should listen to or address in another way, but its easy to confuse the two. People have become disconnected from their emotions, beliefs, and self-confidence, says intuitive life coach Tammy Adams. They have so much doubt within themselves that they don’t listen to their own intuition. People veer off with fear and live more in anxiety than they do in confidence. Your gut feeling is your intuition, says Adams. It has many different names, she says. I call it our sixth sense. The more you connect to your senses, the more information you get. Anxiety is an alert system, a feeling of apprehension, says Laura Day, a practicing intuitive and author of Practical Intuition: How to Harness the Power of Your Instinct and Make It Work for You. It can be useful momentarily because it makes you pay attention to the data that intuition is providing, she says. That data gives you a blueprint that leads you immediately to the right action or perception. Anxiety has put the spotlight on your intuition, but it is the intuition that is useful, not the anxiety. When anxiety persists after that, it is no longer useful. A test for anxiety Telling the difference between intuition and anxiety is simple, says Adams. If acting on the information makes you feel free, its intuition. If that feeling doesn’t go away, its anxiety. We often create our own anxiety by putting ourselves in negative situations because we’re creatures of habit, she says. True anxiety is not something someone just catches or has. Its been built up. The only time that anxiety would persist in an intuitive paradigm is if a boundary has been crossed, says Day. For example, you see a good friend do something unethical and dangerous, such as stealing or lying. Your intuition tells you that the person needs to be stopped, but you will often be anxious because someone close to you has broken rules you hold dear. How to Get Better at Listening to Your Intuition Your intuition is something that needs to be trained, and its different from belief, says Day. Trust is belief without proof, she says. Intuition provides proof; it does not require belief to be present and useful. I am wary when I hear people say, I believe in intuition. That is like saying, I believe in gravity. Intuition simply is. If you refine and document its action, you quickly discover that you can rely on it. But when you magicalize it with belief, you remove its burden of proof, thus rendering it less useful. Day recommends recording your feelings of intuition. You can use a journal, for example, but she recommends removing any attached emotional content. Also, dont try to make sense of what you feel. We get lots of information all the time, but we don’t have a very good filing system, especially for our intuitive information, says Day. Intuition functions best on automatic pilot. When you document it, you begin to see that it’s accurate, it’s precognitive. Your subconscious will make it more available. It’s noticing what you notice, not looking for anything. The importance of goal-setting To use intuition, its important to know what youre working on and know what your goals are. You dont see what you’re not looking for, says Day. You will know how to address your intuition when you know what your goals are. Adams also recommends practicing meditation for at least 20 minutes a day as a way to make room for intuition. Allow yourself to step away from situations that could become negative habits, such as wasting your night on things that are not important, she says. Reclaim quality time by doing meditation, being silent, or walking in nature. . . . Pay attention to your breath. When youre quiet, your soul, spirit, and bodythe true trinity that’s inside of uswill have an epiphany and the knowledge and knowing inside you starts kicking in. Every human being has intuition, says Adams. We can all feel energy, because we are all energy, she says. Feel the energy coming off other people. The energy may tell you that person’s not so happy, or that person is really happy. You can’t lose your intuition. You can disconnect from it, you can ignore it, but you can’t lose it.
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