If you’re trying to build a business, a brand, or a community, here’s a good north star: focus on helping people feel less lonely.
Or if you prefer this phrasing: helping people feel closer to each other. It’s what we’re all searching for! It’s what we want, more than anything. Well, I suppose to be technical, we all want meaning and purpose. But an important part of living a meaningful life is feeling connected to other people, so there you go.
And it seems that lately we’re all feeling lonelier, even as technology makes all sorts of advancements that supposedly bring us closer.
Children in the Dark
Many people feel very anxious about AI. Some of the general concern is not just “Will this take our jobs?” but a more existential fear. Even the co-founder of Anthropic, one of the largest language models (like Chat-GPT), had this to say in a recent talk:
I remember being a child and after the lights turned out I would look around my bedroom and I would see shapes in the darkness and I would become afraid—afraid these shapes were creatures I did not understand that wanted to do me harm. And so I’d turn my light on. And when I turned the light on I would be relieved because the creatures turned out to be a pile of clothes on a chair, or a bookshelf, or a lampshade.
Now, in the year of 2025, we are the child from that story and the room is our planet. But when we turn the light on we find ourselves gazing upon true creatures, in the form of the powerful and somewhat unpredictable AI systems of today and those that are to come. And there are many people who desperately want to believe that these creatures are nothing but a pile of clothes on a chair, or a bookshelf, or a lampshade. And they want to get us to turn the light off and go back to sleep.
Remember, this story is from one of the main guys who’s advancing the field of AI! And it seems even he’s afraid of it, at least a little.
Then of course you have “social media,” which I put in quotes because it’s so fashionable to complain about now. As with AI, I don’t hate social, I just find it a little disturbing even as I consume it (and benefit from it) in different ways each day.
So we all feel unsettled, anxious, and uncertain. In a single word: lonely.
Like it or not, AI is not going away, nor are the algorithms that influence much of what we encounter online all the time. So in the absence of “let’s burn it all down,” I think the best response is where I started this post: to help people feel less lonely.
Feeling Lonely? Help Someone
If you feel lonely, it might be helpful to ask how you can be of service to someone.
Will this act magically solve your sense of isolation? It actually might! Research shows that performing acts of kindness or helping others can meaningfully improve your own well-being—for instance, a meta-analysis of 27 studies found a small-to-moderate positive effect (δ = 0.28) of kindness on the psychological well-being of the giver.1
But let’s assume that helping someone does not completely solve your loneliness. Even so, it’s still a much better choice than doing nothing. Someone else is now better off because of your actions, and that makes you feel good, too.
This is our mission at NeuroDiversion: to celebrate the lived experience of ADHD, autism, and other types of neurodiversity. It’s the project I’m working on more than any other this fall. Year one (March 2025) was a great start, but we’re going bigger-and-better for year two. This week we’ve been selling tickets and welcoming hundreds of new attendees to the community.
Over the next six months I hope to share the event with you one way or another—some of you in-person (!) and others from afar through posts, pictures, and videos.
And of course, I know that YOU may be working on something to help someone as well. Whatever that thing is, I hope you keep going. We need you!
Thank you as always for reading. Take care of yourself over there. 💚
Happy to help? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of performing acts of kindness on the well-being of the actor. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2018 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103117303451
This is what my ‘Lil Mission’ adresses-
That the most invaluable source of human purpose and pleasure is connection- to oneself, to other people and to the planet.
This is the one thing AI cannot take from us.
This conference looks really cool. But I have a young adult on the spectrum who has limited ability to tolerate noise, crowds and social interaction. Does this event have stuff for someone like that?