I was looking for a change of scenery after spending most of my adult life in San Francisco. I knew I’d miss the food and the nature and most importantly my friends, but my gut was telling me I needed to move back to the East Coast.

I began last year in the startup idea maze. Lots of reading, long walks, and podcasts. What they say is true, you genuinely need to find a problem you’re interested in spending at least a decade trying to solve. You should work on an important problem1 if you want to produce important work. Your interest will keep you going during the low points, the times of uncertainty, and the loneliness of discovering a new path.

I don’t think I truly understood what living in the moment meant until last year. Every day is a unique experience when you’re navigating the idea maze. It feels more like an artistic practice you sit down to every morning than clocking into into a 9-5. I don’t think I had more than a week or two planned in advance. I wanted to be nimble and spontaneous. Some directions will lead to dead ends but eventually a path will reveal itself that takes you further into the labyrinth, and you need to be ready to meet that moment. The freedom is nice, but this lifestyle is not easy. It takes courage and mental fortitude to keep exploring after reaching so many dead ends and ignoring the detours and distractions that come your way.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an interest with the consumer social industry. The social apps on our phones set the stage for modern culture, influencing commerce, geopolitics, and our daily lives – what a privilege it must be to build software that impacts the lives of so many people. Yet I’ve always dismissed trying to start a company here because the industry has seemed so difficult to break into. Not only do you need to create a product with organic network effects, build an iconic brand, and time the market perfectly around changing consumer behavior, you have to find a way to fund your ambition in a sea of free applications.

But I couldn’t seem to shake how many important problems there are to solve here and how deeply they resonated with me. Maybe it was the recency bias of that acute loneliness you feel when moving to a new city and don’t know anyone yet that compelled me to revisit this space.

Never let a crisis go to waste.

I leaned into the discomfort. I treated making friends as a full-time job. I studied the loneliness epidemic. I downloaded the friend matching apps. I went to meet ups and book clubs and parties. It took effort. It took time. But I started making friends.

Your goal is to find people aligned with your values and to build trust. First impressions matter. You won’t connect with everyone. Remember it’s just the beginning of hopefully rich and lasting relationships.

This year of making friends gave me the opportunity to study the process and overanalyze what seemed to work in our hypermodern digital age, particularly where technology aided the process or fell short of its claims.

And now this year, I’ll be channeling this learning into new projects – building software that helps us be more human and writing about my journey last year.

Thank you to everyone who made last year a great one. Special shoutouts to Lola, Carly, Nicole, Ruby, and Lucas for being such welcoming hosts. I hope to pay it forward this year.

You’re engaging with me and my thoughts, but we’re not talking with each other in person. I don’t know what you look like. I don’t know how tall you are. Do you have siblings? What is your favorite color?

I’m 6’ if I were lying on a dating app, an lonely independent only-child, and if I really had to pick, I’d choose turquoise.

Normally we’d be trading these facts about ourselves at a cocktail party or a picnic in the park. I’d ask about your day or what show you’re watching on Netflix. We might trade phone numbers and make plans to hang out again.

But when we’re sharing our lives online, things feel a bit one-sided. I post into the void hoping I catch your attention, and if I do, you choose how to engage. I bet you’ll passively consume this and move onto the next thing. If I’ve really struck a chord you’ll feel the urge to reach out.

Parasocial relationships, once exclusive to celebrities and media personalities, now influence our behavior and daily lives. In our media filled world, you’ve probably developed more parasocial relationships than real life relationships. How many podcasts are you listening to? Do you watch YouTube while you eat? That Instagram story you just liked — when was the last time you talked to that person? Do you know who’s formed a parasocial relationship with you?

We see a familiar face, we hear a friendly voice, and our brains are tricked into thinking we’re socially satisfied. But when the phone screen goes dark and our reflection stares back, we come to the realization: was it all in our head?

I worry what happens if we continue spending more time engaging with media and machines than with people. Are we headed to a lonely world? A quiet world? Why are we so afraid of talking to people?

Don’t get me wrong — I think the Internet is one of humanity’s greatest inventions. As with any technology, we learn its risks alongside its benefits and should put appropriate safety measures in place.

I think society’s greatest risk is that we forget how to socialize. We engage indirectly online, attach ourselves to strangers we’ve never met, and have our thoughts reflected back onto us by machines we believe can think. All the while, our social skills atrophy, we get lost inside our heads, and become deer in the headlights1 when re-entering the physical world.

If we can’t relate in person, we can’t coordinate change. We will grow more divided, and we will fail to solve problems like climate change.

So how can we break free? How can we exercise our social skills? How do we form meaningful relationships in our extremely online age? That’s what I hope to explore here, and I encourage you to subscribe. But be aware of the parasocial relationship you’re signing up for — maybe you introduce yourself first so things aren’t so one-sided.

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