Infinite Options, Shrinking Worlds
How more connections made us less connected
Quick personal note before the essay: I've been selected as one of three finalists to speak at Love Tomorrow Summit 2026 — the thought leadership stage at Tomorrowland. Now the public decides on who makes it to the holy grounds as a speaker. I'd appreciate your vote: vote here. Voting closes April 20th.
A friend of mine recently shared the following story with me:
“Someone on Bumble suggested to meet. Great, he thought. Let’s do it.
The proposal: 11pm, a quick walk around the block, because she’d be passing through his neighborhood anyway.
Not a drink. Not a coffee. A quick walk. Around the block. At 11pm. Squeezed between whatever came before and whatever came after, like he was an errand on someone’s to-do list.”
My friend said no. And then he deleted the app for good.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that story. Not because it’s dramatic — but because it’s not. It’s completely ordinary. And that’s the problem.
We now have more ways to meet people than any generation before us — and we are worse at actually meeting than ever.
Tinder. Hinge. Bumble. LinkedIn. Instagram DMs. Snap. The promise is enormous: the world is open, everyone is reachable, connection is one swipe away. But something strange is happening. The more options we get, the smaller our worlds become.
Matches that never become conversations. Conversations that never become meetings. Meetings that never become relationships. At every stage, the funnel leaks — not because the technology fails, but because the abundance itself changes how we value the thing at the other end.
When you can match with 30 people in an evening, why invest in one? When someone’s attention is free and infinite, why would it feel valuable? The like, the match, the message — they’ve become the product. The actual human meeting has become an afterthought. Something that feels too effortful, too risky, too real.
And so we end up in a strange paradox: a generation that has never been more connected on screens and never been lonelier in rooms.
The key issue though: It’s not just loneliness. It’s that we’ve quietly downgraded what connection means.
A birthday used to be a phone call. Now it’s a WhatsApp message — if that. We used to sit across from someone and hold the awkward silence until something real emerged. Now we swipe past it.
I’m currently reading “The House in the Cerulean Sea” by TJ Klune. It’s a quiet, strange, beautiful book. In it, a government caseworker named Linus Baker is sent to evaluate children at an orphanage — to assess them, check boxes, file a report. But the longer he stays, the more he realizes that everything his forms are designed to capture misses what actually matters. To understand these children — their character, their beauty, their value — he has to stop evaluating and start showing up. He has to put down the clipboard and sit with them. Be inconvenienced by them. Let them be messy, unpredictable, and real.
It’s a children’s book. But it might be the most accurate description I’ve read of what we’ve lost. We’ve turned human connection into something to be optimized — swiped, filtered, scheduled into a 15-minute slot. And the things that make people worth knowing — the weird, the vulnerable, the slow-to-reveal — those don’t survive that process.
So if digital tools make us lonelier and real connection requires inconvenience — then the places that force us into the same room, with no algorithm, no filter, no exit button, aren’t just entertainment.
They’re medicine.
That’s why the explosion of live events, fan communities, and shared physical experiences isn’t a trend. It’s a correction. People aren’t flocking to concerts, festivals, and sports events because they’re fun. They’re flocking to them because they’re real. Because you can’t swipe past the person standing next to you. Because you can’t ghost someone who’s sharing the same rain, the same bass, the same 3am conversation – and honestly you don’t want to, because you are together with your Community.
Swifties, Adele residencies, Tomorrowland — these aren’t fandoms. They’re belonging systems. The last spaces where strangers still become friends without an algorithm deciding they should.
At Tomorrowland, I’ve watched that happen in real time. Thousands of people from 200+ countries. No bio. No filter. No option to unmatch. You dance next to a stranger, and by the end of the night, you’d trust them with your wallet. Not because of technology. Because of presence.
For me that’s a blueprint for what we need to protect. And it is the future currency in a world that becomes more and more digitized.
And it’s why I applied to speak at this year’s Love Tomorrow Summit. My talk — “Measuring the Wrong Things — And Calling It Progress” — is about exactly this: the dangerous gap between what we track and what actually holds our lives together. We measure engagement rates but not belonging. Screen time but not presence. Matches but not connection.
If any of this resonated, I’d appreciate your vote: https://tally.so/r/5BGXbN
Voting closes April 20th.