In May 2023, United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring loneliness and social isolation a public health epidemic. The advisory cited research showing that lacking social connection increases the risk of premature death by 26%, that the health consequences of loneliness are comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes per day, and that more than half of American adults reported measurable levels of loneliness even before the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the trend.
I want to sit with that for a moment before moving on to the technology and the vision and the product roadmap, because it's the foundational reality that everything Mustartlove exists to address. We are not building a better swipe mechanic. We are not optimizing a subscription revenue model. We are trying to do our small part in solving one of the defining human crises of our era — the progressive deterioration of the social fabric that has historically been the primary source of meaning, resilience, and belonging in human life.
That context shapes how I think about where human relationships are headed and what technology companies in our space have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do about it.
How We Got Here: The Loneliness Epidemic's Deep Roots
The loneliness epidemic didn't begin with smartphones or social media, though both have played roles in accelerating it. Its roots are structural: decades of declining civic participation, the erosion of "third places" (the spaces outside home and work where communities traditionally formed), increasing geographic mobility that disrupts established social networks, longer working hours that crowd out time for social engagement, and urban and suburban design that optimizes for individual consumption rather than communal interaction.
Robert Putnam's landmark 2000 book Bowling Alone documented the collapse of American civic life with meticulous data: declining participation in civic organizations, religious institutions, neighborhood associations, amateur sports leagues, and — yes — bowling leagues. Putnam identified the erosion of what he called "social capital" — the network of relationships and norms of reciprocity that allow communities to function effectively — as one of the most consequential trends in American life. The book was published before social media existed in its current form, before the smartphone changed how we spend every idle moment. The trends Putnam documented have only accelerated since.
What social media and smartphone-era platforms contributed was a substitution effect: they provided experiences that superficially resembled social connection — scrolling through friends' updates, accumulating likes, messaging in group chats — while often not delivering the actual physiological and psychological benefits of genuine social engagement. Research consistently shows that passive social media consumption is negatively correlated with wellbeing, while active, meaningful social interaction remains positively correlated. We built the world's most sophisticated systems for distributing the appearance of social connection while the substance of it continued to decline.
Gen Z: A Generation Rewriting the Social Contract
If you want to understand where human relationships are headed, pay close attention to Generation Z — the cohort born roughly between 1997 and 2012. They are the first generation to have grown up entirely in the smartphone era. Their formative social development happened against a backdrop of social media, constant connectivity, and an unprecedented availability of digital social substitutes. And the patterns they're exhibiting are both troubling and, in certain respects, genuinely hopeful.
The troubling patterns are well-documented. Gen Z reports higher levels of loneliness than any previous generation in survey data. They form romantic relationships later, date less frequently, and report lower sexual activity than millennials did at the same age. Mental health challenges — anxiety, depression, and the specific phenomenon of social anxiety in face-to-face contexts — are more prevalent in Gen Z than in prior generations. The causal relationship between these trends and digital technology use is complex and contested, but the correlation is robust.
The hopeful patterns are less frequently discussed but equally real. Gen Z is, in aggregate, more aware of the loneliness problem than any prior generation. They are more likely to explicitly name social connection as a priority in their lives, more likely to seek help for mental health challenges, and more likely to design their social lives intentionally rather than leaving them to chance. They are the generation that normalized therapy, that built elaborate friendship rituals, that understood explicitly that meaningful connection requires effort and doesn't just happen passively.
They are also, interestingly, exhibiting a cultural backlash against the digital substitutes that defined their adolescence. The rise of offline social hobbies — vinyl collecting, tabletop gaming, craft brewing, community gardening — is disproportionately a Gen Z phenomenon. So is the growth of interest-based communities that organize around shared activities rather than shared demographics. Gen Z doesn't want less technology. They want technology that serves their social goals rather than replacing them.
The Pendulum Swings: From Superficiality to Depth
Every major social technology goes through a similar arc. In the first phase, the technology is novel and exciting; people use it for its own sake and the experience of using it is inherently rewarding. In the second phase, the novelty wears off and the technology's value becomes purely instrumental; it serves a purpose, and that purpose is evaluated on its merits. In the third phase, users who find the technology insufficient for their real needs either abandon it or demand that it evolve.
Social media is somewhere in the second or third phase of this arc for most adult users. Dating apps are in a similar position. The novelty of swiping through potential partners that characterized the early years of app-based dating has largely worn off. Users who remained are evaluating these tools instrumentally — do they actually help me find meaningful relationships? — and many are finding the answer wanting.
I believe we are at the beginning of a significant pendulum swing in social technology: away from scale, speed, and superficiality and toward depth, trust, and genuine human connection. The indicators are everywhere. The growth of small, curated social platforms at the expense of massive ones. The rise of audio and video interaction in contexts where text previously dominated. The proliferation of in-person community events organized through digital platforms. The growing user appetite for slower, more considered interaction rather than the rapid-fire swipe and scroll formats that dominated the previous decade.
This shift represents a massive opportunity for platforms that were built for depth from the beginning — that didn't first optimize for superficial engagement and then try to pivot toward meaning. It's one reason I'm genuinely excited about the moment Mustartlove finds itself in.
AI's Role in Facilitating Genuine Human Connection
Artificial intelligence is often positioned in public discourse as a threat to human connection — a technology that will substitute for relationships, reduce human interaction, and accelerate the loneliness trends we've described. I think this framing, while not entirely without basis, misses the more important and more likely scenario: AI as infrastructure that makes genuine human connection easier, more likely, and more durable.
The core problem with finding compatible people — whether for friendship, romance, or community — is fundamentally an information problem. The person you'd find most meaningful to know may be ten miles away, or in the same industry, or at the same gym, without either of you ever crossing paths in a context that would reveal your compatibility. We have historically relied on proximity and happenstance to create those intersections, and the results have been inefficient at best and systematically biased at worst (toward connecting people who are already similar in easily observable ways, while missing deeper compatibility that's harder to observe).
AI changes this equation. It can surface signals of deep compatibility that humans couldn't identify on their own. It can map the complex multi-dimensional space of lifestyle preferences, values, and behavioral patterns and identify overlaps that would never emerge through casual browsing. It can facilitate serendipitous encounters between people whose compatibility would have been invisible through traditional matching approaches. Done well, AI in social platforms is not a substitute for human connection. It is the mechanism by which human connection becomes far more likely to occur.
The key qualifier is "done well." AI that optimizes for engagement metrics will produce exactly the kind of superficial, compulsive interaction patterns that have characterized the previous generation of social platforms. AI that optimizes for human outcomes — genuine connection, relationship formation, community belonging — can be something qualitatively different. At Mustartlove, the latter is what we're trying to build.
Community as the Antidote: Why Social Infrastructure Matters
If I had to identify the single most important concept in thinking about the future of human social connection, it would be infrastructure. Not the metaphorical infrastructure of digital platforms, but the actual physical and institutional infrastructure of third places, community organizations, and shared activity spaces that makes sustained social connection possible in the first place.
Robert Putnam's research identified the loss of this infrastructure as the primary driver of social capital decline. His proposed remedies were largely structural: rebuilding civic institutions, redesigning urban spaces, creating new forms of community organization suited to contemporary life. Technology was not a central part of his framework, writing as he was at the dawn of the web era.
Twenty-five years later, technology has become an unavoidable part of any serious answer to the problem. Digital platforms are how communities find each other, coordinate, and maintain coherence across the increasingly mobile and dispersed lives of contemporary adults. The question is whether those platforms can serve as genuine community infrastructure — as scaffolding for the kind of rich, sustained social engagement that generates real social capital — or whether they'll continue to serve primarily as advertising platforms with community features grafted on.
This is the question that drives Mustartlove's long-term vision. We want to build social infrastructure for the communities that form around shared activities and interests — a platform where those communities can find each other, organize, grow, and sustain themselves over time. Romantic matching is a core feature of what we build, but it exists within a larger vision of what human social life could look like if it were better supported by well-designed technology.
The Long View: What Social Connection Could Look Like in 2035
Looking ten years forward from where we are today, I see a genuine possibility of social technology that is qualitatively different from what we have now — not in its technical sophistication but in its relationship to human wellbeing and social fabric.
In that vision, the dominant social platforms are organized around shared activities and interests rather than around broadcasting personal identity. They facilitate in-person interaction as actively as digital interaction. They measure their success primarily by outcomes for their users — connection quality, community health, relationship formation — rather than by engagement metrics that are easily divorced from user wellbeing. They treat safety and privacy as foundational design constraints rather than compliance burdens. And they contribute to the development of social capital in their communities in ways that are visible and measurable.
This is not a utopian vision. It doesn't require technology to solve problems that are fundamentally human or political. It doesn't claim that an app can substitute for the kind of sustained, patient community-building work that has always been necessary to create genuinely healthy social environments. It simply suggests that technology could do a much better job of supporting that work than most current platforms do — and that companies willing to design for that goal, accepting the constraints and trade-offs it requires, will find themselves on the right side of where the market is headed.
Mustartlove's Long-Term Vision for Social Infrastructure
Mustartlove's long-term vision is to become the platform where people go to build their social lives — not just their romantic relationships but their friendships, their communities, their sense of belonging in the places where they live. We want to be the platform that serious community builders use to grow and sustain their groups. We want to be the place where people in a new city find their people. We want to be the infrastructure that supports the kind of rich, layered social existence that used to happen in third places that are now largely gone.
Achieving that vision requires us to build across several dimensions simultaneously. We need to continue deepening our romantic matching capabilities, because helping people find love remains central to what we do and who we are. We need to build out our community infrastructure — the tools for organizing events, managing groups, creating experiences that bring people together in meaningful ways. We need to expand our geographic footprint to reach the communities, large and small, that lack the social infrastructure they need. And we need to maintain the safety, privacy, and ethical design commitments that are the foundation of user trust.
It's an ambitious agenda. But the problem we're addressing — loneliness, social disconnection, the fraying of the social fabric — is genuinely urgent and genuinely large. And the opportunity to build technology that contributes meaningfully to solving it, rather than exacerbating it, is the reason I wake up every morning and come to work.
The future of human connection is not predetermined. It's being shaped right now by the choices that technology companies make about what to optimize for, what to measure, and what values to encode in their products. We intend to be one of the companies that shape it well.