How Far Would You Go To Make A Friend?

Photo: Christian Bettelli

In her own telling, every business Radha Agrawal has ever started or project she has dreamed up or mission she has embarked on was born of a persistent, lifelong desire to belong. She was a partner in Wild, her twin sister Miki’s gluten-free-restaurant chain that became the Central Perk of their wide-ranging friend group. A few years later, a late-night conversation with a friend about their shared wish for a sober dance floor inspired her to start Daybreaker, a substance-free, early-morning dance-party pop-up that’s now in its 11th year. She traveled the world, meeting with Indigenous communities in places like the Amazon and the Serengeti, studying how to live communally, researching the dangers of loneliness and the benefits of togetherness, and putting those findings in a book called Belong: Find Your People, Create Community & Live a More Connected Life. While Thinx, the period-panty company she co-founded, wasn’t the direct result of her need to belong, she started the business with her sister, who served as CEO, and their best friend, Antonia Saint Dunbar, using early Kickstarter donations from the network of like-minded optimists she had carefully nurtured. Belonging, she says, is her raison d’être. “I actually really believe that we could live in harmony, as a species, very quickly if every single one of us focused on belonging,” she tells me. This past fall, Agrawal launched the purest distillation of her mission: an anti-loneliness nonprofit, Belong Center, that will “end loneliness and empower belonging for all.”

As befits something that is a calling, not simply a business venture, Belong Center in its current iteration started with both a divination and a boat. One day, during the pandemic, a Daybreaker collaborator called Agrawal up. He often helped her plan global dance adventures, co-hosting events in Tulsa or Cuba, and now he had access to a boat that could go to Antarctica that she could use for $2 million. Did she want it? Yes, of course she did, even if she didn’t yet know what to do with it. “I needed to tune in,” she explains, to figure out what she was meant to do with this nautical gift from the universe. As she meditated, a voice came to her, repeating a mantra she often heard in dreams and doodled in her journal: “Wow! It’s now! Wow! It’s now! Wow! It’s now!” She tells me, “It was Mother Earth saying,‘Wow, it’s now. Bring 150 of the most wealthy, influential founder voices to this part of the world’” — Antarctica — “‘and show them my most tender parts.’”

In response to Mother Earth’s business advice, she decided the cruise would be the first excursion hosted by her new venture, Wow It’s Now by Daybreaker, an invite-only adventure series that takes founders, CEOs, and other high-net-worth individuals on “an experience they never forget” with the shared goal of raising money for climate-change or social nonprofits handpicked by Agrawal. (At $15,000 a ticket, she paid off the cost of the boat.)

The second trip was a ten-day pilgrimage to Egypt, followed by a third trip to the Serengeti in Tanzania. The fourth and most recent was a voyage around the Arctic Circle this past June, for which she brought in members of the Sápara tribe from Ecuador and the Scandinavian Sami community for an exchange of world-healing knowledge.

It was Burning Man camp meets baby Davos meets a pleasure cruise. Agrawal invited entrepreneurs like Ken Howery (co-founder of PayPal); downtown matchmaker Amy Van Doran; Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money; as well as her former partner (and current business partner) Eli Clark-Davis; her friend (and business partner) Timothy Patch; her friend Karine Plantadit, who leads the yoga portion of almost every Daybreaker; her sister (and business partner) Miki; her and Clark-Davis’s 6-year-old daughter. Every day there was morning yoga or a Daybreaker dance session. Guests could choose to attend dream-interpretation workshops, solstice full-moon celebrations (with a celestial dress code), and off-ship excursions. At night, Madame Vivien V, a drag queen with a House of Yes residency, emceed the entertainment. On Instagram, some of the guests posted videos of themselves lounging in bathing suits and dancing like they were in an ecstatic cult. Becca Bernstein, a former senior manager at a branch of Sheryl Sandberg’s foundation and the current chief community and operations officer of Belong Center, wrote a caption describing it as a trip where people were “collectively waking the fuck up.” “This is not Portlandia,” they wrote. “This is about actually taking back our power in how we relate to the planet and each other.”

The cruises also served as a chance for Agrawal to launch a sort of pilot program for what would become the foundation of Belong Center and its key offering, the Belong Circle, a probing guided conversation meant to turn strangers into intimates. Almost every day, Agrawal hosted a Belong Circle for the ship’s passengers. Over the course of the ten-day trip, she workshopped conversation prompts (“How are you doing really?” was a common one) and toyed around with meeting formats (should it be one big group or little breakout groups?), trying to figure out the best way to encourage people to connect. Word of the Belong Circles spread among the cruisers, and by the last day, about 100 of the 150 guests joined. It was then she knew what she was building might actually work.

During a “reentry call,” Agrawal announced a portion of that year’s Wow It’s Now grant ($500,000) would be given to Belong Center. This year, she plans to bring the Belong Circle model to all 50 states and the District of Columbia and start the very complicated task of solving loneliness.

Loneliness is part of the agony and ecstasy of being alive, our body’s way of telling us we need to reach out and touch somebody’s hand — uncomfortable, yes, but not unnatural. In 2000, Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone warned Americans that the way we lived (increasingly isolated) was making us lonelier. Two decades of technology, dating apps, a fractured political system, a pandemic, and any number of other factors later and, in May 2023, the surgeon general was declaring loneliness a chronic disease akin to smoking. People who experience social isolation are 32 percent more likely to die earlier from any cause, a report from the same year found. A recent cover story in The Atlantic painstakingly charted how antisocial we’ve become; Americans of all ages are spending more time alone than ever before. Loneliness has become an epidemic, and we need to find ways to strengthen connections and relationships or we will, well, die.

But as it always goes, an old problem creates new opportunities, and in the 20 months since the surgeon general’s report, an influx of founders and entrepreneurs have joined Belong Center in jumping into the growing market for human-to-human connection. Some loneliness solutions are even emerging from the very companies that arguably contributed to the erosion of connection in the first place. Dating app Bumble now has the Bumble for Friends app and, in late 2023, added the “Plans” feature to help people transition to offline meetup groups. Hinge has invested $1 million to fund nonprofits that create opportunities for people to connect in person for reasons other than dating. Many of these companies seem to approach loneliness the same way they have approached dating: as a problem of search optimization.

“I don’t think we necessarily lost the way to connect. I think it’s more like a system or design problem,” says Maxime Barbier, a 40-year-old Paris-based entrepreneur. Whereas a century ago our network was all close by — our parents, our co-workers — now, though we may have more ability to stay in touch with far-flung friends and family, we’re less likely to have community built into our daily lives. “We don’t go to church on Sunday,” Barbier says. “We don’t go to the football game on Saturday.We don’t go to the grocery market with our parents anymore. It just separates us. We are in our own bubble.” After realizing his social network was shrinking, he wanted to find people who might be more available to hang out. He had just sold his media company and decided to create an app to provide people with something regular to do and someone to do it with.

Barbier hit a few early snags: He found if you just paired people for friendship, like Tinder but platonic, and a man and a woman matched, the man would inevitably try to turn their encounter into a date. Activities with groups of strangers were too hard to scale, but dinner seemed to be the sweet spot — something everyone could get behind. He landed on Timeleft, an app that pairs five strangers for a dinner date. The app even suggests a nearby bar for after, if attendees hit it off. “Even if you don’t find your best friend, that’s okay. You just have a nice moment with a human being, and you say, Okay, that’s not so bad after all,” he says. Timeleft joined an already crowded field. There’s the Breakfast (connecting strangers over breakfast) and Saturday (connecting strangers for spontaneous hangouts).

An app that works so well it drives people off the app is a success from a human, combating-loneliness standpoint, but it’s not necessarily a sustainable business. Barbier says Timeleft users kept going rogue, starting their own WhatsApp groups to keep hanging out. Now, he plans to introduce a feature that allows people to reconnect via the app and request to have another dinner.

Rather than offer a quick-fix friendship, other companies are treating loneliness as a chronic illness that requires more fundamental lifestyle changes. These companies have gone back to basics, teaching users how to improve conversation skills and sharpen their ability to be intimate. Peoplehood, a meetup company started by SoulCycle founders Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler, reportedly got $7.2 million in venture-capital funding to help people learn mindful-conversation skills, and Renate Nyborg, the former CEO of Tinder, founded an AI-chatbot company, Meeno, that lets you practice difficult conversations before you try to have them with human beings. Meeno has raised over $5 million, $3.9 million of which came from Sequoia Capital.

“There are two existential threats we’ll experience in our lifetime,” says Nyborg. “One is the climate crisis; the other is loneliness. And I think loneliness is actually the one that we should be more worried about.” When Nyborg left Tinder in 2022, she was so discouraged that she considered leaving tech altogether: “I had been trying to use technology to help people connect and feel joy for over ten years, and I just saw things get worse and worse. Technology was making loneliness worse.” But a conversation with an AI scientist named Andrew Ng steered her out of techno-pessimism. The new frontier of AI, he told her, was mental health and relationships.

“By creating a low-risk way to practice communicating well and to learn about yourself, I actually think we might move toward healthier relationships than we’ve ever had,” she says. “I really believe that.” Nyborg thinks she’s learned from Tinder’s mistakes. Tinder may have undermined human connection as much as it fostered it, but Meeno, she says, will be different. It’s not a chat girlfriend but a chat coach, meant to give people the courage to connect. What could go wrong?

Belong Center’s goals are not so different from those of a Meeno chatbot, but instead of being AI based, Agrawal says, “we’re somatics based. We’re movement based. We’re joy based. We’re optimism based. We’re friendship-making based.” In September, Agrawal, a diminutive but energetic woman with a large off-white fedora pulled over her long black hair, ushered me into the Daybreaker–Belong Center offices in a former factory space in Greenpoint. (“Beyoncé’s Lemonade was filmed in the same building,” she noted.) The offices were more hippie mother’s den than Eames-chair start-up. Dream catchers dangled from the wooden beams; the number of organic teas and ashwagandha-centric beverages on offer rivaled Erewhon. We settled into couches so broken-in I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand up elegantly. On the wall was a picture of Agrawal with Oprah, who invited Daybreaker to be part of her 2020 arena tour.

Daybreaker was an unlikely success story, considering the health of the business hinges on getting people to wake up at 5 a.m. and dance wildly to EDM with strangers without a single drug in their system. It has had over 500,000 attendees in 33 cities. “We’re already leaders in the collective-dance space, but where we’re not known yet is the loneliness space,” said Agrawal.

Her dream is that Belong Center will “eradicate loneliness and the shame of actually admitting our loneliness,” Agrawal said with unabashed earnestness. “There used to be a lot of shame around our periods, right? Like, ‘Oh my God, my period. Don’t tell anyone it’s my time of the month.’ Now you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m free-bleeding, whatever,’ because of Thinx.” (The company sold a majority stake to Kimberly-Clark in 2022, four years after a former employee alleged inappropriate office behavior, forcing Agrawal’s sister Miki to step down as CEO.) Agrawal is proud of the revolution Thinx started around period awareness and feels Belong Center can accomplish the same for loneliness. “Only one in two people bleed,” she explained, “but every single human feels lonely.”

Agrawal’s core beliefs about loneliness and why people feel it go back to childhood — beyond it, actually: “We’re continuously chasing this feeling of that womb environment our whole lives. And so that’s really, for me, the purpose of what we’re doing with Belong Center and Daybreaker. It’s like returning to self, returning to wholeness, returning to that exhale of I’m home.”

Her childhood, she recalled, was full of community. Agrawal, whose mother is Japanese and father is Indian, was raised in Montreal, where she attended festivals and parties and went to Japanese school on Saturday and Hindi school on Sunday. She played soccer in college. Her parents’ house was like “Grand Central station” — always full of people. Her own house is still like that. Just the other day, she came home to the surprise of a friend hosting a meeting of about 20 people in her living room.

Though she finds connection easy and isn’t shy about sharing — telling me, basically an hour into our first real conversation, about the inner workings of her marriage and later about her love life and her sister’s love life — she knows loneliness. As a hippie child in a careerist family, she often felt like the black sheep. At age 30, she decided to prioritize finding a community of her own, a journey she details in a book chapter titled “My Epiphany,” which also includes her updated version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (renamed Agrawal’s Hierarchy of Needs), in which she places belonging under the category of “Basic Human Needs.”

While researching for the book, she had another epiphany: “Holy shit, every single social issue we face as a human species ladders down to I don’t belong, therefore dot, dot, dot: I will rape and pillage the planet. I will be violent with guns. I will shoot a school.” She sees social ills from processed foods to fascism as a problem of belonging: “I really believe that if I helped every single executive at Kellogg’s and every executive at Halliburton, or every single fucked-up organization that is raping and pillaging our planet — you can take some of these names off the record — but if you could just really get each person in the world to feel like, Oh, there’s a kid that sees me and gets me and loves me and holds me and supports me. I could confide in them, I actually feel like one by one, systematically, we’ll take down every social issue. We’ll live in harmony. And that’s what Belong Circles are really about.”

Somewhere in Agrawal’s explanation of what sets Belong Center apart is the suggestion that the problem is not just about a lack of community centers or churches or dinners at neighbors’ houses. We’ve lost the ability to carry on the kind of conversation that creates real connections with people who see us authentically and whom we see in return. It’s possible we’ve all been lonely zombies, confusing “medium friends” (a term coined by the New York Times for a certain kind of casual relationship) with real, close friends. If our friendship-making muscle has atrophied, then what’s the workout to pump it back up?

Instead of AI personal trainers buildingthat muscle through virtual chats, Agrawal is betting on Belong Circles. She’s taken the intimate, soul-baring gatherings she workshopped in the Arctic Circle, and trained a team of “community architects” (“That’s a term I coined”) to facilitate them. The track record for in-person solutions so far is not great. Peoplehood, the company started by the founders of SoulCycle, hosted programming similar to Belong Center’s — where Belong has circles, it had “gathers,” which offered guided conversations to help people socialize in more mindful ways. But currently, if you visit the Peoplehood website to sign up for a gather, the calendars are empty.

Agrawal isn’t worried. (“I would never bet against Radha and Miki,” says Heather Hartnett, CEO of Human Ventures, an early-stage venture fund. “They’ve proven, time after time, that they can build a community, a cultlike following, a brand.”) The first year of Belong Center has only bolstered Agrawal’s confidence. It got its first major press mention in The Wall Street Journal this past February, before the programs had even launched. Thousands of people emailed wanting to join, attend, or volunteer, she told me. Belong Center is a nonprofit, and inarguably still small-scale, but on top of the $1 million raised across various expeditions, it has secured $750,000 in funding from donors like Sam Ben-Avraham, co-founder of sneaker store Kith, and mushroompreneur Paul Stamets. And it established partnerships with AARP and the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center.

Agrawal is also, she said, well into solving step one of her three-part plan to eradicate loneliness: eliminate shame or, in this case, get people to admit they are lonely enough to do something about it. (Step two: Get to know yourself to get to know others. Step three: Gather.) Erasing shame is often a trick of branding — making a product non-corny enough that people forget they are embarrassed to need it. Agrawal has meticulously developed every aspect of a Belong Center event. “We’re really trying to modernize this nonprofit space. It feels like a Nike brand, like a brand that you can actually see yourself wearing.” She enlisted her Daybreaker DJs to help her develop a playlist called “The Sound of Belonging.” She’s carefully picked event spaces for her Belong Circle events (yoga studios, art galleries, performance venues). And each community architect receives a box containing a highlighter-yellow T-shirt to wear as a uniform; special lightbulbs, so every room has the same warm amber glow; and room spray with a specific “belonging” smell.

It wouldn’t matter if you went to a circle in any one of the 35 states where Belong Center is set to pop up over the next couple of months — wherever you go, the sound, smell (citrus for joy; jasmine and rose for harmony and connection; cardamom and clove for warmth and depth; base notes of sandalwood or cedar for grounding), and feel of belonging would be the same.

Agrawal has big plans for Belong Center in 2025, including a Belong bench program, in which bright-yellow semicircle seating meant to facilitate conversations with strangers will be placed in parks around the country. Each bench will have a QR code with 20 questions designed to help people fall in love, “rupture and repair,” or make a new friend. This summer, there will be a “Belong block-party challenge” encouraging people to throw intentional block parties. There will be more circles but with different seasonal themes (a Friends-giving, a white-elephant party, a Valentine’s Day mixer, etc.). Later in the year, Agrawal wants to start friendship matchmaking, in which strangers will be paired up based on values, interests, geography, and energy. The eventual plan is to build the most comprehensive database in history — “the Wikipedia of community.” And though she can’t say much about it, there are plans for physical locations to house all of the events.

The cornerstone of her vision, though, is still Belong Circles. In September, I attended the very first New York Belong Circle at Sound Mind Center, an event space in Dumbo that focuses on wellness programming.

Agrawal, unmissable in gold-painted jeans (designed by a friend), a brown knit poncho, and her signature fedora (this time in tobacco brown), greeted a stream of her people. She was busy and frenetic; she had a huge hug for Karine Plantadit, the striking yoga instructor from the Arctic Circle cruise, who has a septum ring and a pan-European accent and would lead us through breathwork later, then she turned to introduce me to Timothy Patch, her friend and Daybreaker co-founder, then she spun around to accept a bouquet from her former partner Eli Clark-Davis, a gentle-seeming man wearing a vest without a shirt. “This is my baby daddy,” she exclaimed proudly. Then another friend whose name I didn’t catch and another and yet another.

Our community architect was Holly Johnson, 36, a Michigan native, who found her way to the Belong Center through Daybreaker. Per the curriculum, Johnson offered hugs to those who wanted them (as they release oxytocin and immediately make people feel like they belong). For those who didn’t, she thanked them for taking care of themselves by setting boundaries. After an explanation of how we could donate via the QR code — currently, Belong Circles are free to attend, but there’s a suggested donation of $20 — and icebreakers (hand-over-heart breathwork to help us tune in to ourselves; hectic, giggly speed rounds of rock-paper-scissors to dissolve our self-consciousness), we were broken up into groups of four and took seats on meditation pillows, ready to answer a mildly invasive conversation prompt: “What would you tell someone if you were brave?” One woman, the bravest because she went first, volunteered that while she was proud of the cosmic dinner-party pop-up she started, she had moved from India, where she was established, to New York, where she felt frustrated because people didn’t respect her business ventures enough. Next, a man opened up about his father calling him with a minor emergency earlier that day; though it was easy enough to fix, he felt the pressure of being an adult who parents a parent.

If you walked into this scene at the Sound Mind Center and stumbled upon all of us sitting cross-legged on the floor, sharing feelings but not snacks, what would you think was going on? A cult indoctrination? The end of a mindfulness workshop? Group therapy? AA meeting? Burning Man camp matchmaking? All of the above?

Afterward, some of us milled about exchanging numbers and reasons for coming. One woman had just moved to New York and wanted to find her footing socially. Another was sick of trying to make new friends and getting asked out instead. We all signed up for the Belong Center NYC Telegram meant to connect us after the fact. As I walked into the night alone, I wondered what it would actually take for one of these businesses to “eradicate loneliness.” The experience of the Belong Circle had felt more like a TED Talk than an actual solution. Two weeks later, I still had not heard from the few people I had exchanged numbers with. The Telegram group was silent except for a link to a survey. I reached out to a few of the women I’d met. Most of the responses were noncommittally positive, but one woman identified an underlying ickiness at the expectation of vulnerability throughout the night. “It all felt very elitist and woo-woo,” she said on a call. She didn’t feel she connected to most of the people (“They were all Tulum people!”), and while she exchanged numbers, she hadn’t heard from anyone or followed up herself.

The event seems to have gone better in other cities. Carlos DelaPlaya, the community architect in Miami, said that most of his Belong Circle had gone out for drinks afterward, and he was still in touch with several attendees — one whom he had known loosely before became a main hang. In L.A., Bernstein said, community architects actually have to say out loud, “This is not a networking event,” though one might wonder, If that’s what people want, why not let it organically transmute into whatever connection people desire?

In December, Belong Center hosted its (belated) Friendsgiving. It was a freezing-cold Thursday, and I couldn’t believe I was leaving the house, but I was even more surprised to find the Belong Circle well populated and in full swing when I arrived. Belong Circle had already changed format:Instead of forming a circle, people sat together at tables. The conversation was looser, and while Johnson still gave a preamble and a closing speech, people ignored the question prompts placed at each table and instead just chatted — about their jobs, hobbies, neighborhoods. One man, a Daybreaker regular, came all the way from the Upper West Side to the Bushwick art gallery where the dinner took place and told me he felt it was worth it. This Belong Circle seemed to ditch the lofty idealism in favor of food and fun. Women in one group realized they had a ton in common and left together; members of another group exchanged numbers to start planning a camping trip.

Toward the end of our chat in September,I had asked Agrawal what success and failure would look like for Belong Center. “I think that the idea of something not working is not part of my language in general,” she said. “I’ll tell you why. Because I believe that every single event or experience that we do is an experiment. So we’re constantly learning and failing fast.”

Success, however, she sees clearly: Once you attend a few Belong Circles and practice social connection, you’ll feel brave and strong enough to come to a Daybreaker party. And then, because Daybreaker has paired up with UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center to do a comprehensive national study on the science of collective dance, it won’t just be a Belong Center–to–Daybreaker pipeline; everyone will see the potential for Daybreaker and the power of collective awe to end loneliness. In this dream, “which is going to live beyond me,” when you go to the doctor, instead of antidepressants or meditation, she will prescribe “collective movement, embodied dance experiences, as an antidote for depression, anxiety, loneliness, and isolation,” Agrawal said. Call that the ultimate growth potential.