Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. Sign up here to get it nightly. 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. 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. Did she want it? The second trip was a ten-day pilgrimage to Egypt, followed by a third trip to the Serengeti in Tanzania. It was Burning Man camp meets baby Davos meets a pleasure cruise. 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.
On Instagram, some of the guests posted videos of themselves lounging in bathing suits and dancing like they were in an ecstatic cult. 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.
Word of the Belong Circles spread among the cruisers, and by the last day, about of the guests joined. It was then she knew what she was building might actually work. 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.
In , Robert D. Two decades of technology, dating apps, a fractured political system, a pandemic, and any number of other factors later and, in May , 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. Loneliness has become an epidemic, and we need to find ways to strengthen connections and relationships or we will, well, die. Some loneliness solutions are even emerging from the very companies that arguably contributed to the erosion of connection in the first place.
