Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace once promised to bring humanity closer together. They delivered something else entirely.
The screen economy that emerged around these apps at extraordinary speed optimized for attention. Time spent and daily active users were the twin metrics upon which this economy lived and died. Engagement loops got stickier and friction fell away from increasingly measurable interactions. The promises of internet-induced belonging, of social cohesion, of a new global intimacy all failed to materialize.
Instead, people retreated into their screens at such a scale that major social health organizations started sounding the alarm about a global loneliness epidemic. The World Health Organization found that 1 in 6 people worldwide experienced persistent loneliness, contributing to 870,000 deaths per year and costing governments billions in healthcare, employment, and education. Loneliness often manifests on balance sheets as absenteeism, which costs the U.S. economy alone $406 billion annually.
People are starving for the meaningful social connection they haven’t found online, and now they’re willing to pay. That hunger is quietly giving rise to a brand new market — and a generation of startups racing to serve it.
How social isolation created a new demand
Humans are social animals. We’re biologically wired for social cohesion, which has been a matter of life or death since the days of hunting woolly mammoths and sleeping in caves. As our species marched forward, we built this cohesion into institutions: schools, religious communities, trade associations, sports clubs, civic organizations, even entire nations. Multigeneration families living together were the norm and every city was dotted with bars and cafés for informal gatherings.
When such institutions enter a protracted decline, the desire for community remains. Enter the IRL economy, which I loosely define as an industry that deliberately facilitates in-person belonging. The end goal of all these businesses is to get people offline, together. How a given business goes about doing it is somewhat secondary.
The first phase of this economy arrived in the form of city-specific meet-up apps. Meetup, arguably the most popular of these apps, actually predates most social media platforms, having been initially founded to bring New Yorkers together in the wake of 9/11. Post-Facebook, so to speak, these platforms proliferated, and Meetup eventually proved so successful that WeWork bought it for $200 million in 2017. New startups meanwhile coordinated curated dinners, coworking spaces, running clubs, and shared activities. At WeRoad, we came to it through travel.
We organize trips for small groups of people who do not know each other before departure, specifically targeting young adults in their 20s and 30s. Wherever our travelers go, the base product is the same: guaranteed connection with like-minded people. We saw solo travel become a bona fide phenomenon and we figured many solo travelers still want to meet others along the way. We offered them a way to solo travel together.
It worked. When you give people the chance to rebuild social scaffolding, they will take it.
The economics of the new social scaffolding
Real-world participation has not disappeared. It has, however, slipped through the cracks of an atomized world. In dismantling social scaffolding through the decline of third spaces, real-world participation became difficult to access spontaneously. Going out was no longer a surefire way to meet someone, and the dating apps that emerged within the attention economy didn’t guarantee meaningful connections either.
IRL economy businesses sell that structure. We’re selling context more than a single, easily defined product. We commercialized travel at WeRoad, but we’re actually serving a different need. If we didn’t exist, the solo travelers who use us would still go all over the world. What they wouldn’t necessarily get is the connection we offer. That’s what they’re paying for, more than any specific trip to Mexico or Morocco or Indonesia.
The real product is always connection. We achieve it through structured immersion: 15 strangers together for ten days, away from their routines and homes. Introduce shared logistics, a little unpredictability, and the mild discomfort inherent to being in an unfamiliar place. Titles fade, social bubbles soften, interaction is a matter of course.
There’s basic economics in play, too. Real-world connection feels scarce and scarcity drives demand and increases value. The global travel and experience economy is already valued at over $1 trillion. IRL businesses are meeting that demand by contextualizing real-world connection in abundant, active economic sectors—not just through travel, but also dining out (a global industry valued at $3.9 trillion) and live music (valued at $38.5 billion). But since belonging doesn’t operate like behavioral metrics, its economic value will always be harder to measure than in the attention economy.
It’s too early for formal valuations of the IRL economy. What we do know is that VC investment in consumer startups, which includes IRL business, rose 25% between 2023 and the end of 2024. We can also point to funds like the Jägermeister-backed Best Nights VC, which specifically invests in startups dedicated to nightlife and going out together. And Tinder is now beta testing an in-person events tab offering pottery classes, raves, and bowling nights. Something big is happening here.
Friction-maxxing and mass atomization
In 2026, we’re seeing a new trend emerge: friction-maxxing.
Friction-maxxing is the deliberate rejection of seamless convenience — the transactional optimization that virtually every consumer-facing company has ruthlessly pursued for a decade. You order dinner without speaking to anyone. You rent a bike by scanning a QR code. You work from home, stream on demand, and feel constantly stimulated while remaining physically alone. Friction-maxxing refuses that bargain.
The friction-maxxers, however, need somewhere to go to find the connection they seek, and this is where the IRL economy comes in.
None of this is precisely new. Although social atomization exploded in the age of social media, it had already begun to take hold in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Family members moved away from one another. Professional environments became increasingly tenuous as places to build community, despite colleagues being the only built-in social circle for many young professionals. Traditional community structures continued to decline. Digital communication emerged as the default, a development accelerated by the pandemic. In other words, we’ve been headed this way for a long time.
The IRL economy is still emerging, but the demand behind it extends far beyond the 1 in 6 people experiencing persistent loneliness. The friction-maxxers aren’t just rejecting their phones — they’re signaling that the next trillion-dollar consumer market won’t be built on a screen.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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