A few weeks ago, my husband Pav and I started a WhatsApp group for our neighborhood.

It sounds like a small thing, but after living in our neighborhood for five years, we realized we didn’t actually know anyone on our street. Sure, we gave the casual wave as we drove by every once in a while, but we never actually took the time to build meaningful relationships. 

As it turns out, there are many young families with kids that are starting to play together, neighbors that need help bringing in their trash cans, and even people that just moved to LA and don’t know a single other family. 

All it took was a simple WhatsApp group, and each home adding the family to their right or left. Now we talk every single day.

Our isolation in America is by no means unique in 2026. We set out to change it.

The loneliness numbers are rough.

Half of American adults say they feel lonely. This has become a baseline condition of daily life. That's the finding from the U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on social connection and isolation, which designated loneliness a public health epidemic.

The numbers behind that headline are rough. In 1990, 3% of Americans said they had no close friends outside their family. That number is now 20%. Adults who report having six or more close friends dropped from nearly 50% of the population in 1990 to about 25% today.

Robert Putnam saw this coming. His 2000 book Bowling Alone saw this coming and tracked the collapse of American civic life across almost every measurable category: fewer people voting, joining civic groups, attending religious services, or knowing their neighbors. His most famous data point: bowling league participation is down roughly 95% over the last fifty years. We are still bowling. We just stopped doing it together.

Then we handed everyone a phone.

We told ourselves social media would fix the problem. You would be more connected than ever. Your friends would always be a tap away. You could reach anyone.

What actually happened: a 2025 study from Oregon State University found that increases in social media use correlate directly with greater feelings of loneliness among U.S. adults. The Surgeon General explicitly identified social media as a loneliness risk factor.

The platforms we built optimize for audiences, not relationships. Instagram rewards broadcast performance. Facebook became a place to follow strangers arguing. None of them were designed to help you know your actual neighbors. All of them were designed to make you feel like you were missing something.

What’s more: Americans will spend nearly $100 billion this year paying strangers to do what neighbors used to do for a six-pack and a thank-you — the “favor economy”. We didn't outsource our errands. We outsourced our relationships, and now we're billing ourselves for the gap.

The erosion of the “favor economy” is costing us billions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, China is solving this problem.

The pandemic stress-tested community infrastructure everywhere at once. What most Americans discovered was that they had none.

In China, it looked different.

Chinese cities are organized around residential compounds called xiaoqu, gated neighborhoods where residents share space, share management, and share responsibility for common life. Most xiaoqu have formal residents' committees, grassroots organizations that coordinate neighborhood activity. And almost all of them have WeChat group chats.

WeChat is China's dominant communication platform, built around private groups and real-life relationships rather than public audiences. When Shanghai went into COVID lockdown in 2022, those WeChat groups activated almost overnight into full mutual aid networks. Residents coordinated food deliveries, organized group purchases, collected donations for stranded building staff, and navigated shifting restrictions together. The existing infrastructure allowed for communities to become stronger than more isolated.

The key difference between WeChat and American social platforms isn't the technology. Research comparing the two platforms found that WeChat users maintain more, smaller groups of dense private connections, while Facebook users tend to have fewer, larger, and far looser ones.

America built platforms for broadcasting to strangers. China built a platform for staying close to the people you actually know.

There are downsides in China.

China's community cohesion is not purely organic. The residents' committees that anchor xiaoqu life are supervised by the government. They are officially classified as grassroots self-governance bodies, but they report to local subdistrict authorities. WeChat is not a neutral platform. It is also a surveillance instrument, and the same groups that coordinate food deliveries exist within a state monitoring apparatus.

Strong community and watched community coexist in China. You don't get one without the other under the current system, and that is not a model to import.

But it is worth understanding why it works. Because the mechanism underneath it is not state power. It is structural proximity. When you organize life at the scale of a building or a block with shared space and a shared communication channel, community tends to form. The state didn't create that dynamic. It built infrastructure around something that was already there.

We can solve this without state involvement.

Pav and I didn't wait for a neighborhood association. We didn't need an app built specifically for it. We sent a message to a few neighbors we knew vaguely, asked if they wanted to be in a group, and started adding people from there. We have kids. We look out for each other's homes. We ask questions. 

The goal is simple: knowing who lives on your street. That is the whole thing.

I’ll venture a guess that most of us are feeling America’s loneliness epidemic in some form, but the problem is so widespread and normalized that it feels too complex to solve alone. 

But the solutions can be simple. It starts at the scale of one block, one building, one group chat with three people in it. 

You can do the same thing this week. Start with three people.

Hit reply and tell me: do you know your neighbors? I want to hear what the community looks like where you live. I read every single response.

Jenny

P.S. If this resonates, forward this to someone you want to be part of your community build. Starting with one person is how it actually works.

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