Meeting More People Is Not the Fix

The advice shows up in every “how to fight remote-work loneliness” list: go to more events, join more Slack communities, say yes to more coffee chats, expand your network. The assumption underneath it is that loneliness is a supply problem. Meet enough new people and eventually some of them will stick.

This is not really what the research says causes friendship to work.

The myth is about quantity. The evidence is about repetition.

Friendship forms through repeated, low-stakes contact with the same people over time — not through meeting more people. A 2025 study of college students coming out of the pandemic found that it was the quality and regularity of social connection that predicted wellbeing, not the sheer number of contacts a student had. Someone with a smaller circle they saw consistently did better than someone with a wider circle they saw once.

This tracks with something Robert Putnam described back in 2000: the decline in American community life wasn’t really about people disliking each other more. It was the disappearance of the structures that put the same people in the same room, week after week — bowling leagues, union halls, church groups. Once those went, the repeated contact went with them, and repeated contact is the actual mechanism, not a side effect of it.

Ray Oldenburg made a related point decades earlier, describing what he called third places — the café, the barbershop, the regular’s spot at the pub. What made them work wasn’t novelty. It was that you saw the same bartender, the same regulars, on a schedule you didn’t have to think about. The friendship was a byproduct of the repetition, not the goal you showed up chasing.

Why “meet more people” feels true anyway

It feels true because meeting new people is the part that’s visible. A conference, a networking event, a new group chat — these are legible, effortful, and countable. You can tell yourself you did something. Turning an acquaintance into a friend by seeing them nine more times over three months is invisible and unglamorous. There’s no event to RSVP to. It just requires showing up on Thursdays.

It also feels true because remote work genuinely does shrink the pool of people you cross paths with, so “meet more people” sounds like the correct diagnosis for the correct problem. Gallup’s 2024 workplace data found that fully remote employees report loneliness at 25%, compared with 16% for people working fully on-site. A study of healthcare workers found something more specific: remote working and loneliness aren’t the same thing, and workplace isolation in particular has its own separate effects, cushioned or worsened by how much social support someone perceives they have. The problem remote work creates isn’t a shortage of new contacts. It’s a shortage of the incidental, repeated contact that used to happen by accident — the hallway conversation, the person who sat two desks over, the same five people at the same standing meeting.

That’s a structural problem, not a networking problem. And it needs a structural answer, not more first meetings.

What actually reduces loneliness for someone working from home

If the mechanism is repetition, the fix looks less like “meet new people” and more like “pick a small number of people, or a small number of contexts, and make contact with them recur without having to decide to.”

A standing weekly call with one or two former colleagues, at the same time, works better than a general commitment to “stay in touch.” The fixed time removes the decision-making that tends to lose out when you’re tired at 6pm. A recurring in-person thing — the same run club, the same coworking morning, the same trivia night — works for the same reason a bowling league used to: you don’t have to re-decide to go each week, and you see the same faces long enough for small talk to turn into something else.

The American Enterprise Institute’s 2021 survey on American friendship is a useful gut check here. It found that the share of men reporting six or more close friends fell from 55% in 1990 to 27% by 2021, and that 15% of men reported no close friends at all, a fivefold rise since 1990. That collapse didn’t happen because men stopped meeting new people. Men still meet plenty of new people, at work and elsewhere. It happened because the structures that turned acquaintances into close friends through repetition — sports leagues, workplaces with long tenures, neighbourhoods people didn’t move away from — thinned out.

What this means for an actual Tuesday

If you’re working from home and feeling the isolation, the useful move probably isn’t the networking event on your calendar for Thursday. It’s picking two or three people you already sort of know — a former coworker, a neighbour, someone from a class you took — and proposing something with a fixed cadence. Not “let’s get dinner sometime.” A specific Tuesday, every other week, same coffee shop, same time. Low effort per instance, because the effort of deciding has already been spent once.

It’s a smaller ask than “build a bigger network,” and it’s less satisfying to talk about. But it’s the version the evidence actually supports. Meeting new people has its place — you have to meet someone before you can see them regularly — but treating the meeting as the achievement, rather than the first of many ordinary repeats, is where the advice usually goes wrong.