Gen Z’s social renaissance

From run clubs to chess clubs, the ‘loneliest generation’ isn’t lonely anymore.

W hen Julia Nagel-Mayberry moved to Chicago in 2022, she knew only a handful of people. She was 22, had just finished college, and quickly discovered that making friends in a new city was much harder than it had been in school. When she told a coworker about her predicament, he lit up. “I have the perfect thing for you,” she recalled him saying. That’s when she learned about the Electric Athletic Club, a nationwide run and fitness club.

The next day after work, Nagel-Mayberry made her way to the run club’s local meeting point. “I was so anxious,” she told me. During the 3-mile run, people chatted with each other, and one runner kept pace with her. Afterward, the 15 runners, all in their 20s and 30s, congregated at a bar.

“No one was really talking about work. We talked about everything else under the sun,” she said. Despite her initial anxieties, Nagel-Mayberry kept showing up every week. “Some of my best friends I’ve made in Chicago have been through my run club,” she said.

Over sweaty postrun beers, Nagel-Mayberry discovered something that has become a lost art for many people. In a 2024 study titled “The American Friendship Project,” 51% of surveyed Americans said they found it difficult to make new friends. In a 1990 Gallup survey, one-third of Americans reported having 10 or more friends. In 2021, only 13% in an American Survey Center poll said they had that many friends; 12% said they had none at all.

“Much of our life is organized in a way that points us towards isolated or solitary activities when we have spare time,” Sheila Liming, the author of “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time,” said. That isolation has prompted a slate of fearmongering about the loneliness crisis.

But while some young people are whiling away their hours at home, many Gen Zers have had enough of their own company. In every part of their lives, the internet-native “loneliest generation” is making an effort to step outside their comfort zones and create their own “third spaces” separate from work and home. Gen Z is driving up book-club attendance, fueling a surge in running clubs, flooding gyms and workout classes, and shilling out for social clubs — all in the name of making friends. Given the pandemic stole some of their prime years for socializing, Gen Z is going out with a vengeance and flipping the script on the loneliness crisis.

Michelle Kong, 26, fell in love with chess after a friend introduced her to the game two years ago. Unable to find enough friends to play with her, she started playing online — but that wasn’t ideal. “I quickly realized that I still need human contact. I cannot just sit at home and play chess alone by myself,” she told me. Kong started looking for chess clubs near her in Los Angeles, but they were all for older men or younger children. “I was honestly very surprised that it was not catered towards people that are in their 20s and 30s,” she said. Kong decided to take matters into her own hands.

She started by livestreaming her chess games on TikTok, where she would share details about in-person meetups. At the first one, only Kong’s friend, who came along for moral support, showed up. But over the next few weeks, people started coming. After eight months, she was averaging 80 attendees per event and had to move to larger warehouse venues to fit everyone. On Valentine’s Day, she hosted a chess-themed dating event and drew a crowd of 150. Now, roughly 300 people between 21 and 35 attend LA Chess Club each Thursday evening. Kong ended up quitting her job to focus on the club full time. The event is priced at $60 for men and free for women, with the aim to balance out the gender distribution.

At first, Kong made the events more programmed, but she quickly realized that people simply wanted a space to connect. “People want to come, have a good time, drink, listen to music, and socialize. It’s like a big soiree,” she said. “Someone told me that they always have an afterglow after coming to chess. That was honestly the nicest thing I’ve ever heard.

A lot of people say they come for the chess and they stay for the community.

Kong said about half the people who come each week are entirely new to chess. “A lot of people say they come for the chess and they stay for the community,” she said, adding: “Some people have been coming every single week for the past year and a half.”

The eagerness to socialize after years of pandemic lockdowns is nothing new. After the double whammy of World War I and the influenza pandemic in the 1910s, people were ready to get out and have a good time. Cities built movie theatres and dance halls. Many women, dubbed “flappers,” cut their hair short and danced all night. The social and economic boom of the 1920s earned the decade the title “Roaring ’20s.”

Fast-forward 100 years, and people are again hankering to get outside the house, but the spaces and social institutions that make that easy have fallen off. “When we don’t have access to those kinds of events or gatherings in our life, there is a sense of isolation that builds,” Liming said. “One of the things that comes along with that sense of isolation is decreased empathy and decreased patience with our fellow human beings in society.”

Research has found that people embedded in associations in their communities — whether they’re bowling leagues or book clubs — are better able to weather poverty and unemployment; they are more likely to be educated and less likely to commit crimes. Fortunately, Gen Zers understand this better than anyone.

Across the US, young people are organizing their own third spaces and meetups. In New York City, five friends in their late 20s founded Reading Rhythms — which bills itself as “not a book club” but “a reading party” — in May 2023. They now host events monthly across six locations in the city, aptly titled “chapters,” with two more coming later this year.

At the events, attendees bring their own reading material and settle into 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading, followed by a 15-minute one-on-one discussion with a stranger, the book serving as an icebreaker. Then there’s another 30 minutes of reading, with a final group discussion.

“We started this as a fun project with friends, and we’re quickly realizing that we are tapping into something much, much bigger, which is this collective societal need for us to get off our phones and back into the real world and connect,” Ben Bradbury, one of the cofounders, told me. According to Eventbrite, book-club listings were up 24% in 2023 from the prior year, and themed book clubs, such as queer book clubs, saw an 82% increase in attendance. In the UK, book-club listings on the site jumped 350% from 2019 to 2023.

Maya Aristimuño also wanted to tap into this need for socializing. The 22-year-old founder of the marketing agency Maristi Creative hosts a series of pop-up dinner parties for creatives in New York. She said brands typically sponsor entire dinners in return for content. But for events that aren’t fully sponsored, she sells tickets to cover the expenses.

“We are tapping into something much, much bigger, which is this collective societal need for us to get off our phones and back into the real world and connect.”

“I’ve been to a lot of random events in New York and they’re very impersonal,” she told me. “The intention behind the events I’m trying to curate is really just to break that and be real. Let’s have a real conversation over a good meal.”

Those with money to spare are turning to members-only clubs to make friends. Clubs like Soho House, Casa Cipriani, and the San Vicente Bungalows serve as social spaces for cash-rich professionals who are willing to pay a premium for exclusivity and access. In a survey by GGA Partners, over 60% of private clubs said they increased their membership in the US in 2022. Perhaps the most well known, Soho House, said it increased its membership from fewer than 112,000 in 2021 to over 176,000 in 2023.

Others are showing up to gyms and fitness classes in droves. The fitness chain Orangetheory grew its Gen Z member base by 200% from the beginning of 2019 to August 2023, its chief technology officer previously told Business Insider. And two-thirds of Gen Zers said in a 2023 Les Mills survey that socializing was something they were looking for in a gym.

Compared with two decades ago, people under 30 report having far fewer friends. And in a report last year, the surgeon general cited a study that found young adults were almost twice as likely to report feeling lonely as those over 65. As a result, many are fighting back against the lingering isolation of the pandemic and reinventing the social landscape in the process. In 2019, all the 10 most-attended events listed on Meetup were tech or professional events. By 2022, half the top 10 events were focused on meeting friends or prospective partners. With new kinds of clubs popping up in every major city, young people are paving the way out of the loneliness crisis.

After attending her run club every week, twice a week, for almost an entire year, Nagel-Mayberry was ready to try something new in June last year. A friend suggested she join a book club with 12 other girls. “The first book club was on a Wednesday, so I wasn’t able to go to my run club,” she told me. On her way to the event, she ran into some friends from her run club. She told them where she was going — and that she was nervous about it. “They were like, ‘Don’t be. You’re going to have so much fun. Tell us about it when we see you next week,'” she said.

Nagel-Mayberry still attends the book club each month. Between her various clubs and activities, she no longer has any time to be lonely.