Alone Together: Disconnection Is Our Generation's Black Death

Another dinner.

Another table of men in overpriced jackets and underdeveloped convictions, arguing about how they'd like to die.

"Happy," answered one.

"Without regrets," mumbled another. (He definitely regrets that £5,000 jacket.)

Then they turned to me.

How do I want to die?

I don't.

Tech Bro's Longevity Obsession#

I get it. "Not dying" is a tech-bro meme. But if previous generations had just accepted death, we'd still be riding in horse-drawn carriages, not hypersonic jets.

Most people in tech go for gene editing, biohacking and blood transfusions. But while they look in test tubes, one of the most respected longitudinal studies in the world, Harvard's 75-year Study of Adult Development, found something else.

And let's be honest. The current longevity game is mostly smoke.

• Gene editing? Risky, still stuck in the lab.
• Biohacking? Mostly almond butter and definitely botox.
• Blood-swapping with your teenage son? Weird flex, Bryan.

Billions spent on living longer. Malaria claims a child's life every minute (UNICEF, 2024), while receiving $4 billion globally, largely from overburdened government coffers.

A £2 net saves a life (AMF, 2025). A £300 supplement makes your pee more expensive.

Genes account for just 20 to 30% of your lifespan (NIH, 2016).

So what does?

The study tracked men from Boston's working-class neighbourhoods and Harvard students, including John F. Kennedy, to find out whether money, status or elite healthcare is the key to lasting health and happiness.

It Is Human Connection.#

Chronic loneliness is associated with constant activation of the HPA axis and sympathetic nervous system, flooding the body with cortisol. This leads to poor immune regulation, chronic inflammation, and reduced T-cell and NK cell function, which raise the risk of infection, heart disease, and early death (Cole et al., 2007; Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2010).

It's as bad for you as drinking or smoking.

This is the new Black Death.

In the years ahead, we will be together alone. We will share physical spaces, but find them socially barren. Being near someone won't mean they're present.

AI won't just take our jobs, it will rob us of each other. We'll increasingly talk to things instead of people, because that's all we'll have left.

During the Black Death, people died with no idea how or why. This was medical helplessness, a visible crisis with invisible causes.

Today's crisis is the opposite: invisible, but the cause is everywhere. Chronic loneliness, social isolation and emotional disengagement are doing massive harm to our bodies. But we don't see it.

This is psychosocial blindness: our inability to realise that loneliness is killing us, and our willingness to accept it.

Remember: The Black Death didn't end because it was cured.

It ended because it ran out of hosts.

When I started building, I understood the risk:

A future of automation, ambient despair, and hollowed-out communities too numb to know they're grieving. Every time we automate or outsource connection through AI, touchscreens, or soulless UX, we chip away at the signals our brains evolved to crave.

I love (embodied) AI. Let it handle the soul-crushing tasks. Let it even run our politics!

But not this. Not the part where someone looks you in the eye and makes you feel like you exist.

So I Build The Future Differently.#

That's why in our robotics-powered restaurant a real person greets you at the door.

That was always part of my vision. I believe human connection matters even in the most high-tech environment. But belief is one thing. What surprised me was how many people told us, explicitly, that it mattered to them too.

And what really shocked me?

How many of our regulars turned out to be the elderly. Were they not scared by the robotics? The touchscreens?

So we asked and the answer stayed the same:

"Here, it still feels like someone cares about me."

(81-year-old Anne added: "Also, your bowls are better than sex.")

They're right. This isn't just good etiquette or a "nice bonus." It's neuroscience.

A 2010 fMRI study by neuroscientist Elizabeth Redcay found that live conversation activates more of the brain than watching a prerecorded video, including areas tied to emotion, attention, memory and decision-making.

But connection alone isn't enough. You can't out-socialise crap food or bad health.

I care about connection. But I'm also obsessed with everything else that keeps a body alive. Sleep, light, micronutrients, air quality, muscle mass, psychological load, hormonal rhythms, protein timing, plastics in your bloodstream, and yes, food.

There are extraordinary projects shaping this future:

Neko Health is one of them, delivering next-generation healthcare experiences at scale. Their human operators and GPs make you feel like their only client.

(I witnessed their obsession over experience and connections firsthand from Hjalmar and Shak.)

Another figure I admire is George who's building ZOE: pushing the boundaries of personalised health to feel like a community rather than just a blood sugar test.

Food just happens to be one variable I believe to have an unfair advantage at through what I'm building. One of our PhDs is literally decoding taste, so you can eat what your body needs before you even know you need it and actually love how it tastes.

Here's what no one tells you: if you want to not die, you don't need optimism. You need standards. Unreasonable ones.

For me I'm sacrificing all my standards temporarily to solve this problem. I'm building a cult (aka a startup), which means I already get zero sleep, zero sunlight, and probably inhale a worrying amount of 3D-printing fumes.

Honestly? What keeps me is the people. I'd rather share lunch with cracked engineers and obsessive PhDs than sit through another dinner party pretending to care how someone wants to die.

Longevity, as per research, isn't about avoiding death. It's about refusing a life not worth living.

So yeah, I'll take your injections, your supplements, your son's blood.

But I'd rather take a shared table, a warm meal, and someone who remembers my name.

Let's hack death - not with AI, but with each other.

Braindump by Josef Chen