Alone Together: Disconnection Is Our Generation’s Black Death

The Black Death killed 100 million people in the 14th century. It’s happening again. Just like back then, none of us seem to know why.

Another dinner.

Another room full of men in overpriced jackets and underdeveloped convictions, debating how they want 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 know “not dying” has become a tech bro punchline. If past generations had given up so easily, we’d still be in horse-drawn coaches, not hypersonic jets.

Most of the tech world chases gene editing, biohacking, and blood transfusions. But while everyone else is looking for answers in labs, one of the most respected longitudinal studies in the world, Harvard’s 75-year Study of Adult Development, quietly 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.

We spend billions chasing longevity, while malaria, which kills a child every minute (UNICHEF, 2024) gets just $4 billion globally, mostly from overstretched public funds.

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

Genetics only explain 20–30% of your lifespan (NIH, 2016).

So what does?

Harvard’s longest-running study followed individuals from Boston’s working-class neighbourhoods and Ivy League campuses (including president John F. Kennedy) to uncover what truly shapes long-term health and fulfilment. Is it wealth, status, or access to elite healthcare?

It Is Human Connection.

Loneliness chronically activates the HPA axis and sympathetic nervous system, flooding the body with cortisol. Over time, this disrupts immune regulation, fuels systemic inflammation, and suppresses both T-cell and natural killer (NK) cell activity, raising the risk of infection, cardiovascular disease, and premature death (Cole et al., 2007; Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2010). It's as detrimental as alcohol or smoking.

This is the new Black Death.

Over the next decades, we will be together alone. We will still inhabit shared spaces, yet experience them as emotionally vacant. Proximity will no longer guarantee presence.

AI will not only displace labour, it will erode social interaction. Increasingly, we will interact with machines rather than people, because our infrastructure will allow nothing else

During the Black Death, people died without understanding how or why. That was medical helplessness - a visible crisis with invisible causes. Today, we face the opposite: our health crisis is invisible, but the cause is everywhere. Chronic loneliness, social isolation, and emotional detachment are eroding our bodies from within.

Yet we fail to see it. That’s psychosocial blindness: the inability to recognise how disconnection is quietly killing us, and we’ve normalised 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’m 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 is not just good manners or a “nice touch.” It’s neuroscience.

fMRI research from Elizabeth Redcay (2010) shows that live conversation lights up far more of your brain than passive video. It engages 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.