Eighty-five years is a long time to study anything.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been running since 1938, following the same men and eventually their children, asking one question: what makes a life go well? Not what makes it successful. What makes it go well.

The answer wasn’t wealth, or achievement, or cholesterol.

From performance, to culture, to kindness, to teamwork, to perseverance, to innovation, to collaboration, to communication, and on and on. The groups changed on a molecular level.

If you were to announce to a group, “Hey, we’re going to know each other better,” the suggestion would most likely be met with eye rolls and a few under-the-breath groans. We’ve become weary of the forced or awkward connection activity. As a facilitator, I always found it fascinating that people would come to a live event only to be head down scrolling rather than connecting with the people right around them. It seems contact made from a keyboard has become more comfortable than a real conversation in person. Connection itself cannot be manufactured. But I have seen what’s on the other side of pushing through the hesitancy, and it has always been worth it. Even a tiny bit of interaction could change the energy for the entire day.

Whether it was at a coaching group, retreat, accountability check-in, convention, or workshop, it was a mark of a job well done when somebody would remark that they felt more connected to the others around them. It made me smile even more when the declaration came from somebody who would say, “… and I’m not even one of those warm, fuzzy, woo woo-liking people.”

Like human connection had anything to do with woo.

Why has connection become rare or under-valued? Is it that we’ve become too busy? We’re curating our inner circle to the point we don’t allow others in? Have we insulated ourselves to the point that we can only handle like-minded interactions? Perhaps it is because our habits have reduced the opportunities.

If it changes so much, it begs the question: Why don’t we value connection more?

Because we should. We certainly have enough data points to prove its importance

Leadership taught me what I watched. The science has been catching up to it for decades.

Where People Live Longest

In 2004, National Geographic and longevity researcher Dan Buettner identified five regions of the world where a slightly higher percentage of people live past 100 in remarkable health. They called these places Blue Zones. The locations are scattered across cultures and continents — Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, Ikaria in Greece, and Loma Linda in California, the only original Blue Zone in the United States. Singapore was added later as a sixth. 

What’s worth taking a closer look at is what these different communities share. The researchers identified nine common factors, what they called the Power 9. Some are about food and movement. Three are direct: belonging, loved ones first, and the right tribe. A fourth — purpose — is shaped by community. Nearly half the factors that explain extended longevity are relational. Connection focused.

Okinawans build something called a moai — a group of five friends committed to each other for life. Children are introduced to their moai as early as age 5. By the time someone needs that support in adulthood, it’s already been there for decades. The financial support, the emotional support, the regular gatherings — all of it is built before it’s needed, not after.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development tells the same story from a different angle. The study began in 1938 and has followed more than 700 men, and now their spouses and 1,300 descendants, for the better part of a century. Robert Waldinger, the study’s current director, has stated the central finding as plainly as possible. The most consistent finding from 85 years of study is that positive relationships keep us happier, healthier, and help us live longer. Period.

That sentence is worth sitting with. After 85 years of data — across class, across generations, across every variable researchers could measure — the strongest predictor of how long and how well someone lives is the quality of their close relationships. Not their income. Not their cholesterol. Not their genes. Their relationships. Doesn’t that make you think twice about the petty dust ups at the Thanksgiving Day gathering?

All of it is built before it’s needed, not after.

When the researchers ran predictive algorithms on the cohort at age 50 to forecast who would be healthiest at 80, the strongest single predictor wasn’t a biomarker. It was relational satisfaction at midlife.

Surrounded and Still Lonely

And then there’s the counter-data. In May of 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a formal advisory declaring loneliness a public health crisis. The advisory states that loneliness and isolation increase the risk of premature death at levels comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Half of American adults reported experiencing loneliness before COVID — the pandemic didn’t create the problem, it accelerated something that was already underway. People who spent two or more hours a day on social media reported feeling socially isolated at more than twice the rate of those who spent less than 30 minutes. It turns out social media has not been great for our relationships and perhaps our longevity.

Read that line again: connected and lonely at the same time, more than ever before.

This is the structural problem. We are surrounded by people. We have more ways to reach each other than any other time in history. And the loneliness data paints a picture of the public health profile like the long-running tobacco crisis.

There’s something else happening, though. It’s quieter than the loneliness epidemic, but it’s real.

The Quiet Comeback

Mahjong is having a moment. Yelp named the Chinese tile game one of the top trends of 2026. Searches for mahjong clubs surged 4,467 percent year over year between September 2024 and August 2025. In San Francisco, a 25-year-old started hosting mahjong nights in his apartment and quickly outgrew it. His club now hosts pop-up parties at bars and restaurants with 30 tables and up to 200 guests. The crowd skews young with Gen Z and millennials drawn to, in their own words, the chance to get off their phones and socialize in the real world. Interestingly, they aren’t isolated in younger groups with the 20-year-old playing next to the 70-year-old.

Pickleball has grown over 220 percent in participation between 2020 and 2024, the fastest-growing sport in the country for three years running. The demographic has shifted from the early retirees who first carried the sport into the wider culture. It’s now Gen Z and millennials, drawn as much to the social scene as to the sport itself.

Bowling alleys are staying open later. Late-night leagues, sober social events, places where the lights stay on past midnight not because the building has to keep operating but because people want somewhere to be together. You can find similar upticks for golf across the U.S. as well. Having fun together is in fashion again.

Gen Z, the most digitally native generation in human history, is buying flip phones. Brick phone purchases among 18-24-year-olds surged 148 percent between 2021 and 2024, while smartphone use in the same age range dropped 12 percent. They’ve earned the right to know what their phones cost them, and they’re voting with their wallets.

These aren’t isolated trends. They’re a pattern. A generation that grew up online is putting the phone down to play tiles with strangers. A sport that began as a retirement-community pastime is being adopted by 20-somethings looking for a place to belong. Bowling lanes, of all things, are functioning as third spaces because we lost most of the ones we had. When I think back to my sand volleyball days, I definitely wasn’t there because of skill for the game. I’m surprised my team didn’t ask me to stop playing. Instead, we shared laughs and time together. We connected.

A theory worth exploring: connection is making a deliberate comeback because enough people have figured out what its absence costs. The body of work points to this — the Surgeon General data, the Harvard study, the Blue Zones, and the consumer behavior reaching for things that look surprisingly analog. My own experience working with teams of people supported all these findings. People perform better when they are connected to a community. To each other.

This is also where the workplace gets it wrong.

Mandated Connection Backfires

When connection is mandated rather than fostered, it produces the opposite of what leadership intends. The team-building offsite that nobody wanted to attend. The mandatory happy hour after a brutal week. The forced luncheon that will require everyone to stay later that night to make up the time to hit a strict deadline. The icebreaker activity at the start of a meeting that already had no room for it. The return to work order with no plan for collaboration. The “fun” committee no one wanted to volunteer for. The HR team who tries to mask a consistently difficult environment with events aimed at keeping people happy.

People resent being forced into connection because they can tell the difference between the gesture and the conditions. The gesture is the icebreaker. The conditions are whether the environment otherwise allows people to bring themselves to the room. If the conditions don’t support it, the gesture lands as performance — and worse, as evidence that leadership has confused naming a problem with addressing it.

The pattern I’ve seen in leadership work: leaders who produce real connection in their organizations almost never use the word connection when they’re doing the work. They build the conditions — psychological safety, clarity about what each person is contributing, recognition of the people doing the work, time and structure for actual conversation, vulnerability encouraged and protected (not exploited), healthy disagreement a norm, and the willingness to let the team have its own life that doesn’t require constant facilitation. The connection emerges from the conditions. It can’t be ordered into existence.

Leaders who don’t produce and actively participate in real connection — who treat it as a checkbox, a quarterly initiative, or work to be outsourced — get the consequences quickly. The team sees the inconsistency. The optional events get skipped. The mandatory ones get attended grudgingly and people go through the motions. The cultural distance between leadership and the work widens. And the leader who genuinely cares about the team but doesn’t know how to build the conditions ends up resented for the very gestures meant to bridge the gap.

What’s worth a closer look is this: forced connection is not just neutral when it fails. It’s actively corrosive. It teaches people that the organization will perform care without practicing it. And once that lesson is taught, the next sincere gesture also gets read as performance.

Forced connection is not just neutral when it fails. It’s actively corrosive.

The inverse is also true. When the conditions are built deliberately, connection emerges — and the results are measurable across many different areas.

What Deliberate Conditions Produce

Pixar’s Braintrust is the example most often pointed to when people study creative teams. It’s a group of directors who watch each other’s films early — well before they’re finished — and give honest, sometimes brutal feedback. The reason it works isn’t the candor itself. It’s that the candor sits on top of relationships that have been built over years. The directors trust that the feedback is meant to help them, not undermine them. Without that trust, the candor would land as attack. With it, the same candor has produced some of the most beloved films of the last 30 years.

The data from operating rooms is even more direct. Research has consistently shown that surgical teams with strong communication and trust produce measurably better patient outcomes than teams without it. The same surgeon, the same procedure, the same patient profile — different team dynamics produce different results. The Joint Commission has identified communication failures as a leading cause of preventable medical errors in U.S. hospitals. The connection in the room is part of the surgical infrastructure, not a soft layer on top of it.

The clearest current example is happening on a football field.

The New England Patriots had two consecutive 13-loss seasons before the 2025 NFL season. The franchise that had defined a generation of football excellence had become, by football standards, broken. Mike Vrabel, a former Patriots linebacker who’d gone on to coach Tennessee, was hired as the franchise’s third head coach in three years.

In one season — one — the Patriots went 14–3, won their division, ran through the AFC playoffs, and reached Super Bowl LX. They lost the Super Bowl to Seattle, 13–29. But the trajectory of the team had completely shifted. The same building. The same fan base. The same ownership. Much of the same roster. New conditions. New result.

A piece of the explanation is football — Drake Maye’s development at quarterback, the front office’s draft success, schematic improvements. But the other piece is harder to quantify and is exactly what I’ve watched in rooms for years: when players care about each other and about the people leading them, performance changes on a molecular level. The Patriots’ behind-the-scenes documentary series is called Forged in Foxborough. The word forged matters. It’s not built. It’s not announced. It’s forged — produced through pressure and proximity over time.

In the wake of a few players and the coach having individual personal drama go public, the work of connection showed up in their responses. From the outside, it appears that they are cutting through the noise and staying focused on what matters most. All while showing each other some grace in the process. It shows in what they will and won’t discuss publicly and the language they use to support each other. It’s a rare show of support in the aftermath of mistakes made. Especially given the cancel culture and combative comments section commentary we’ve come to accept as normal. Some even applaud.

The reality is that connection when you’re fighting to win the Superbowl comes easier than the connection and community needed when a team member is struggling. The tough times are when it really gets tested. And, when it is needed most.

It’s not built. It’s not announced. It’s forged.

Sports teams have always taught this lesson the most concretely, because they have to. There’s no theoretical layer in football. You either function as a team or you lose. A roster of more talented individuals who don’t care about each other will routinely lose to a less talented team where the players do. We’ve all watched it happen. We watched it happen this year.

The same principle operates everywhere else. We just notice it less when the scoreboard isn’t running in real time.

What Holds, and What Gets Lost

What gets built when connection is built deliberately is something that lasts. It holds in extreme conditions — a championship run, a difficult quarter, a hard season at home. It holds across years — the moai that started at age 5 and lasts past 90. It holds in the ordinary days — the workplace where people choose to stay because the people are worth staying for.

What gets lost when connection isn’t built is harder to see until it’s gone. The midlife relationships that didn’t get tended. The friendships that drifted because no one made the call. The team member who suffered in silence because nobody wanted to have the uncomfortable conversation. The team that quietly disbanded because the leader stopped asking who was struggling. Talent departs when they learn the leader only cares about the win, not the players. The post-achievement disorientation that arrives for the high performer who built the career and forgot to build the life around it.

The data is not telling us anything we didn’t already half-know. It’s confirming what every generation of human beings has worked out the hard way: we are built for each other. We do better in proximity. We are stronger in positive communities. We live longer when the relationships are good and shorter when they’re not. Results improve and mountains get moved by connected teams.

Connection was never optional. Somewhere along the way, we decided it was.

The data and the lived evidence are both arguing now that it’s time to value it differently.

What’s worth exploring: where in your life has connection been treated as a bonus rather than infrastructure? What habits have insulated your experiences? What pattern is running when you find yourself closing off from connection? What gets built once you start treating it as the load-bearing element it has always been?

The architecture of an ambitious life requires it. Not the gesture. The structure underneath.