Why Social Wellness Is the Health Frontier Nobody's Talking About (Yet)
By Eli Walker
We know that sitting all day is slowly killing us, so we buy standing desks and walk 10,000 steps. We know that processed food hijacks our bodies, so we read labels and eat whole foods and learn the difference between omega-3s and omega-6s. We know that doomscrolling at midnight wrecks our sleep and mental health, so we do therapy and meditate and set screen time limits.
We've gotten pretty good at working against the grain of modern convenience in service of our health. Meaning, we've learned to fight our own comfort.
But, one category of wellness that's been slowly eroding in our hyper-independent, digitally mediated, "I'll just stay home and order in" culture: Social wellness.
And unlike the other wellness categories, this one isn't a new problem we've discovered with better science. It's an ancient need we've managed to engineer out of everyday life, almost without even noticing.
What I Mean When I Say "Belonging" and "Social Wellness"
These two terms are related but distinct.
“Belonging” is a felt sense of being centered in your circumstances. I believe it means knowing who you are, where you are, and choosing to be there. It manifests and feeling accepted, seen, and valued within a community or live experience.
“Social wellness” is the broader, deliberate practice and capacity to build, sustain and nourish healthy relationships, which requires cultivating habit, environments and skills to create and maintaining experiences of belonging. It's belonging as a lifestyle skill. Think of it as the fitness regimen that makes belonging possible.
Where belonging is the destination, social wellness is how you get there (+ stay there).
Both are now recognized as foundational to human health after the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. Research consistently shows that social isolation increases mortality risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, reinforcing connection as a biological need, not a luxury.
How We Got Here: The Shift from Collective to Individual
For most of human history, “social calendars” weren’t a thing; belonging wasn't something you had to work very hard for. It was the default state of being human, texturing daily existence with identity affirmation.
You were born into a village, a tribe, a family compound, or even a faith community. Your identity was inseparable from your group. You were known by your neighbors. You shared meals, rituals, grief, and celebration with people you'd known your whole life.
….Then modernity happened:
Industrialization moved us off communal land and into cities with strangers.
Cars made commuting past hundreds of people without acknowledging the humans driving them.
TV moved family life indoors and turned conversations into background noise.
The internet lets us work, shop, date, and socialize without ever needing to put pants on.
The gig economy eliminated office culture for millions, while a global pandemic taught us how to exist in total physical isolation.
Obviously, none of these shifts were intentionally malicious. In fact, I’d argue that these daily-habit-tweaks were made in the name of joy (albeit in the form of quick hits of dopamine), and many remain genuinely liberating. Still, each one has chipped away at the infrastructure of belonging that had previously been built into the architecture of daily life.
We traded communal living for individual convenience, and, at scale, the trade-off has incidentally been catastrophic to our health and happiness.
Enter the paradox of our age: We are more simultaneously connected and lonely than ever.
The New Muscle We Have to Build
So, while our grandparents didn't need a social wellness strategies because they were lucky enough to be born into a neighborhood “porch culture,” we've dismantled most of that societal foundation without replacing it, and now we need to rebuild it consciously in the same way we've had to consciously relearn how to eat, move and meditate.
Think about it: meal prep and therapy wouldn’t have made sense to someone living 200 years ago. These interventions exist because we've broken something natural with sedentary work, industrial food systems and chronic stress. Likewise, just as we developed deliberate practices to restore what used to come automatically for physical and mental health, social wellness is next.
Once you understand that social wellness is a skill (i.e. something that can be practiced, refined and designed), loneliness stops feeling so personal. Rather, it’s a practical signal from your nervous system letting you know it’s time to stop scrolling and prioritize IRL relationship-building.
5 Social Wellness Hacks You Can Start This Week
Here are my top 5 “belonging hacks” to help you set up the conditions for belonging to naturally emerge in your daily life to make social wellness an easy-to-implement skill starting today (sans small talk and networking burnout).
1. Create a Third Place (& Fill it with Intentional Play)
Home is your first place. Historically, your work office is your second. A "third place" (a concept coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg) is a recurring, low-pressure space where you show up consistently without agenda. This could look like a cafe you frequent, your favorite weekly yoga class, the local bar’s monthly trivia night or a community garden. The key differentiator is that a “third place” is somewhere that isn't about productivity or obligation.
But (and here’s my hot take), simply having a third place isn’t enough. You get what you give, am I right? In relationships, career goals, at the gym, and the same applies to your third spaces. They only work when you bring intention into them; ideally, intentional play. Meaning you engage with others within your third place with genuine curiosity, effervescence and a willingness to be a little unguarded (dare I say “vulnerable”?). This looks like asking the person next to you real questions, offering to volunteer within the space, and staying ten minutes longer at the event than you planned.
Play is the mechanism that turns a recurring location into an actual community. Without it, you're just…existing in another regular place. With it, you become someone people are glad to see.
Pick one third place. Show up consistently. And when you get there, don't just take up space. Inhabit it with loving intention and playful effort.
2. Give the Gift of Acknowledgment
One of the most underrated belonging practices is radically simple: acknowledge people. Give a stranger a compliment. Tell your barista you noticed she remembered your order. Text a friend to say you were thinking of something they said months ago and it still makes you smile. In meetings or group settings, name contributions by name: "That's building on what Marcus said earlier." Acknowledgment is the currency of belonging, and most of us are unwittingly stingy with it. When we feel seen, we feel safe. And when we feel safe, we feel like we belong. Practice being the person who makes others feel seen.
3. Upgrade Your Small Talk to Real Talk
Small talk isn't necessarily the enemy of connection, but shallow stopping points are. The most cliche example is the go-to “fine” response to the polite greeting question, “How are you?” But fun fact, research by psychologist Arthur Aron suggests that asking deeper questions (even with strangers) creates measurable intimacy faster than we'd expect, and intimacy like this breaks down the 4th walls that keep us feeling isolated, which I talk about in depth in my P.L.A.Y. Method. You don't have to go full-on trauma-dumping in the grocery line. But you can ask questions with more delightfully disarming specificity. For example, instead of "How was your weekend?" ask "What was one thing that surprised you this week?" Or simply: "What are you looking forward to lately?" These small tweaks turn polite questions into deeply connective ones, and signal, “I’m genuinely interested in talking to you right now, person,” and that is the doorway to belonging for all involved.
4. Design for Serendipity
Spontaneous connection used to be built into our environments. Now we have to set up the conditions for serendipity deliberately. This could look like saying yes to one more "low-stakes" social invitation per month even when you're tired and would undoubtedly prefer an Netflix and popcorn. It could also look like leaving your headphones (and your phone!) at home while out on a walk. Try moving your home office to a shared workspace once a week, or walking to the cafe instead of ordering delivery. Serendipitous connection (meaning, the kind of not-necessarily-romantic “meet-cutes” that happens by accident) is actually the result of deliberate environmental choices. Design your life to include friction-free encounters with other humans, and you'll be amazed at the belonging moments that emerge.
5. Ritualize Your Relationships
Strong communities rely on rituals, not “good intentions n’ hoping for the best.” Rituals within a family could look like a weekly dinner at the kitchen table or an annual camping trip. Within friendships, rituals look like a standing Sunday call with your college bestie. (One of my best girlfriends and I ritualize a monthly FaceTime call on the full moon.) In work-life, I bet most of you have a weekly Monday meeting, for example, that serves to ground and sync the entire team, (even if it’s kind of boring sometimes). One of the many reasons rituals rock is because they do the scheduling work of connection in advance, so moments of belonging don’t keep losing out to the urgent and immediate. Think about the relationships in your life that matter most. Do they have a recurring, protected, expected touchpoint? If not, that's your homework. And listen, you don't need a grand gesture, like a summer trip to Paris. A standing 30-60 minute date or check-in will do the trick. Put it in the ol’ Google calendar and set it to “repeat” Let the structure carry your social wellness when motivation can’t.
The Big Takeaway
We've accepted that we have to work for our physical health and mental health because the defaults of life’s modern conveniences work against us on both accounts. Now, social wellness is no different. The conditions that once made belonging automatic (like shared spaces and communal rituals) have been systematically dismantled by the same “frictionless” culture that gave us all those other problems.
The good news is, just like other wellness categories, social wellness is a skill we can learn and practice. Even better, social wellness isn’t a solo-journey. We get to work on it with communally (which is way more fun, right?). So, when you set up the conditions for authentic connection to arise naturally by intentionalizing third spaces, verbally acknowledging others and creating rituals that build belonging into your calendar, you don't just improve your own wellbeing. You become part of the infrastructure of belonging for everyone around you.
So build it like the muscle it is. Your health depends on it.
Eli Walker is a belonging expert, solo performance artist, and founder of The Uplift Center — a school for belonging and social wellness. She is the creator of the P.L.A.Y. Method and works with organizations like Google, Spotify, and Porsche to design cultures of genuine connection. Learn more at theuplift.center.
