A BUNCH OF NEW START-UPS ARE HYPING THE LONELINESS EPIDEMIC AND ARE OF COURSE, HAPPY TO OFFER SOLUTIONS

IN HER OWN TELLING, every business Radha Agrawal has ever started or project she has dreamed up or mission she has embarked on was born of a persistent, lifelong desire to belong.

- BY ALLISON P. DAVIS

She was a partner in Wild, her twin sister Miki’s gluten-free-restaurant chain that became the Central Perk of their wideranging friend group. A few years later, a late-night conversation with a friend about their shared wish for a sober dance floor inspired her to start Daybreaker, a substance-free, early-morning danceparty pop-up that’s now in its 11th year. She traveled the world, meeting with Indigenous communities in places like the Amazon and the Serengeti, studying how to live communally, researching the dangers of loneliness and the benefits of togetherness, and putting those findings in a book called Belong: Find Your People, Create Community & Live a More Connected Life. While Thinx, the period-panty company she co-founded, wasn’t the direct result of her need to belong, she started the business with her sister, who served as CEO, and their best friend, Antonia Saint Dunbar, using early Kickstarter donations from the network of like-minded optimists she had carefully nurtured. Belonging, she says, is her raison d’être. “I actually really believe that we could live in harmony, as a species, very quickly if every single one of us focused on belonging,” she tells me. This past fall, Agrawal launched the purest distillation of her mission: an anti-loneliness nonprofit, Belong Center, that will “end loneliness and empower belonging for all.”