Your network is your net worth, and it’s shrinking. Today you’ll understand why.
Behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder once ran an experiment on train commuters. They asked passengers to predict whether they’d enjoy their commute more if they kept to themselves or talked to a stranger.
Most assumed silence would be better. We probably would, too. But when they actually tried it? The people who held conversations with fellow passengers reported feeling significantly happier than those who stayed quiet.
This paradox is what we, as a society, are now dealing with at scale. We’ve built a world that defaults to isolation, even when real connection makes us happier and probably more wealthy.
Derek Thompson put it bluntly in The Atlantic: We’ve increasingly been living a “remote life” amid a complete restructuring of human interaction. And we’re paying for it.
You wake up, check your phone. Get work done, on your laptop. Buy your groceries, with a click. Order lunch and dinner, from an app. Watch a movie, on a screen. Go to bed, after one last scroll. A day of life, and you seldom have to talk mouth hole to mouth hole. If this feels normal, that’s because it is. But normal doesn’t mean good, and the data shows we’re choosing this path more than ever.
Welcome to the anti-social century, Thompson says, where your closest relationships are solidifying, your online tribe is expanding, but the middle ground — the people who make up your local community — is disappearing. We still have our closest friends and family. We still have our internet echo chambers. But we’re losing our communities.
This is a massive, invisible tax on our well-being, success, and likely our wallets, and it’s costing us more than you think.
More drinks, fewer toasts. More binge-watching, fewer outings. More texting, less talking. For decades, we’ve optimized for convenience. Now we’re paying for it with communities that are eroding. This erosion has real-world consequences:
This all sounds bleak, but we think it’s also an important opportunity. When isolation is the norm, building a real community becomes an unfair advantage. Community compounds. It creates leverage. It’s the ultimate career moat, the best business strategy, and the strongest economic safety net.
Community shapes who you are, who you become, and how much you can accomplish. And over the next 10 years, the people who understand how to build, nurture, and leverage community are going to win big.
Last year, newspapers reported on 73-year-old Hidekazu Yokoyama, a business owner in northern Japan who did something unthinkable — he sold his profitable logistics company for $0.
His business wasn’t failing. It had a 30% profit margin, 17 employees, all the necessary equipment, and nearly 150 acres of land. And yet, he gave it away, for free.
Yokoyama had no other choice. In Japan, business sales aren’t the norm. Traditionally, you pass down a company to a family member or a trusted apprentice. But there was no one left to take it. Yokoyama’s children didn’t want it. His employees weren’t interested. His town’s young people had already moved to the cities. So he listed the business for free, on the condition that someone, anyone, move to his small, remote town, learn the trade, and keep it running.
He’s not alone in this struggle. Japan is facing a demographic crisis that threatens the survival of thousands of businesses just like his:
To help struggling owners, Japan has expanded buyer-seller matching programs. In 2021, those programs successfully found buyers for 2,413 businesses, but that same year, 44,000 shut down. More than half of them were still profitable when they closed. And the problem is about to get tougher.
This year, Japan will have an estimated 2.5 million businesses owned by people in their 70s, many of whom have no succession plan. In 2019, it was predicted that if nothing changes in Japan by 2025, 630,000 profitable businesses could close, 6.5 million jobs could be lost, and $165 billion could be wiped from the economy.
By 2030, Baby Boomers in America will be 65 or older, meaning thousands of business owners will hit retirement age every single day. The good news is there’s a strong demand here for acquiring and owning good businesses. But this crisis isn’t just about money. It’s about something deeper, a collapse in connection.
When connection fades, so do things that come with it. The relationships, the skills, the shared traditions, and the sense of belonging that once made people want to stay, contribute, and build. Craftsmanship disappears. Local knowledge vanishes. The ties that hold a place together unravel. And when that happens, rebuilding isn’t easy. But recently, we’ve noticed something that made us stop and think. Something that suggests the story isn’t fully written yet.
It happened up close, right in our own Contrarian Community…
For years, church membership in America has followed a predictable trajectory — down. Fewer people identifying with a religion, fewer people showing up for services, fewer people tied into a local community.
The decline has been so steady that many assume it’s permanent. But lately, we’ve noticed something interesting. The Catholic prayer app Hallow just had its biggest day in history, larger than the year it ran a Super Bowl ad. Nearly half a million people downloaded the app in a single day.
At the same time, conversations around faith and church attendance seem to be surfacing more often, and in circles you might not expect, like in Silicon Valley, where some feared that online platforms — prayer apps, faith-based social media groups, or digital sermons — would replace in-person churchgoing. In some cases, it seems they might be sparking more engagement.
This is worth paying attention to, and here’s why.
One of our own Contrarian Community members recently spent the past year searching for the right business to buy. He spoke with dozens of owners, listened to their stories, and learned from their experiences. None of those conversations immediately led to a deal, but they shaped his thinking and refined his approach.
Then, an unexpected opportunity came from a familiar place — his church.
A fellow church member who owned a pool service company knew our member was looking to get into a service business. He mentioned to the member that he’d been considering launching a pool tile cleaning business, but hadn’t moved forward with it. That conversation sparked an idea, which eventually turned into a partnership between the two of them.
This is REALLY cool, but it actually shouldn’t be surprising. For generations, places like church and Main Street were where these organic connections happened. It was the coffee shop, the barber shop, the local business owner leaning on the counter talking to a regular customer. It was a network built on relationships and neighbors, not followers.
That middle layer, the casual but consistent relationships that form in shared spaces, is disappearing. It’s why we believe the people who understand how to rebuild it through small businesses, local organizations, and tight-knit communities will be the ones who thrive.
Having the right people in the right places creates leverage. When you surround yourself with the right network, opportunities surface in ways that can’t be engineered.
Businesses that truly endure aren’t built on trends; they’re built on principles. Jeff Bezos understood this when he built Amazon. Instead of predicting what would change, he had his team focus on what wouldn’t.
This is the foundation of a Bedrock Business, one that doesn’t rely on whims or hype. Instead, it operates on fundamental principles, serving needs that are undeniably real, highly valued, and long-term.
Most people don’t think this way. They chase what’s hot. They optimize for short-term returns. They believe they’re betting on the future, when in reality, they’re gambling on variables they can’t control. A smarter path? Build around what’s inevitable.
While confidence in media, government, and major institutions has collapsed, small businesses remain THE primary institution that Americans across the spectrum still clearly trust. Guess what? Main Street businesses have operated on the same bedrock principles for generations.
In a world addicted to chasing what’s changing next, a real advantage can come from simply understanding what may not change. We, for one, believe something that won’t change anytime soon is exactly this: Americans’ belief in Main Street.
Now you know.
It’s isolation. We engineered the world for comfort. No lines, no friction, no small talk, no interaction. Everything you need, delivered in a click. But this comes at a cost.
It costs us the opportunities that didn’t happen because we weren’t in the room. It costs us insights we never heard because we muted the conversation. It costs us the ideas, friendships, and laughs we simply missed out on.
They sold us on isolation, and we bought it. The bill might not be in dollars — but it may damn well be the most expensive thing we ever pay for.
The information contained here is educational, may not be typical, and does not guarantee returns. Background, education, effort, and application will affect your experience and the profitability of any business. Individual results may vary.
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