By Kat Yeung (Co-founder)

I: the problem

My friends and I were born around the turn of the millennium. Year after year, we have found that we live in an increasingly individualistic and fragmented society. We are disconnected from those of different demographics and are explosively divided on social issues. We have forgotten how to be comfortable alone, and we have forgotten how to be comfortable together.

It’s not just reflected in the little things – phones at the dinner table; “doom-scrolling” on the couch; going to a party and everyone sticking to the friends they came with. It’s also clear in the headlines and in the larger upheavals in our world.

Our world is increasingly lonely and more prone to spend spare time stuck in screens rather than in real-life conversation. In April 2023, the US Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic. In 2022, the Office for National Statistics found that 3.3 million people in the UK are chronically lonely and that young people are more likely to report feeling lonely than older people. Studies have shown that loneliness is more than just a sad feeling: it is also a major risk factor for serious health problems. When we are disconnected from others, our risk for depression and anxiety increases, as does our risk for dementia (50%), stroke (32%) and heart disease (29%).

Although pre-internet factors such as increased globalization, shrinking family sizes, declining marriage rates, and increased secularism surely contributed to today’s sense of loneliness, I blame our screens the most. It’s unsurprising that loneliness and mental health problems increased globally after smartphones were introduced. Former executives and designers of big tech have come out and revealed that addiction, attention deficiency, and individualism are ingrained within the design and profit of social media. At the same time that our phones exploit human psychology to hook us onto dopamine-rush notifications, we are bombarded by advertisements, all pointed towards a culture of vanity and materialism. Our pics-or-it-didn’t-happen attitude has morphed into a zeitgeist where we often prioritize our digital personas over our real-life ones. It doesn’t matter if the party was lame as long as it looked cool online. Airbrushed filters and snapchat dysmorphia are the new normal. We have become addicted to the validation and superficial thrills of social media, video games, and 30-second entertainment. The pandemic only exacerbated screen and internet addiction across the world; 46% of American teens say that they are on the internet 'almost constantly'. All of this has combined to proliferate mental illness and to create a generation of distracted individuals who rely on screens for comfort and a sense of self; a generation averse to the real-life and slow challenges of connection to others and to themselves.

At the same time, political divides have only gotten more extreme as democracies around the world are being called into question. In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that profit-hungry social media algorithms have created separate realities and sets of “facts” for individuals, separating communities into polarized echo-chambers. We have entered an era where social media executives’ decisions can make or break an election. Where we will hardly ever see any opposing opinions online. Misinformation, fake news, and deep fake AI all combine to separate us from an anchored sense of reality. Diversity does not exist on our feeds.

The problem is that our society is averse to real-life discomfort and connection. It is easier and more fun to be online; we feel understood by our echo chambers; it feels good to receive likes and comments. In the short-term, it is more satisfying to scroll on Tiktok than to have a conversation about someone’s day. And yet it is in discomfort that life’s best things happen – we learn and grow through understanding the Other. Speaking to others with different opinions makes our own more robust; friendship and reciprocity make life more meaningful. In developing friendships, we develop ourselves. In developing ourselves, we develop our communities and democracies.

The problem is that it is often hard to meet new people and make friends who understand or inspire us. Many of us have just moved to a new city or feel stuck in the ruts of circumstantial friendships from work or school. It is difficult to branch out.

The problem is that our technology does not encourage branching out in real-life into meaningful relationships. It does not facilitate interacting with people different to ourselves. As such, technology promotes short-term satisfaction over long-term happiness. Technology as a whole has made us more lonely, more antisocial.

We aim to change that.

II: our solution 

Supperclub is an app to meet five others at a restaurant for a dinner party of good food and conversation.

We want to connect communities with our dinner parties; to introduce people who would not otherwise meet over a great meal. We want members of supperclub to get excited about dinner conversation and what they might learn at the table. We want to normalize getting out there and connecting to new people; to reap the rewards of real-life friendship. Why a party of six? We think it’s the ideal dinner party size: there’s no one left out and side conversations are less likely to form. As Kant said of dinner parties: ‘the number of guests should follow Chesterfield’s rule: no fewer than the Graces (i.e. three), no more than the Muses (i.e. nine)’.

We believe in the power of a dinner party – in the rituals and romance that have transcended cultures for all of history. It is the same principle of friendship and reciprocity that underlies both Chinese dinner parties (which are said to be vital to bolster one’s guanxi 关系, i.e. community network) that motivates Jewish shabbats. Dinner parties have always been an important part of connecting individuals. Food is more than just nourishment; it brings us together and elevates a moment to something special. Dinner parties create community and wellbeing by giving us a moment to understand others and ourselves. Kant believed that dinner parties are part of the ‘highest ethicophysical good’ as they help us find meaning within our relationships and within our own thoughts. A recent study from Oxford University on social eating has shown that ‘social networks are important in combating mental and physical illness. A significant proportion of respondents felt that having a meal together was an important way of making or reinforcing these social networks. In these increasingly fraught times, when community cohesion is ever more important, making time for and joining in communal meals is perhaps the single most important thing we can do – both for our own health and wellbeing and for that of the wider community’.

If our attitude so far sounds at all Epicurean (Epicurus said that ‘we should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink’), it’s because the idea for our app was inspired by Catullus 13 – a playful poem about friendship and dinner. My co-founder (Sarah) and I read it when we were fifteen and became enamoured by the charm of a dinner party. At the time, we were talking about how hard it was to break out of our friendship groups at school and reach out to new people – we had been at the same school for years. Sarah came up with this amazingly magnetic idea to have a series of blind group dinner dates to get people talking to those they would not otherwise hang out with. We advertised the idea in our school’s Facebook group: sign up for a dinner party, but you don’t know who you’ll be dining with until you get to the restaurant. We played god and mixed and matched people from different friend groups. It was a huge success; our first time organizing it, we made over fifteen reservations for one night. Our friends loved it.

Then we realized that the problems that we were addressing as fifteen-year-olds – stale friendship groups, high barriers to meeting new people in real life – existed on a much larger scale throughout our lonely and divided world. We wanted to make it into an app. Pure luck brought us to our third co-founder, Oliver, who not only knows London’s food scene like the back of his hand, but is also a swiss-army-knife when it comes to starting an app: he codes, makes finance spreadsheets, and handles graphics like a pro.

That’s how we came to be supperclub.

III: you

We hope that you will use our app to eat well and meet a new friend, lover, mentor, or even enemy. We hope that you will join us in creating a movement that values real-life connections over online presence. Join us via the app, now available on the Apple app store.