April 6, 2026

Over the last year, I have gotten really into F1. I started watching races every Sunday and following the social media and press coverage in between races. As a result, my feeds have become dominated by F1 content, which has helped me learn more about the sport and deepened my interest further. I have joined online communities and forums where people discuss F1, debate strategy, and break down races in detail.

At the same time, none of my close friends follow F1 at all. They do not know the teams, the drivers, or what is happening week to week. It means that I cannot really talk about it with them. Instead, I find myself going deeper into online forums to engage with people I do not know, people I have never met, and almost certainly never will. The more I get into it, the more I am interacting with a global group of strangers, while having one less thing to connect over with the people physically around me.

Contrast that with the Toronto Raptors. Growing up in Canada, my friends and I all watched the Raptors. We followed the same seasons, reacted to the same games, and celebrated together when they won the championship in 2019. Even now, when I go back to Toronto, conversations about the Raptors happen naturally. If I meet someone at a bar, there is a good chance we can immediately connect over the team. It creates an instant bond, even with people I have never met, simply because we share the same reference point.

My friends are great people, and we still connect over many things. But what if that overlap continued to shrink? I would start to feel isolated from the people around me. Despite being physically close, we would be living in different worlds. The people online would feel closer, not because I know them, but because we share the same inputs. I would feel lonely in real life even though I am surrounded by people every day.

In that world, why would I feel compelled to participate in the social institutions of my community if I feel closer to people online than those around me? I would rather just stay online.

In this context, my behavior would lead to the erosion of social capital within my community. Social capital refers to the value embedded in social relationships and networks. It is the idea that trust, shared norms, and connection between people function as a form of collective wealth. Social capital is accumulated by repeated, trust building interactions over time through reciprocity, shared experiences, and active participation in communal life. It is the connective tissue of communities, enabling cooperation and coordination in ways that neither money nor formal institutions can fully replicate. Communities rich in social capital are more resilient, more cohesive, and more capable of solving problems collectively. When it is weak, those same communities fragment. Trust declines, participation drops, and people begin to operate more as individuals than as part of a shared system.

Today, our social capital is in free fall as social media has disrupted traditional shared patterns of consumption, weakening our ability to maintain community.

Community is not built in abstraction, it is built through repeated, overlapping exposure to the same inputs. Historically, mass media played this role. Books, television broadcasts, major films, and widely followed sporting events aligned attention across large populations. They created moments where individuals engaged with the same content, often at the same time. People across the country read the same books, watched the same movies, and experienced the same events. This created a shared layer of context that made interaction easy. People did not need to coordinate to have something in common. It was built into the system.

The early internet largely extended this model. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was primarily a tool for consumption. Most users could access information, but very few could publish it. As a result, it functioned as a new distribution layer for mass media. People still consumed largely the same content, just through a different medium. The overlap in cultural inputs remained intact.

The rise of social media introduced a shift. Platforms such as Facebook recreated existing social structures online by organizing interaction around real world relationships. People shared content with their friends, followed individuals they knew, and participated in conversations grounded in shared context. The internet, in this period, reinforced offline networks rather than replacing them. It strengthened social capital by increasing the frequency and visibility of interaction within existing communities.

This structure began to erode as platforms optimized for engagement and scale. Platforms such as TikTok introduced a discovery driven model where content is prioritized based on predicted interest rather than social connection. Virality replaced familiarity as the organizing principle. Users shifted from producing for their immediate networks to consuming from a global pool of content curated specifically for them.

The current phase is defined by highly personalized media environments. Each person experiences a distinct stream of content, shaped by behavioral data and optimized for engagement. The overlap that once existed is no longer guaranteed. Two people sitting next to each other can consume entirely different content, with little shared context. This is why I get F1 content while my friends get Raptors content.

From a social capital perspective, this has real consequences. Social capital depends on shared experiences that create common reference points. When those disappear, connection becomes harder. Conversation requires more effort, and communities become more difficult to sustain. The likelihood that I meet someone at a bar who saw the same TikTok as me is much lower than someone who caught the last Raptors game.

As AI continues to improve, the forces driving individualization will only intensify. Personalization will become more precise, and the divergence between individual’s consumption/digital experiences will increase further, putting additional pressure on social capital.

At the same time, there are signs that this trend is reaching its limits. No one wants to live in a society with low social capital and weak communal ties. But this is not the first time the US has faced this dynamic. Social capital has historically operated like a pendulum. In the Gilded Age, society was highly individualistic, before shifting toward a more communal structure in the mid-20th century, and then back towards individualism in the 1970s.

Today, the cracks in that individualism are beginning to show. All around me, I see people subconsciously craving cultural overlap.

Sports remain one of the clearest examples of this dynamic. A live game unfolds in real time, with an outcome that is uncertain and cannot be personalized. The experience is inherently collective. Millions of viewers watch, react, and process the same sequence of events simultaneously. This creates a shared temporal and emotional framework that facilitates connection. The significance of the event lies not only in the game itself, but in the fact that it is experienced together.

It seems like some of the most entertaining sports moments have happened over the last two years. But is that because sports suddenly became more entertaining, or because we have been so deprived of shared media that people are gravitating toward anything that brings them together? Super Bowl viewership continues to reach all time highs after bottoming out in 2021, and most people at Super Bowl parties are not even football fans. They want to be part of the shared experience.

Films and music are performing a similar function. A widely viewed film or a culturally dominant album establishes a common set of references and meanings. These works provide a shared language that individuals can draw upon in conversation and social interaction. They reduce the friction of connection by supplying a baseline of mutual understanding. Even in an increasingly fragmented media landscape, certain cultural products still break through, and when they do, their impact extends beyond entertainment. Marty Supreme drew people to theaters not just because of the cast or director, but because Timothée Chalamet’s marketing, for the first time in years, created a true cultural moment for Gen Z, one that people did not want to miss or be excluded from once it became the center of shared conversation.

Live events and physical gatherings are making a significant comeback among young people because they amplify these effects. Most people are not joining run clubs to run or attending trivia nights to learn facts. They are drawn to them because they combine shared content with shared space, resulting in a genuinely shared experience that feels increasingly rare in a hyper-personalized world. Individuals are not only consuming the same material, but doing so together. This reinforces social bonds through direct interaction and collective response. These repeated, overlapping experiences rebuild a depleted stock of social capital.

What most are confusing for nostalgia is not nostalgia, but adaptation. Sports, films, music, and gatherings are not remnants of a simpler past. They are the mechanisms through which collective life re-forms in an environment that has increasingly pulled people apart.

As the world becomes more personalized, shared experience becomes more valuable. And as AI makes shared experiences more scarce, people will, either consciously or subconsciously, continue to seek them out more actively.