Loneliness: The Four Circles of Belonging (2/2)
A tactical guide for finding meaningful connection 😎
Table of Contents:
The Four Circles of Belonging
4: The Collective
3: The Clan
2: The Squad
1: The Inner Circle
0: Putting them all together
Filling the Four Circles
Approach 1: Throwing Darts
Approach 2: Becoming a Lighthouse
Approach 3: Building a Funnel
Finding soul-feeding, all-encompassing belonging
💡 This Essay is part 2/2 of my series on loneliness.
Read part 1 here.The Four Circles of Belonging
In part 1 of this essay, we talked about how repeated failed attempts to address loneliness lead to unhelpful conclusions and ineffective solutions. Part 2 proposes a new framework for thinking about loneliness — The Four Circles of Belonging.
This framework has helped me pinpoint and articulate the precise types of connection I’ve lacked and has allowed me to then be intentional with troubleshooting, making it a lot easier for me to find solutions that actually work.
So without further ado, it’s time to introduce the The Four Circles of Belonging: the Inner Circle, the Squad, the Clan, and the Collective.
This essay will break down each circle in more detail, discuss what it feels like when you’ve filled it, and outline steps to take if you feel you could use a little bit more connection in that area of life. It’ll conclude by discussing strategies for filling all four circles and the importance of prioritizing connection as a lifelong pursuit.
Nice. Let’s get started.
4. The Collective
“You matter because you exist.”
This circle will feel full every time a stranger smiles at you in the street. You’ll have an internal smile when someone holds the elevator for you and says “have a nice day” when you part ways. You’ll feel it when you share experiences with someone you’ll never meet again — running for cover from torrential rain, listening to a screaming baby in public, making eye contact with a stranger across a crowded bar — for the brief sliver of time that you share, you’ll switch off autopilot and telepathically communicate:
You’ll find it feels full when people glance up from their busy lives to make sure you’re okay. Women’s washrooms are some of the most 4th circle filling locations in the world — whether you’re standing complaining with your neighbour about how long the line is, needing to borrow a tampon, or reading the long chain of stall-door sharpie affirmations from decades of strangers, there’s a feeling of collective womanhood — in the women’s washroom, everyone’s looking out for each other. It’s really beautiful.
3. The Clan
“You matter because you’re a part of something.”
You may be part of many clans — those who share your religious beliefs, share the mission of winning the collegiate sports championship title, share a vision with your neighbours of throwing the best neighbourhood barbecues in the city, or share a mission with your coworkers to deliver shareholder value. 😁 Whatever it is, you’re in it together — being part of a clan will help you feel a sense of purpose as a small but meaningful contributor to something bigger than yourself.
2: The Squad
“You matter and should be celebrated!”
These people will make a big deal on your birthday. There’s an unspoken understanding that even if you tell them you don’t care if they come to your band’s open mic night, they’re going to be there and ask for your autograph and get a great video. They’ll come to your intramural game with a sign and make you feel special. They hype you up through both wins and losses, and most importantly, they show up.
1: The Inner Circle
“You matter exactly as you are.”
This is where you’ll find a shoulder to cry on. When this circle is full, you’ll have someone who wants to listen whenever you feel like sharing a thought. Even your most mediocre, guess-what-I-dreamed-last-night-wait-that-doesn’t-make-sense thoughts. They’ve seen you petty, heartbroken, giggling uncontrollably, and with your laundry all over the floor. Around them, you can just be.
0: Putting them all together
“You matter.”
There’s no one way to feel lonely — belonging is something we must strive for in all four circles. If you have wonderful people in your life and are questioning why you still feel lonely, the problem may lie in a circle you’ve never even thought to consider.
Once you’ve analyzed your four circles and identified where there’s gaps, it’s time to move on to the next step: filling them up.
How to fill the Four Circles of Belonging
There are generally three approaches I’ve seen people use to fill their circles.
I’ve named them “Throwing Darts”, “Becoming a Lighthouse” and my personal favourite, “Building a Funnel”. There are no cheat codes or life hacks here — all of these approaches require intentional effort, vulnerability, and practice, and all of them can be effective. I’ll start by giving give a high level overview of each, then give some examples for how you can implement them in your own life.
Approach 1: Throwing Darts
The dart-throwing approach takes the concentric circle model and treats it like a dartboard:
Throwing darts rests on the premise that closeness is found through seeking out and “aiming for” others who share our values, “likes” and “dislikes”, and cultural references. It relies heavily on shared interests. With this model, the pool of people you could connect with is theoretically anyone, and you spend a lot of time observing others, looking for “signals” that they’d be compatible with you, and then reaching out.
Online Examples:
- Dating Apps
- Online communities (e.g. Discord Servers)
- A good ol' fashioned DM slide
Offline Examples:
- Introducing yourself to strangers IRL
- Moving to different cities to meet people
- Going to events
- Asking for someone's number Words of Caution:
“Hitting the dartboard” is only step one
Dart throwing gets you in the door, but there are diminishing returns if you keep playing the game — the 200+ incredible first interactions I’ve had via dart throwing have rarely had any follow up. Dart throwing can give the comforting illusion that friendships are things you “find” rather than “build”, but genuine connection takes time and effort — it’s built on the back of uncomfortable (but necessary) failures, growing pains, and lessons-learned-the-hard-way.You might end up with “misses” instead of “lower commitment relationships”
Throwing darts is a one-sided activity that abstracts the most important piece of information: is the other person looking for the same thing as you? Maybe a first date should clearly have actually been a “let’s be colleagues” conversation, but now it’s weird that you met on Hinge. It’s easier to move people from outer circles to inner circles (à la “Friends to Lovers”), but super awkward to move them in the other direction (“colleague-zoned?”). Dart throwing is random enough that even if you find each other, it might be under conditions that don’t set you up for success.
What you practice is what you’ll get good at
Swiping on dating apps didn’t make me better at going on dates (going on dates did!), sliding into people’s DMs to get to know them for 30 mins over video chat didn’t result in strong friendships (3am talks in the living room did!), and simply moving to a different city didn’t help me feel connected to the world around me on its own (building communities did!). Through all this research, I realized I wanted the process of looking for connection to be something that helped me learn and grow, something that was fun, something that gave me great stories to tell my future kids, and something with a lot less planning, evaluation, and algorithms involved. I’ve since been surprised and delighted by new people and experiences, I feel a lot more brave, and I’ve been having a lot more fun.
Approach 2: Becoming a Lighthouse
The becoming-a-lighthouse approach takes the concentric circle model and plops you right in the middle, casting your light upon all the potential friends-to-be-had.
It rests on the premise that if you make yourself extremely visible, people will find you. If you are true to yourself, create many artifacts reflective of your interests and share them broadly, people will flock to your light. Becoming a lighthouse favours highly creative people with unique personalities and a lot of initiative, but can be quite draining for those who need to recharge away from the light. Similar to throwing darts, this continues to rely heavily on shared interests, but with the power dynamic flipped — requests to hangout become inbound when you make yourself discoverable (which sounds like a dream, until you realize you need to be really careful with your own boundaries and limitations as a human being if you want to avoid social burnout).
Online:
- Borderline oversharing on your instagram story
- Thought leadership, engaging in twitter discourse
- Thirst traps (🤡)
Offline:
- Becoming a ✨leader✨ of an existing community, or starting your own
- Hanging out in smaller (therefore less intimidating) groups in public - Wearing clothes that reflect your personality (crocs, animal shirts, fun glasses, laptop stickers, fidget spinner = "come say hi!")
- Friendly and approachable body languageImportant things to remember:
Let your audience curate to YOU.
Be cautious about advice that tells you to narrow your online existence into "a niche" — if your goal is meaningful connection, you might find you accidentally create a persona that’s very discoverable but is an uncomfortably shallow or inaccurate representation of who you actually are. Being yourself aggressively will attract people who think you’re awesome and weed out people who weren’t going to be your friends anyways.Information imbalance can set a weird tone in relationships
Being discoverable means that sometimes you’ll meet people who know a lot about your work or your life — almost as if they’ve been watching a TV show about you. I’ve been on both sides of the “one of us clearly knows way more about the other person” dynamic, and reconciling “the persona” with the multi-dimensional real-life person can take some time.
You might get too much attention (and it might do weird things to your brain)
A ton of people and organizations might start to notice you! What a rush! People might start to treat you differently (but you’ll feel like the same person on the inside), you’ll feel overwhelmed, you’ll feel guilty for feeling overwhelmed, you’ll feel like Hannah Montana. You’ll end up finding ways to feel grounded, you’ll remember you’re the same old Miley, and you’ll feel really really grateful for the friends that cared about you before you became “a person to know”.
Remember you can ‘turn it off’ if you need to
The biggest celebrities of the early 2000s can (for the most part) walk the streets today unnoticed. Even Taylor Swift is choosing consciously every day to remain in the spotlight. In comparison, the level of attention you’re receiving is probably small potatoes (even if it doesn’t feel like it) — the world is loud and it can be comforting to remember that if it all becomes too much and you need to disappear for a bit, the void will quickly be filled by all the other people who are constantly yelling for attention. You can fade into the background to rest and recharge, then re-emerge if and when you’re ready.
Approach 3: Building a Funnel (My favourite)
Building a funnel is longer term and higher effort, but extremely foolproof. The funnel-building approach to filling the circles of belonging views the concentric circle model as a one-dimensional representation of a funnel.
It rests on the premise that closeness is developed through:
Proximity + Consistency + Vulnerability
It deprioritizes shared interests and relies heavily on shared experiences, imitating the way kids make friends — focus on the pool of people around you, and leverage “gravity” to work in your favour: to make a new inner circle friend, it makes sense to look from the pool of friends in your Squad, and most of those people are probably a subset of the people you’re in a Clan with.
To start, we must fill the 4th circle — luckily, this really just comes down to choosing to participate in society — here’s 9 places to start, from lowest to highest commitment.
Filling your 4th Circle — Participating in the Collective
Leave the house. Hang out in public, show up to things your community is running. Drive to a public park or city centre if you feel stuck in the suburbs, then go for a walk or get some work done at a library or cafe. Putting yourself in environments where it is possible to have chance encounters is probably less productive and definitely more effort than staying home, but it will help you feel less lonely.
Support the things you value, even when you don’t have to — if you make it possible for someone to make a living by busking on the street corner or running a cute little coffee shop around the corner from your house, that version of the world will continue to exist. Vote with how you spend your money.
Question your instinct to pay for private access to stuff — While it’s comfortable and convenient, we don’t talk enough about how sharing has the dual properties of a) making life less expensive and b) giving us reason to connect (and have fun with!) with the people around us. It’s good to need each other.
When optimizing for connection: - Large dinner table > several small tables - Hostels > hotels - Public park > backyard - Library > co-working space > home office - Public transit > Uber > private vehicleGET 👏 GROCERIES 👏 FROM 👏 FARMERS 👏 MARKETS 👏
Rally your friends, make it a weekly ritual. Going to the market alongside families and buying from independent vendors is a super fun, wholesome, and human-feeling experience. The Kitchener Market runs every Saturday from 10am-2pm, year round. The St Jacob’s Market runs Thursdays from 8am-3pm and Saturdays from 7am-3:30pm. Both of these markets offer meat, dairy, and produce products that are noticeably more fresh and affordable than supermarket standards, both are accessible via public transit and paved bike paths (~25 mins from UW campus), and both have student discounts.
If you’re moving to a new city, think about walkability.
There is an abundance of evidence that car-centric city planning is getting in the way of human connection. Cities have the best infrastructure for going car free when they prioritize pedestrians and bikers (Montreal, Toronto, and Waterloo have all been making CRAZY progress). I’ve appreciated the freedom of hopping in and out of busses, bike shares, subways, and ride shares — my days have been spent exploring instead of returning to where I parked my car. Being car-free works best when you fully commit to the lifestyle — get shoes that are comfortable to walk in, find good backpacks, buy a used bike, and those little wheely grocery cart things so that you don’t need a car trunk to move stuff around. 😍 🥰 🎉… but also consider the broader effects of affordability
Big cities have a bit of a dark side when it comes to belonging— the rising costs mean that many people a) get priced out b) have to work ridiculous hours to be able to afford the lifestyle or c) can only participate for short periods of time. I’ve noticed communities of young tech workers are significantly less “sticky” — an industry-wide culture of remote-first work, high-turnover jobs, and high salaries combine to form a network of people that bounce between city centres and interact mostly at the surface level out of self-preservation — why get invested in people if you’ll only know them for 4 months?
… and consider places where people take pride in being friendly to strangers Cities where people chit-chat in grocery store aisles and say thank you to bus drivers are unmatched. Whether it’s Canadian niceness, Southern Charm, or one of the many community-oriented cultures that exist outside of the western hemisphere, there’s a difference in the air. You can feel it.
Decide to stay.
I’m grateful to have had the ability to explore through internships, but living in 4 month increments for 5 years has been a quiet form of heartbreak — each time I pack up my boxes, I leave behind the people who have witnessed me grow up. A piece of me still lives in all 14 bedrooms I’ve lived in since 2020, and I’ve never been able to pause long enough to mourn those losses. As I near graduation, I’ve been daring to dream of letting myself fall in love with places and people in a very long term way. I’m excited to put down some roots.Advocate for other people in your community
Learn enough to have an opinion and then put it to action. After hearing about proposed changes to the LRT schedule on twitter, Rodney and friends successfully led a charge to keep the trains in Waterloo running at 15 minute intervals during off-peak hours and it worked. Get into YIMBY advocacy, dedicate time to supporting the development of dense, walkable, human-scaled neighborhoods and/or affordable housing projects. Advocacy can take many forms— the Obama Campaign had a CTO and data science team. Surrounding yourself with people who care about the health of their communities will give you a sense of purpose and help you feel less lonely.
Filling the 3rd Circle - Joining and inviting people into your Clans
If you’ve met someone and think you’d like to be closer friends:
Ask for their Instagram or contact information (in my opinion, phone number feels a bit personal and high commitment) so you can stay passively aware of each others’ life updates until you can think of some reason to hang out again on purpose.
Invite them to do something specific and recurring based on shared goals or interests (e.g. “hey I’m looking for people to do this group activity, feel free to invite someone else too, no worries if not!” v.s. “do you want to be my friend?”) feels a lot less awkward as a starting line to initiate a more ongoing relationship.
Fun ways to get to know someone over time include:
1. Making Stuff (band practice, doing a project, crafts) 2. Learning / self improvement (university, art class, coding bootcamps, cooking classes, fitness classes) 3. Sports (intramural, community leagues, competitive teams) 4. Work (part time, full time, entrepreneurship, peer groups) 5. Volunteering (community centres, advocacy, libraries) 6. Cultural spaces, churches 7. Starting a Socratica Node (atrociously shameless plug, I'm not even being paid to say this, ridiculous, anyways here's the link 😁💃🎉🕺🪩😎✨)Become a“yes person”. Reaching out to people is scary for everyone (what if they say no?), so if you consistently are enthusiastic about participating and say yes often, you’ll probably find you become people’s go-to invite when they want to have a good time.
Filling the 2nd Circle — Assembling a Squad
To “promote” people from your clans (e.g. coworkers, teammates, volunteers, friends from school, friends from church) into genuine friendships, the key is inviting them to do activities beyond what initially brought you together. Introducing your friends from different contexts to each other can be quite fun, and making group chat is one of the most powerful ways to initiate the formation of a squad. The goal is to create a ton of crossover episodes until you stop thinking of people as “your friends from ____”, and just start thinking of them as “your friends”.
Examples:
1. trips to the beach with your classmates
2. going to the bar with people from your sports team
3. starting a reading club with your friends from church
5. inviting your coworkers, reading club, church friends, sports teammates, classmates, and friends you met at the bar to create the most incredible trivia team your small town has ever seen. Awesome.
Filling the Inner Circle — Opening the gates & dropping your guard
This is arguably the hardest layer to break through. Turning members of the squad into members of your inner circle requires a level of vulnerability and mutual neediness that many people are uncomfortable exposing. Without fail, I’ve only *really* befriended roommates and close friends at this level after: 1) ugly crying in front of them, 2) throwing up in front of them, 3) going through some sort of otherwise traumatic experience together. With those things in mind, it becomes somewhat obvious that if you are risk averse and strive to be “self sufficient”, you will also struggle to reach a level of friendship this meaningful. Being vulnerable in front of other people is HARD.
(At your own risk), activities that generally work:
1. Being roommates (lower commitment: have a sleepover)
2. Moving to a new city/country together
3. Travelling together, going camping, road trips
4. Supporting each other through something vulnerable (e.g. breakups, exams, car accidents, getting unreasonably drunk and dealing with the consequences, interpersonal ✨drama✨💅) The line between Squad and Inner Circle is a delicate one — these activities work only because there is real risk involved: leaning on people and finding out which relationships break under pressure can be really painful, but it’s the only way to find the relationships that will stand the test of time.
Your grumpy, anxious, mopey, ‘being ridiculous”, low morale, stinky, bad-attitude self is part of who you are — the only way to feel truly seen is being vulnerable enough to show someone all of that, terrified it’ll scare them away (because you really are being grumpy anxious mopey ridiculous low morale and stinky), and then realizing they’re still there, somehow excited to deal with this messy version of you, honoured to witness your life behind-the-scenes.
It takes a long road to get here, but having people in your inner circle is one of the most empowering and beautiful things you can experience in the entire world. It is worth it.
Finding soul-feeding, all-encompassing belonging
Is a myth. Even if you feel you’ve found it, it will be fleeting — you’ll change and evolve, be influenced by your surroundings, and seek environments that feel in sync with who you are and who you want to become. Connections at all levels will come and go throughout our lives, and life events (moving to a new city, losing a close relationship, integrating with new colleagues or peers) can all make us feel unstable — it’s unlikely that anyone will ever truly have all of their circles full at any point in time.
If you feel a perfect sense of belonging everywhere you go, you’re probably limiting yourself by staying too deep in your comfort zone. Prioritizing connection is a lifelong pursuit, and not something you can (or should!) put on autopilot. Relationships and strong communities require effort (at an individual and societal level), but that doesn’t mean they have to be draining — I can say with complete confidence that investing time into relationships has been the single most rewarding thing I’ve done in my life. I think it’s kind of entire point of being alive.
You live in a place full of people worth getting to know.
You are worth getting to know.
We are all. right. here.
This essay is dedicated to Anson.
In the depths of the pandemic, she spotted me in our 100+ member SYDE 2025 class Facebook messenger group chat and slid into my DMs:
After a year and a half of infinite conversations, school projects, late night video calls, online hackathons, and links sent back and forth, we finally met in person in summer 2021, and over the past 4 years we’ve leaned on each other through bonks on the head, heartbreaks, exam seasons, and the co-parenting of community organizations.
We’ve cried and fought as we’ve weathered the ups and downs of our intermittently-long-distance friendship — but have come out of each bump in the road feeling stronger and more resilient, both in our friendship and as individual people. I have been changed for good: I would not be the person I am today without Anson, and I cannot imagine the past, present, or future of my life without her in it.
Every so often I’m struck with all of these feelings — most recently I could be found sobbing while listening to Grow as We Go by Ben Platt:
I don't know who we'll become
I can't promise it's not written in the stars
But I believe that when it's done
We're gonna see that it was better
That we grew up together
Tell me you don't wanna leave
'Cause if change is what you need
You can change right next to me
When you're high, I'll take the lows
You can ebb and I can flow
We'll take it slow
And grow as we go.
… But I think I captured it best in words in a ✨private friendship essay✨ from 2022:
I’ve been thinking about the thing I said the other day (admittedly a banger), about how loneliness shouldn’t be the reason great people don’t do great things. Today I think I realized, or at least remembered from a long long time ago (from a brain that no longer feels like my own) a feeling that I haven’t acknowledged in a while.
I haven’t felt lonely since the day I met you.
I want you to know that everything I have personally worked on since I met you — even if you had absolutely nothing to do with it — has been supercharged by your existence. I was wandering around, searching for community, and finding great collaborators along the way, but a broad community is only one piece of the puzzle — there’s just something about your inner circle being full that lights you up and lets you be the absolute best version of yourself.
Though I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to make life better for other people, I think I’ll feel forever karmically indebted to the universe for not only bringing you into my life but for doing it early enough that we have so many incredible years to spend together.
Who tf gets that lucky?!:)
- Joss
This is an excellent model. As someone who just sold my house and am moving to a new province to solve this very problem (while going on a very public adventure), this resonates a lot with both the reasons I'm doing this and the fears / hopes I have ahead. Definitely going to come back to this.
I think you've got the makings of a book in here, Joss.
This article - the framework AND the explanations with tips - is so well thought out.
I’m speechless at how thorough yet kindly-written this was.
I want to be you when I grow up! 😂