The Zojul mission
The “why” behind our IRL socializing platform
“Man is by nature a social animal.”
This quote, by Aristotle, dates back to the 4th century BC. But the extent to which this remains true today has been confirmed by a remarkable 75 year study on happiness. Following the lives of 724 Boston men born around the 1930s, from their teens until today, what the Harvard study of adult development bears out is that, of all the things in our lives, the quality of our relationships — be they with our partners, family, friends or peers — has by far the greatest impact on our happiness and life satisfaction.
That’s right—neither fame nor fortune was a factor. Careers and success didn’t matter. Only human relationships. And the study features a fantastically broad range of people; one even became US president.
The flip side to this finding is that loneliness has a reciprocal, adverse affect on our health. New studies being published every year show the detrimental impacts on health, both mental and physical, on people of all ages, caused by loneliness.
So if we know that good friendships are key to health and happiness, why is modern society making it so hard to be truly social? Through a combination of having higher expectations of our careers, entertainment piped into our homes, and a connection to others only through our screens, forging real relationships has become much tougher. It’s no wonder that some have coined this “The Age of Loneliness”.
It’s easy to find ourselves wanting to meet new people. We might be new to a city. Or have been there for years, but our current friends are all settling down or moving on. We might have focused heavily on work, but now want to expand our social circles. Perhaps we haven’t met people we click with, or that special someone, and would like to. In fact, all of these have applied to me over the last few years.
What I’ve found is that, while there are lots of ways to meet people, finding, connecting with and forging real friendships with people that I like is much harder. That’s also been the experience of my good friend, Ben.
We both work in tech, and we believe that rather than putting a barrier between us, it should be making it far easier for us to find and connect with people we like, In Real Life (IRL). So we decided to create Zojul — its mission:
“To help people forge new and meaningful friendships.”
That way, we can get back to what really matters in life — supportive, happiness-inducing, life-affirming, quality human connections. Find out how at zojul.com.
