Your group chat has 47 people in it. So why do you feel like you have nobody to call?
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Singaporeans spend 17 hours a week on social media. We average 7 different platforms a month. We are, by every digital measure, the most connected generation in history. So why are young adults aged 21 to 34 the loneliest demographic in the country?
That contradiction is worth sitting with for a moment. Because the answer is not simply to put down your phone. It is more uncomfortable than that.
We confused staying in touch with actually being close
There is a difference between a friendship that is maintained and one that is alive. Group chats, Instagram reactions, the occasional meme drop, these are maintenance. Low-effort signals that say I have not forgotten you exist. They are not nothing. But they are not the thing itself.
Real connection, the kind that actually makes you feel less alone is built through shared experience. Researchers call it the difference between passive contact and active presence. We have gotten very good at the former and quietly let the latter slide. And in a city as busy and transactional as Singapore, that gap between digital and real-world social wellbeing has never been wider.
The group chat is not the problem. The group chat replacing the actual hangout is.
Adult friendships do not just happen anymore and that is not your fault
When you were in school, proximity did the work for you. You were in a room with the same 40 people for years. Friendships formed almost by accident, through repetition, shared suffering over exams, and the kind of boredom that forced actual conversation. You did not need to be intentional. You just had to show up.
Then that structure disappears. NS, first jobs, different neighbourhoods across the island. The people you were close to scatter. Making friends as an adult in Singapore suddenly requires a level of deliberate effort that feels almost embarrassingly high. You have to find someone, figure out shared interests, organise something, show up, not be weird about it, and do all of that while both of you are busy and slightly out of practice.
It is not that people do not want connection. It is that the infrastructure for it quietly disappeared after graduation and for a long time, nobody replaced it. The social events scene in Singapore is growing, but most of it is either too big and impersonal, or too niche to find unless you already know where to look.
The third place and why losing it matters more than we realise
In the 1980s, sociologist Ray Oldenburg introduced the concept of the third place. Not home. Not work. The vital somewhere in between. The neighbourhood coffee shop. The community table. The Sunday football game where the same faces show up week after week. Third places, Oldenburg argued, are not a luxury. They are how communities actually form. They are where strangers slowly become familiar, and familiar slowly becomes belonging.
What made third places work was not programming or planning. It was regularity and low stakes. You did not go to achieve anything. You just went. Over time, through repetition and shared small moments, something built. The conversations got easier. The faces got warmer. You started to feel like you were part of something without ever having to formally sign up for it.
The problem is that modern life, especially in a city like Singapore, has slowly squeezed the third place out. The old coffee shop became a specialty cafe with laptop policies. The community sports game got harder to sustain when schedules stopped lining up. Work expanded to fill the gaps. And what replaced third places? The group chat. The Instagram story. The illusion of togetherness at arm's length.
Research backs up what most of us feel intuitively: people with access to a third place report higher life satisfaction, stronger sense of identity, better mental health, and more resilience during hard times. Not because anything dramatic happened there. Just because they had somewhere to be, with people who knew them, regularly.
We are not lacking things to do in Singapore. We are lacking places to belong.
What it actually takes to rebuild one
The tricky thing about third places is that you cannot force them. You cannot manufacture belonging with a canape and a name tag. The classic networking event fails precisely because it tries to engineer connection under time pressure, which is the opposite of how connection actually works.
What you can do is build the conditions for it. Give people a shared activity with low enough stakes that they can relax into it. Put them in a room with others who care about the same things. Make showing up solo feel normal, even obvious. Then step back and let the conversation do what it naturally does when the context is right.
Specificity is everything. A dinner for anyone who loves food is a restaurant. A dinner for people obsessed with fermentation is a conversation waiting to happen. The more specific the shared thread, the faster strangers stop feeling like strangers.
Why Co. Duxton exists
During the day, Co. Duxton is a focused workspace in the heart of Duxton Hill, open 9am to 6pm on weekdays. A quiet, productive space for people who need to get things done away from home or a noisy cafe. But when 6pm comes around, the laptops close and the space transforms into something else entirely.
That same room becomes a third place. It hosts curated, interest-based community events for adults in Singapore who want more from their social life than a crowded bar or another generic networking night. Intimate dinners built around a shared obsession. Creative sessions where the making matters less than the meeting. Conversations, movement, wellness experiences, all put together with one question in mind: would this bring the right people into the same room?
We are not an events company. We are not a coworking space with perks. We are an attempt to rebuild the infrastructure that adult social life in Singapore quietly lost, one specific and well-curated evening at a time.
A question worth asking yourself:
When was the last time you did something with people you did not already know and actually enjoyed it? If you have to think hard about that, this might be for you.
You do not need a social overhaul. You just need one good evening, with the right people, around something that actually matters to you. We will handle the rest. You just have to show up.
Co. Duxton
A community space in Duxton Hill, Singapore.
A focused workspace by day. A curated third place by night.
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