Community > Protocol
Beyond your optimized health stack 🤝
I used to think the people who trained hardest were the ones who figured it out.
Not naively. I’d coached long enough to know that the fastest person on the course isn’t always the most whole. But I kept believing, under everything, that if you built the right body and tracked the right numbers, the rest of life would organize itself around that center.
I spent a decade in the triathlon world. Coaching athletes, building programs, running teams. Close to a thousand people over those years. And what I watched, over and over, was that the people who hit their goals most often weren’t the ones nailing the training plans. They were the ones embedded in a group. Showing up on a cold, wet Sunday morning, parking lots still dark, nobody particularly wanting to be grueling through it, but because someone was expecting them. The plan got them fit. The community got them pushing beyond what they thought was possible.
I knew this. I’d seen it hundreds of times.
And then I left that world, moved to New York for a different life, and immediately felt the void.
New York had community of course. I was working around the startup world, surrounded by smart, driven people moving fast toward things that mattered to them. Collaborative meetings, networking events, and late-night working dinners where the conversation was lively and the energy was tangible. There was genuine warmth at times in it. But it was community organized around what you were building, what round you were raising, and where you were headed next. The relationships were real. They just didn’t reach the part of you beyond your utility in the marketplace.
I didn’t have language for that distinction then. I just felt it. A low-grade hum of something missing underneath all the action.
What I understand now is that what was missing had a name. Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson spent decades studying what separates groups that perform from groups that merely function, and the variable that mattered most wasn’t talent or incentive or leadership style. It was psychological safety: the condition where people believe they won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking honestly, asking questions, or showing the parts of themselves that aren’t polished. Most social environments, and nearly every professional one, are psychologically unsafe in ways so subtle we’ve stopped noticing them. We perform. We edit. We offer the version of ourselves that fits the room and quietly wonder why we leave feeling vaguely empty.
The startup world I was living in was full of brilliant, driven, caring people. It was also, structurally, a place where honesty about struggle was expensive. Showing weakness had a cost. So people didn’t. And neither did I.
A few years in I joined a men’s circle modeled on the work of Owen Marcus and Evyman. Marcus started the original concept in northern Idaho with a simple intention: not performance, not bravado, not therapy. Just men learning how to connect with each other more meaningfully. That deceptively simple idea was the whole thing.
A handful of us met weekly in Nathan’s apartment. Comfortable tucked across his living room. No alcohol, no phones, no agenda beyond showing up and being honest. Advice was discouraged. You weren’t there to fix anyone or be fixed. You were there to be present and to speak and to be heard without someone immediately trying to solve your problems.
What we had built, I realized later, was a designed psychological safety container. Every structural choice, the small group, the prohibition on advice-giving, and the absence of an exit ramp into problem-solving were in service of one thing: making it safe enough to be true to oneself. And when it’s safe enough to be honest, something happens that almost nothing else in modern life produces: real connection.
I hadn’t realized until I reflected on those moments how rarely that happens. How much energy we spend making sure we don’t make other people uncomfortable with the actual weight of our lives. How practiced we become at editing ourselves down to the version that fits the room.
It was the first time since my triathlon days that I’d felt genuinely held by a group. And what still is striking is how rare that is. How long I’d gone without it. How many people around me, accomplished and connected by every conventional measure, were and are probably going without it too.
There are more layers to it than the container I’ve described. Mostly, what we had was a return to something the nervous system already knows: that we’re wired to regulate through each other before we regulate alone. Researchers call this co-regulation. A baby calms in its mother’s arms before it can self-soothe because proximity to a trusted person is the nervous system’s first language. We don’t calm down and then connect. We connect, and that’s what allows us to calm down.
We’ve had this backwards.
John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago neuroscientist who spent his career studying loneliness, found that feeling chronically disconnected triggers the same threat response in the brain as physical danger. The WHO corroborated it from a public health angle, linking low social connection to a 30% higher risk of early death. Two different institutions, different methodologies, arriving at the same place.
To add another layer, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar spent years studying the cognitive limits of human social connection and found that we can maintain roughly 150 stable relationships…but our inner ring, the people we genuinely trust, feel close to, and would call in a crisis, caps at around five. That number hasn’t changed across cultures or centuries. What has changed is how easy modern life makes it to let that inner ring quietly hollow out while accumulating hundreds of ambient connections. LinkedIn followers. Slack channels. Group chats. The quantity goes up. The depth collapses. And you can feel profoundly lonely with a completely full calendar, which is maybe the most disorienting version of it: the loneliness that doesn’t look like loneliness from the outside.
We are not under-meditated. We are not under-supplemented. We are disconnected from each other.
In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring loneliness a national public health epidemic, placing it in the same category as tobacco and the opioid crisis. His message was direct: loneliness is far more than a bad feeling. It’s a serious public health risk. And the scale of it was already staggering before COVID made it visible. About half of American adults reported experiencing loneliness even before the pandemic hit.
And this didn’t happen overnight. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam spent years documenting the slow unraveling in his book Bowling Alone. He found that participation in civic organizations, informal social connectedness, and interpersonal trust had been declining in America since the 1960s and 70s, with a sharp acceleration through the 80s and 90s.
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg was watching the same erosion from a different angle. He called them third places: the public spaces beyond home and work that host the regular, voluntary, informal gatherings that hold communities together. The coffee shop. The barbershop. The church hall. Places where you bumped into people without planning to, where community happened as a byproduct of just showing up. Oldenburg was clear that no digital version replaces this: “Third places are face-to-face phenomena.”
What Putnam and Oldenburg were both describing was the same loss. The slow disappearance of the structures that made connection automatic rather than effortful. We used to stumble into community. Now we have to schedule it. And scheduling it means it’s one of the first things to fall off when life gets full.
But there’s something worth naming about why so many attempts to rebuild community fail, because they do fail, often, and in predictable ways.
Most gatherings are too transactional. People arrive as consumers, scanning for what they can get, and when the returns feel thin, they stop coming back. Community built on extraction doesn’t hold. The ones that hold are built on contribution, on people showing up not just for themselves but because the group has begun to feel like something worth protecting.
Most gatherings lack consistent rhythm. Community isn’t an event. It’s a practice. A quarterly mixer, a one-time retreat, even a monthly dinner rarely builds the kind of trust that makes people honest with each other. Frequency matters more than intensity. What the men’s circle gave me wasn’t a single profound experience. It was a regular low-key Monday night that slowly built something I didn’t know I was building.
Most gatherings are too big. Groups beyond a certain size default to performance. People play to the room rather than speaking with each other. Dunbar’s research suggests that genuine intimacy lives in groups of roughly five to fifteen. Beyond that, something shifts. You start managing your impression instead of sharing your experience.
And most gatherings are designed around comfort rather than honesty. Research on deep bonding, across combat veterans, sports teams, disaster survivors, consistently shows that shared vulnerability creates faster and more durable trust than shared success. Events built purely around positivity and connection stay shallow, not because the people aren’t capable of depth, but because nothing in the structure asked for it.
This is what Owen Marcus understood when he designed those rules for the circle. No advice. No cross-talk. No fixing. He wasn’t being precious. He was removing every structural escape hatch that allows people to stay on the surface and call it community.
I moved to Miami in 2021. New city, new job, life suddenly full in a different way. Two boys entering early elementary school and orienting to a whole new dynamic. The kind of community I’d found in that circle in New York kept getting deferred. Just casually moving it to later until recently.
This past April I started hosting Board Walks on Saturday mornings. The idea was simple: meet at a regular spot, walk together for a couple of hours, and talk about something meaningful in your world. No agenda, no cost, no optimization.
Research on conversation and connection has found that face-to-face contact activates social performance anxiety in ways we’re barely aware of. We track each other’s micro-expressions constantly, monitoring for judgment, adjusting our presentation in real time. Side-by-side contact during movement reduces that vigilance. Soldiers debrief while walking. Therapists run walk-and-talk sessions. Parents reliably get their most honest conversations with teenagers in the car, not at the dinner table. When you’re moving, when you’re looking forward instead of at each other, something in the nervous system relaxes its guard.
It’s early. I’m still learning what it wants to be. But the people who come back every week are telling me something without saying it directly. They aren’t coming for the step count.
Dan Buettner found the same pattern studying Blue Zones, the pockets of the world where people live longest. The defining characteristic isn’t diet or exercise. It’s stable social structures. In Okinawa, they call it moai: small groups of lifelong friends moving through decades together, sharing resources and accountability. Belonging isn’t something they schedule. It’s the medium they move through.
The container matters as much as what’s inside it.
Modern wellness culture is very good at optimizing the individual. It’s very bad at accounting for the environment that individual is trying to survive in.
You can have the perfect morning routine and still feel unmoored if no one knows your name in the places you spend time. The consistency that comes from belonging operates differently than the consistency that comes from willpower. One is you pushing against your own resistance, day after day. The other is you being pulled forward by people who notice when you don’t show up, by a story that’s bigger than your own discipline.
One runs out.
The other holds people through finish lines they didn’t think they had in them.
I watched it happen on training courses for a decade. I watched it happen in a living room in New York where a group of people decided to just tell the truth about how they were doing. I’m watching it begin to happen on Saturday mornings in Miami, tentatively, hopefully, with people still finding their way to each other.
The research confirms what the oldest communities already knew. I (and we) just need the reminder.
Community isn’t a luxury you add once the real work is done. It isn’t a nice-to-have sitting at the bottom of your wellness list beneath sleep, nutrition, and exercise. It is the structure inside which all of that becomes sustainable. Without it, you’re optimizing in isolation. And isolation, it turns out, has a cost that no protocol can offset.
The good news is that community doesn’t require a movement or a perfect program. It requires intention. A decision to stop waiting for it to happen and start building it deliberately. A weekly walk. A circle of people who tell the truth. A standing dinner. A group chat that actually goes somewhere. The form matters less than the commitment to show up for each other, consistently, over time.
But the structure matters too. Make it small enough that people can’t hide. Make it frequent enough that trust has time to build. Remove the escape hatches that let everyone stay comfortable and call it connection. Ask something of people. Not performance. Presence.
We were never meant to figure this out alone. The science keeps saying it. History keeps saying it. Our bodies have always known it.
The question isn’t whether you need community. The question is what you’re going to do to bring it into your life.
How are you accessing community?
