The quiet tax on being together

I keep running into the same pattern in my own life: anything that puts me in a room with other humans is a pain in the ass to organize, and anything that lets me stay home alone gets easier and cheaper every year.

You can feel it everywhere. It’s easier to get a same-day grocery delivery than to coordinate dinner with friends. It’s easier to spin up a solo side project with an AI copilot than to find a co-founder you actually want to text back. You don’t need a think tank report to tell you we’re spending more time alone than ever. You can see it in your calendar.

Economists have a name for part of what’s going on: Baumol’s cost disease. Derek Thompson wrote about it this week, and the basic idea is simple: some kinds of work get more productive with technology, and some don’t. Growing corn and writing software get dramatically cheaper over time. Running a daycare or hosting a dinner party does not.

You can’t “innovate” your way to a three-person string quartet. You still need three people, tuned instruments, and an audience that shows up at a specific time. A great live conversation with eight founders takes eight bodies, one room, and a free evening on the same night. There isn’t a 10x tool for that.

Meanwhile, the stuff that makes us more isolated scales beautifully. One engineer can ship a feature that nudges millions of people to watch one more episode alone on their couch. A handful of model engineers can ship an AI that helps millions of knowledge workers do more by themselves. The economics reward the products that keep us apart.

Think about the last decade of software. The big money is in things you can consume on your own: streaming, feeds, solo productivity, AI copilots. The businesses that exist to put people in the same room — small venues, third places, childcare, live theater — are either struggling or quietly raising prices until only the already-comfortable can say yes.

None of this is a conspiracy. It’s just incentives compounding. If you’re a founder, you’re more likely to chase a business where margins improve as you add users. If you’re an investor, you prefer a company that can ship bits to one more lonely person without opening one more expensive building or hiring one more teacher.

Layer AI on top and you get a new twist: even the work of thinking about being together is easier to do alone. The Free Press ran a piece this week about software engineers quietly panicking about how much of their job can now be done by a model. One way they’re coping is by leaning into the lone-wolf version of their craft: fewer meetings, more prompts, more time in their own head.

Zoom out and you get a kind of invisible tax on togetherness. Every year it gets relatively cheaper to stay home and more expensive — in money, time, and friction — to build real social infrastructure.

The good news is that some people are refusing to pay that tax. Neal Bloom wrote about realizing he’d accidentally built a community in San Diego by hosting founder hikes, company visits, investor days, and dinners. None of that scales like a SaaS product. All of it creates value that shows up in ways a P&L doesn’t capture: co-founder matches, warm intros, the feeling that you’re not the only weirdo trying to build something.

I think that’s the frontier we’re actually on: not “AI vs. humans,” but whether we’re willing to push back against the economic gravity that keeps pulling us into solitude. The tools are tilting the playing field toward alone time. The question is whether we treat that as destiny, or as a design problem.

If you’re feeling more isolated than you’d like, it’s not just your willpower. You’re swimming upstream against the cost structure of the modern economy. The only way to fix that, at the scale of one life, is to choose a few things that are bad businesses and great uses of time: weekly dinners, stubbornly in-person meetups, communities that are “cult classics, not bestsellers.”

The market will keep making alone time cheaper. The work is deciding where you’re willing to overpay to be together anyway.