Hinge is launching a $1 million fund to help local groups in London put on social events for young people.
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It may come as no surprise that Gen Z, the online generation, are increasingly struggling with loneliness — but an unlikely source is coming to their aid.
Dating app giant Hinge on Thursday announced a $1 million fund for around 100 local groups based in London to put on free or affordable social events for young people, in a global expansion of their One More Hour social impact initiative, which first launched in the U.S. last year.
The groups will put on a range of activity-based events, ranging from food, nature and reading, for young people to connect in-person and build friendships.
“This generation [Gen Z] grew up in a period where their core, late teenage years, and early 20s, were spent in a lockdown pandemic situation,” Jackie Jantos, president and chief marketing officer at Hinge, told CNBC.
“Technology plays such a huge role in our lives, and so a lot of the work that we’re doing through these One More Hour groups is encouraging people to come together, and we do it in a way where we want to lower the barrier for people coming into the room,” she said.
An overwhelming 85% of British Gen Z report experiencing feelings of loneliness, according to a new Hinge survey that polled 2,000 Gen Z adults in the U.K. in March. Over half of low income young adults experience severe loneliness, per the research.
Half of young people surveyed emphasized the importance of better accessibility to affordable social activities, while just over two-thirds cited anxiety as a core barrier to meeting people in real life.
However, it’s not just a U.K. problem. A Meta-Gallup State of Social Connections report, which surveyed 1,000 adults over the age of 15 from 142 countries in 2022, found that young adults between the ages of 19 to 29 felt lonelier than older adults.
Around 43% of 19 to 29-year-olds said they weren’t lonely at all, but 57% of those over 65 said the same, highlighting a gap in feelings of connection across ages.
Dating apps like Hinge are seen by some as contributing to the loneliness problem. A Forbes Health Survey of 1,000 Americans in 2024 found that more than three-quarters of Gen Z respondents felt burnt out using dating apps like Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble, with respondents of all ages citing a failure to find a good connection with someone and spending too much time on the apps.
The declining sentiment has seen dating apps lose their luster. A 2024 Ofcom report found that the most popular dating sites in the UK — Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble — saw a decline in users between May 2023 and May 2024. Tinder lost 594,000 users, while Hinge dropped by 131,000 and Bumble by 368,000.
And some are quietly shifting into the live-events space alongside their online offerings. For example, Bumble IRL launched in 2022 with a range of exclusive in-person events centered around fitness, food, music, charity, and more.
LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr is also expanding its in-person presence and partnering with the Mighty Hoopla music festival in London to add a series of queer-themed performances in May and June.
Meanwhile, a host of smaller social apps that encourage in-person meet ups have gained traction from social networking and community app Cliq to TimeLeft, an app facilitating group meet-ups between strangers over dinner.
Gen Z’s social muscle has atrophied
Gen Z’s social skills are not on par with previous generations due to three key reasons: the Covid-19 pandemic, smartphone use, and the decline in third spaces, according to Josh Penny, Hinge’s social impact director.
“Look at the ways in which technology and social media have displaced how we spend our free time, and then Covid accelerated this trend even further,” Penny said to CNBC. “It’s just like a muscle that has atrophied a little bit, and we know that they’re looking for solutions, ways to plug back in, but things are looming in the background, like affordability, like how much does it cost every time they leave their house, are other big drivers that keep people isolated.”
Additionally, the onset of remote work and remote studying since the 2020 pandemic resulted in Gen Z’s interpersonal and communication skills stagnating.
To tackle this, Penny says, centering the events around activities can help ease young people’s anxiety.
“When you tell people to show up for a dating event, it’s high pressure. Similarly, when you tell people to come meet others and make friends, that’s also high pressure,” he said.
“The activities help take that off, and so instead of hearing ‘come make friends,’ it’s ‘come try surfing, come try skateboarding, come try poetry,’ and that is actually much easier to get people involved with than setting the stakes so high up front.”
As in-person events become the new norm for young people to gather and socialize, Penny said it will provide Gen Z with the opportunities to practice those stagnated social skills and build community.
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