How ☠️ is feeding the loneliness epidemic

Losing someone is one of the biggest contributors to feelings of loneliness, but not for the reasons you'd expect...

In 2017 I lost a dear friend of mine, Lindsay Hawley, to suicide.

Lindsay was a thoughtful, inspiring, and cartoonishly animated person who came into my life with the same ferocity as she left her own, swiftly and on her terms. She was introduced to me in 2013 by my former business partner, Tony Hsieh, during our time in Las Vegas, NV. I had founded Life is Beautiful that year, and Tony had just invited Lindsay to stay with him for a few weeks leading up to the festival while she helped manage a new diet he was on (one of his design that was limited to plates full of bacon, and shots of Fernet, but that story is for another time and newsletter).

My first memory of Lindsay wasn't when we first met, but the first time we hung out as buddies. We went to a diner for a quick bite, during which I accidentally spilled an entire glass of Diet Coke (with no ice) into her lap. Anybody else would have called it a night immediately. The solution we came up with was to head to the nearest gift shop on Fremont Street to buy a new outfit comprised entirely of gimmicky tourist-trap items.

Here are the before and after:

I learned she had died when a mutual friend in the city called me one weekday morning. I was at a sizeable dining-table-turned-office desk with my back facing a large window giving way to the desert sun beating down my back. The voice on the other end of the phone line was sobbing, clearly in a lull between bouts of hysterical crying. The call was brief — what happened, when, who knew, etc. — and ended before it ever started. My first response was to call my now wife, who was across the country in New York at the time. Despite having never met Lindsay, she was very supportive, and this was the first loss we had experienced since we began dating. Later that week, I had the chance to catch up with two more people who knew our mutual friend, brief conversations serving as the extent of my ability to process my grief through any form of a shared community. 

It was an odd feeling because Lindsay was one of those people who knew everyone. EVERYONE. As a result, she was the conduit for her entire network to remain within 2 degrees of separation from just about anyone on the planet. Wanted to snag a spot on a trip to Richard Branson's Neckar Island? Call Lindsay. Needed to interview some influencers in LA for background on a project? Again, Lindsay. Need to connect with a person who is equally as passionate about crotchet art (or any other form, for that matter) as you are? She was ready, almost as if she had been expecting your text/call that entire week. 

The challenge with being a fringe friend of Lindsay's is that, for many of us, we were not connected meaningfully to her broader community. That wasn't for any reason other than the result of her expansive social reach. You would have never entirely been able to appreciate it when she was alive. Still, after her death, the space she consumed in the world was more noticeable than ever. Everything immediately felt a lot smaller for those who knew her. Loneliness introduced its ugly head into our world as quickly as she had left it. 

The average time it takes for a community, one that a person spent a lifetime curating, to dissipate after death is ~90 days. During those three months after a loss, the community reacts viscerally, coming together in any way they can to grieve as a unit. That grief process typically is through the form of storytelling. Reminiscing about a bachelorette party, a crazy trip through Europe, a funny yoga teacher, or, in my case, a ridiculously fun night out dressed in Vegas-branded, bedazzled gift shop items. Around the 90-day mark, the community loses their shared connection point (the person and their legacy), triggered not by a lack of need or intent but rather simply a lack of effective communication tools. 

When someone dies, news of that loss ripples through their community. The group grieves together through SMS, phone calls, WhatsApp groups, Facebook Messenger, Instagram posts, TikTok videos, emails, and in-person gatherings. But those communication channels are not designed for long-term, topic-focused discussion. Messaging a WhatsApp group about Lindsay 100 days later felt intrusive like we were forcing our unresolved grief onto others when they least expected it. The reality was that every person in her orbit was still thinking about her and wanted to talk about her, but most of us were unaware. And so, as days turned to months, the story of the magnificent Lindsay Hawley lived almost entirely on a single Facebook Group Page. 

This year, the United States Surgeon General put loneliness at the top of a list of major social issues we face today. It's the cause of increasing rates of depression and suicide attempts. Forbes later listed death as one of the top 5 contributors to loneliness, a list derived from the collective research of hundreds of experts in the space. How death affects our general sense of loneliness wasn't clearly explained. In the past three years working on Chptr (a modern way to grieve and remember someone who has died), I have learned that it's not only the loss of the person that affects our feelings of connectivity to the world but more so the loss of the entire community that represented and celebrated that person. The latter creates the biggest shock to our system because it occurs(or at least is recognized) months after the loss of our person and is the first time we fully realize the space they took up in our life. 

This realization pushed me forward to pursue Chptr as a solution to a broken grief system for the years after my wife, and I first talked about the idea in our Hell's Kitchen apartment… kitchen. Community connectivity and retention had been solved, from remaining connected with former colleagues (LinkedIN) to meeting mutual fans of obscure film characters (via Reddit) and everything in between. Everything, that is, but death, which was a realization too appalling not to address. In 2022 we launched Chptr as a mobile platform that invites in and retains the community a person built over their lifetime. In the process, they develop their person's digital memorial through the individual stories shared. It's a way to ensure people don't continue to grieve alone and that the ripple effect of our existence doesn't fade away immediately after we die. 

Since Lindsay died in 2017, my grandmother later that year, a high school friend in 2020, my beautiful great uncle in 2022, and several others in those following years, I find myself getting out of bed every day, focusing my life on death memorialization. My inspiration comes from a very different place, not the people I have lost in my life, but rather those I get to share life with today as I continue living it. 

Today, I am building Chptr for my wife, our two kids, and (hopefully) future grand and great-grandchildren. I am doing so to ensure there will always be a place for them to return to when I'm gone. I want Chptr to be a safe space for them to ask questions, connect with others, and share a laugh or a cry with people who were impacted in some meaningful way by the tiny life I lived. I want my children to hear the stories I wasn't strong enough to share and the lessons I didn't realize I had learned. I want them to do so not by feeling like they're reading a book or a chronological summary of my life but by hearing it directly from the people who walked life with me. I love the idea that future generations will also be able to dig into the lives of the people who made up my community, the friends, neighbors, colleagues, dog walkers, and others who the Ancestry family tree doesn't account for. 

We want this experience to be accessible by everyone on the planet. At Chptr, we believe everyone deserves to be remembered (regardless of socioeconomic status or circumstances). Beyond that, we all should be able to continue to feel the impact of our person's existence long after their death and to do so alongside the community that made them who they were. It's a big dream that we build daily with each community and person we work with. It's an experience we would be honored to work with you on if and when you need us. 

I think the most challenging part of losing Lindsay is that, six years later, I have nobody to reminisce about her with. I was on the fringe of her friend network, knew her briefly, and lost contact with everyone connected to her quickly after she died. Not daily or even weekly, but every so often when something in the world sparks a memory of her, having someone to share with would be nice. I'm sure somebody out there would love to hear my Las Vegas gift shop story, and that person might even have a very similar one to share in return, one I'd love to hear one day. 

You can find Lindsay Hawley's Chptr in our mobile app alongside hundreds of other memorials built by thousands of loved ones. I'm easy to find if you want to talk about starting one yourself. You can also head to www.chptr.com to learn more. 

Thanks for reading, and be good to each other, 

Rehan Choudhry
Founder x CEO, Chptr