Serena Bian is Ready to Heal Our Divided Nation

Serena Bian is on a mission to end loneliness. Since her freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania six years ago, where feelings of isolation led to depression, Bian has gone deep to understand how to fight loneliness and forge meaningful connections. In doing so, she has learned timely lessons about how to heal individuals and communities, and may well be on a path to heal our nation.

Human beings are wired to seek connection; we need community to live the lives we want. But loneliness was a widespread problem, even before the pandemic trapped us in our homes. Bian worked as a researcher on former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s new book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, which cites numerous studies illustrating the problem: In 2018, 22% of all adults in the U.S. said they “often or always feel lonely or socially isolated.” In another national survey that year, one-fifth of respondents said they “rarely or never feel close to people.”

Blame social media, blame what Mia Birdsong calls the “toxic individualism” of the American Dream, blame the increasing precarity of work, the increase in mobility, or the decline of institutions like churches that traditionally provided community. Whatever the cause, it is clear that many people feel untethered and alone.

For many Americans, the politics of 2020 exacerbated our loneliness by highlighting what divides us. Simple objects like masks and yard signs became flashpoints, turning neighbors into enemies and lawns, shops, and restaurants into battlegrounds. While mutual aid has blossomed in many communities and people of all stripes have banged pots and pans to show support for frontline workers, we have also sought relief from our isolation by retreating into our tribes and doubling down on our opposition to others.

Bian believes that our personal isolation and our social divisions are intertwined, having experienced and studied loneliness in herself, her family, classrooms and workplaces, and in the national arena. She sees how these pieces connect, and believes that if we start with that innermost circle of ourselves, we can achieve healing on a much bigger scale.

Creating space to talk about loneliness

Murthy not only hired Bian to do research for Together, he profiled her in it. As the book recounts, Bian had experienced some isolation early in her childhood as the child of Chinese immigrants in a largely white community in suburban Michigan. But she attended a small private high school where she felt known and nurtured, with close friends and mentors.

Arriving at Penn was a shock to her system: A self-identified introvert, she avoided the parties and socializing that dominated student life, and the hugeness of the classes and campus made her feel lost.

Over winter break, Bian met up with one of her high school mentors, who noticed Bian’s change in demeanor and asked whether she might be depressed. Bian realized she was.

She got back to Penn, bought a bike and started therapy. When she returned home again for the summer, she worked on an urban farm and did a yoga teacher training course. Those experiences helped her regain her sense of self and remember what true connections felt like.

“Fellow students’ number one wish was “deeper/more authentic conversations and friendships.””

She arrived on campus for her second year determined to reach out, and started inviting people to coffee. She was open about her loneliness, and much to her surprise, she found that others felt lonely, too. Intrigued, she created a survey and distributed it to 72 students, who reported that the number one thing they wished they had at Penn was “deeper/more authentic conversations and friendships.”

Bian was emboldened. She approached random students on campus and asked if they wanted to spend a few hours having “intentional conversations.” Then she organized the first of what she called “Space Gatherings,” with 20 students in an AirBnB she rented for the evening. Everyone checked their phones at the door and bypassed small talk to dive into deep questions: “What is one thing that is going really well in your life, and what is an area where you are struggling?” Over three hours, Bian created the feeling of connection and community that she had been seeking. As she told Murthy, the energy in the room that night was “one of inspiration and hope.”

She went on to organize dozens of Space Gatherings during the rest of her time at Penn: with diverse groups of individuals, but also with campus organizations, from sororities to the swim team. She told me that because of this experience, she switched her major from environmental studies to psychology, “realizing that the people were actually what really interested me.”

One Space Gathering participant introduced Bian to his professor, organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who, Bian told me, shared her interest “in creating a kinder, more compassionate” campus environment.

Grant turned out to be an important figure in Bian’s life. Bian did research for Grant and took his organizational behavior class senior year. In his class, Bian saw how Grant built structures that enabled students with different learning styles to contribute: Some students gave TED-style talks, while others thrived in small group discussions. Grant also distributed surveys asking students to name other students whom they had learned from, providing another avenue for recognition.

Because of Grant’s deliberate community-building and legendary generosity, he has a thriving alumni network of former students eager to stay connected and support each other. Bian learned from that experience that “structure and culture are really hand-in-hand, and that these things do not happen; they are designed and created.”

Upon graduation, Bian almost took an internship with The On Being Project in Minneapolis, but instead decided to head to San Francisco and the tech world. Many of her friends were already there, which was appealing, plus she saw how those friends working as engineers and product managers were able to “build and experiment and scale and do all these really dynamic things.”

Can venture capital and Big Tech build community?

Bian took a job as community manager at a venture capital firm, convening the firm’s investees so they could learn from experts and bond with each other. Many of those entrepreneurs were, in turn, creating products that enabled people to connect.

““I have so many mixed emotions around whether one should be scaling community and profiting off of that as the main North Star. Should you have to pay for belonging?””

Once inside Big Tech, Bian found herself asking fundamental questions about its role in building community. Many venture-backed companies are seeking to make money by, for instance, connecting new moms or entrepreneurs of a certain demographic or other communities of shared interest. “I have so many mixed emotions around whether one should be scaling community and profiting off of that as the main North Star,” Bian said. “Should you have to pay for belonging?”

Bian points out that community-building isn’t inherently good: Some of the tech tools aimed at building community, like Facebook and NextDoor, have actually torn us apart by allowing (and, some would argue, incentivizing) racism, threats of violence, and conspiracy theories. Bian knows from her experiences with Space Gatherings and in Grant’s class that positivity in group settings doesn’t happen by default, but requires proactive and deliberate interventions—which Big Tech and venture capital may not have the patience or capacity to deliver.

It wasn’t just the work product but the culture that made Bian uncomfortable during her time in Silicon Valley. She struggled with how much to share with her manager and colleagues, and found the environment too transactional. Co-workers would ask about her weekend but express no interest in her response, making Bian feel lonely. She observed how that kind of exchange wasn’t just isolating personally, but also had a “muting effect” that prevented people from sharing feedback on issues that could affect the business.

While Bian was in that role, Adam Grant contacted her with an opportunity: Vivek Murthy was looking for researchers for his book. Bian took that on after work hours and found working for Murthy a delight; he was kind, compassionate, and treated everyone as equals.

Murthy was also deliberate in encouraging authenticity and connection among his teams. In Together, Murthy wrote about a practice he instituted during his time as surgeon general, where his team members took turns giving short presentations about an experience or interest. Those presentations “quickly became the team's favorite time of the week,” Murthy wrote. “Everyone felt more valued after seeing their colleagues’ genuine reactions to their stories. Team members who had traditionally been quiet during discussions began speaking up. They appeared less stressed at work. And most of them told me how much more connected they felt to their colleagues and to the mission they served.“

Bian saw how Grant and Murthy created cultures of connection, but beyond the two of them, examples were few and far between. Bian and Murthy’s team had a tough time finding workplaces to profile that helped employees forge genuine connections (though she told me that Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and tech company Workday stood out for their positive cultures). She certainly didn’t feel a strong sense of community in her own day job.

Heal loneliness, heal the nation

Bian moved on from the venture capital firm in May, and joined the Biden-Harris campaign in July to do virtual community organizing. In that work, she identified another dimension of loneliness: the isolation that can be both a cause and an outcome of our political differences.

For Bian, Trump supporters aren’t distant “others” she reads about in the news: Her father voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and political differences damaged her relationship with her mother this year as well.

Bian realized that the conflicts within her own heart and family reflect and contribute to broader conflicts in society. In an essay on Medium days before the presidential election, Bian wrote about how her conflicts with her mother caused her to shut down—and how she projected that coldness to people beyond her family. She began to vilify rather than empathize with those with whom she disagrees. “I’ve come to learn that my heart does not selectively harden in her presence alone,” she wrote, referring to her relationship with her mother. “In the process, it grew harder to all those around me—in both personal and political settings.” 

Bian recognizes that this year, as in high school, she benefited from having people in her life who care about her, listen, and help her process her feelings. This has helped her reopen her heart and mind with empathy and compassion—which will have impacts well beyond herself and her family. She wrote in her essay that “the tenderness that I stoke in my heart will help heal my relationship with my mom, begin to bridge ideological differences with my dad, and provide me with the opportunity to aim higher in how I respond to political differences with my fellow Americans these next four years.”

There’s a lot of talk about healing our country right now: how it’s necessary, whether it’s possible. Bian has reflected on healing a lot, prompted first by her yoga teacher training and later by Murthy, who believes that anyone can be a healer, that “there is no medicine that’s more powerful than love, and you don’t need a medical degree or to be a nurse to be able to deliver the power of love to other people’s lives.”

““How can we step back and take solitude, time to reflect, and to develop a healthy sense of self, so that we can approach people in situations and communities in a way that is healthy?” ”

Bian knows from her own experience that the healing process starts from within. The question, she told me, is not “how can we belong to as many things as possible to solve our loneliness, but how can we step back and take solitude, time to reflect, and to develop a healthy sense of self, so that we can approach people in situations and communities in a way that is healthy?” That desire to heal has propelled Bian to look for a full-time role that allows her to be a healer and build community, in a work environment that welcomes her authentic self. 

I ask Bian if she’s still on a mission to end loneliness. She demurs: “That work takes a long time with many people, and is both cultural as well as structural.”

But when I press, she explains that the issue isn’t that ending loneliness is too big of a challenge: It’s too small. Bian says that loneliness is most often discussed within a framework of public health, and focused on older adults. These are important features, but miss the opportunity and necessity of addressing deeper and more widespread issues in our society.

What Bian really wants to do is participate in the rewriting of American values and norms. “I think that is even more fundamental and will hopefully solve not only loneliness, but also polarization,” she told me.

However the work presents itself to her, she is ready to accept it: The work she has done over the past six years has both prepared and sustained her. “One of the biggest, best ways to cure loneliness is through helping acts of service,” she said. “That’s what I think really continues to heal me again and again, is knowing that I can use my experiences to help other people.”

Have you experienced loneliness or isolation this year? How are you managing it? Have your workplaces helped you connect with colleagues, or made you feel more alone? Tell us at hello@thelifeiwant.co.

Photo courtesy Serena Bian.