IRL Experiences Should Never Be Optional. And I'll Die on This Hill.
🗓️ MARINA MIDDLETON POSTED TO THE GROUP CHAT Mar 10, 2026
Community, Networks, & Social Capital | AI & The Future of Work | Marketing & Cultural Virality
OOKKKKAYYY, let’s get something straight.
IRL never left.
Not during the pandemic. Not when Zoom became a verb. Not now, when every AI tool promises to simulate connection and replicate the energy of a room from behind a screen.
The narrative that in-person was dying was always a story told by people who confused convenience with preference. While we were all optimizing for digital, the hunger for real human connection was quietly compounding. Create & Cultivate always knew this.
IRL never left. It’s just more important than ever.
In-person connection is not a nice-to-have. It is a career accelerant. It is a mental health necessity. It is the thing that separates people who are building something real from people who are very busy being online.
Careers are still built in rooms. In 2025, 54% of U.S. workers were hired through a personal connection — not a job board, not a DM. A person. A relationship. Something that started in proximity (Wave Connect, Networking Statistics 2025). 85% of jobs are filled through networking (HubSpot via Apollo Technical). Visibility online opens doors. Presence in person walks through them.
And then there’s what it does to you. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023 — finding that chronic isolation carries the same mortality risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day (U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, 2023). We are not designed for the isolation the digital era normalized. The antidote is not another app. It’s a room.
This isn’t nostalgia. This is biology, and it’s business.
AI makes IRL more valuable, not less — and we’re using both.
AI is extraordinary. I use it. Create & Cultivate is built on staying ahead of what’s next, and AI is what’s next.
But here’s what AI cannot do: replicate the trust that forms when two people are in the same room. It cannot manufacture the moment when someone looks across a dinner table and says we should build something together — and means it.
That’s exactly why we built CONNECT — our data-driven, AI-powered networking program that matches attendees with exactly who they need to meet based on their goals and intentions. Not luck. Not proximity. Precision. To date, CONNECT has facilitated over 10,000 pre-scheduled 1:1 meetings onsite, making it the largest matchmaking program of its kind for women in business. 303 founders connected with investors. 459 attendees connected with hiring managers. 1,037 women stepped into mentorship relationships.
We didn’t use AI to replace the room. We used it to make the room work harder.
What we actually do is different.
We don’t throw events. Anyone can throw an event. Rent a venue, book a speaker, send an email, call it a community.
That’s not what we do.
We architect experiences with intention. Every detail — who’s in the room, how the space feels, what the conversation is designed to unlock — is a deliberate choice. The curation is the product. The room is the offer. And we’ve been doing it for over ten years, across hundreds of Supper Clubs, summits, and the world’s largest festival for women in business.
The women who come to C&C events don’t just leave informed. They leave changed. A conversation, a connection, a moment of recognition — I’m not alone in this — that reorients how they see what they’re building. A collaborator. A connector. A friend who texts six months later with the opportunity that changes everything.
That’s proximity baby!!
The loneliness economy is the real context.
People are lonely. A 2024 Harvard survey found 21% of U.S. adults feel lonely, and 73% cited technology as the primary cause (Harvard Making Caring Common, 2024). Remote work, AI interaction, the collapse of third places — it has created a hunger for real human contact the business world is only beginning to reckon with.
The brands and leaders who build for genuine connection will own the next decade. The ones optimizing purely for digital scale will wonder why their communities feel hollow.
Get in the room.
The rooms you skip, the dinners you decline, the events you watch from an Instagram highlight reel — the relationships forming in those rooms will shape your next five years.
IRL experiences aren’t back.
They never left.
And the smartest thing you can do right now is get in the room.
