Everyone wants to feel part of something. It is a need as real as hunger or shelter. Maslow’s hierarchy places belonging just above physical safety, and for good reason. After people feel secure, their next instinct is to reach out, to connect, to find their place in a relationship, a family, a community.
Long before people understand language, they respond to touch, eye contact, and the rhythms of another person’s voice. These early exchanges form the blueprint for emotional safety and shape the architecture of the brain. The experience of being seen, heard, and felt within a shared space restores a sense of human closeness.
Belonging finds its strongest footing in physical presence. Face-to-face interaction activates a uniquely human network of senses, instincts, and social cues that no screen can simulate. In person, people unconsciously absorb a flood of information: facial microexpressions, the rhythm of breath, the tone beneath a word, even the way someone orients their body in space. Physical presence creates an emotional bandwidth that digital platforms compress or distort.
The Power of Presence over Online Interactions
Despite endless notifications and virtual connections, the deeper emotional needs of the human brain remain unmet. Text messages and emails lack the depth and nuance of in-person exchanges. Communication relies heavily on body language and vocal tone, accounting for 93% of the message, while written words carry only 7% of what we truly mean (University of Texas, 2025). This reality explains why so many digital conversations lead to confusion, misinterpretation, and missed connections.
Research by Gruber and Hargittai (2022) affirms that physical co-presence increases synchrony between individuals. A vital aspect of any human interaction, synchrony is the subconscious mirroring of posture, gestures, and vocal cadence. This synchrony is fundamental to trust, empathy, and mutual understanding, as it fosters what psychologists call emotional resonance —a shared rhythm of feeling that deepens connection and builds the scaffolding for social cohesion.
Across millennia, the human nervous system has evolved to recognize, respond to, and regulate through social proximity. Physical closeness influences neurochemical processes. Eye contact triggers the release of oxytocin, the hormone associated with bonding. Warm touch lowers cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone. Laughter shared in the same space stimulates endorphins, reinforcing a sense of safety and shared joy. Yet, the absence of these cues can leave critical gaps in emotional development (Silva, 2025). Digital reliance weakens this foundation. Children raised in screen-dominant environments often show delays in empathy, difficulty interpreting nonverbal cues, and reduced emotional fluency. This erosion is subtle, but it accumulates. Over time, people become less capable of reading each other, less skilled at resolving conflict, and less resilient under stress. When communication is reduced to characters on a screen, it loses its tone, rhythm, and presence. These are qualities essential to emotional intelligence.
What we call presence is not simply a shared location. In fact, it is a multisensory alignment that communicates safety, attentiveness, and care. How people say “I see you” without speaking a word, how understanding passes between people before meaning is even fully formed. In that space, unfiltered, undistracted, and fully human, people find what their nervous systems have been wired to seek: belonging.
Why Digital Substitutes Fall Short
Digital interactions serve as imperfect stand-ins for physical connection. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many turned to video calls and messaging platforms to stay in touch. However, findings by Marinucci et al. (2022) revealed that these forms of communication offered limited emotional support and satisfaction. Online communication simply cannot deliver the same benefits for well-being as face-to-face interactions.
What makes digital substitutes so limited is not only what they include, but more critically, what they exclude. On a video call, people may see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices, but the interaction is flattened. Spatial awareness, shared silence, and the micro-adjustments people make in real time often fall outside the frame. Communication becomes narrower, more cognitively demanding, and less emotionally intuitive.
Each digital interaction, no matter how well-intentioned, introduces a slight distortion in the signal of human presence. Over time, these distortions add up. They contribute to emotional fatigue, conversational friction, and a sense of being adjacent to one another rather than truly with each other. This phenomenon, often referred to as the “Zoom drain,” reflects a neurological mismatch between the expectation of human contact and the reality of its digital approximation (Shoshan, 2025). Even high-definition video cannot capture the subtle shifts in posture or the barely perceptible changes in facial expression that convey hesitation, warmth, or tension. As a result, people may misread intent, miss moments of emotional openness, or overlook signs of distress.
Digital tools remain useful, especially when physical presence is impossible. But they should be understood as supplements, not substitutes. Real connection flourishes in context—within moments that allow for shared space, shared breath, and the quiet mutuality that only emerges when people are fully present together.
How Herdle Builds the Optimal Conditions for Belonging
Belonging begins when someone feels welcomed without needing to perform. It takes root not through matching or messaging, but through presence. That kind of connection lives in shared moments, in the way someone smiles when you enter a room, the comfort of sitting beside a stranger who might become a friend, the energy of a space that feels open and alive.
Herdle creates those moments, stepping beyond the feed and into real life, where faces matter more than filters and attention feels earned rather than automated. Where other platforms prioritise scrolling and speed, Herdle makes space for slowing down by inviting people to gather, to share time, to rediscover how it feels to truly show up for one another.
For many, these gatherings arrive at the right moment. After a move, a breakup, or a stretch of disconnection, Herdle offers a way back. Not back to screens, but back to shared spaces. It helps people rebuild community at a human pace: through eye contact, shared laughter, and the quiet relief of feeling part of something again.
