The group of 14 singles gathered at à la Jolla eatery on a midsummer's eve — well dressed, coiffed and perfumed. They were looking to make new connections.
But they all lacked one big thing – their phones.
The Ember Supper Club is a "dining experiential event series" founded by friends Marie McGovern and Gracie Alzate. They established it in 2024 as a way to network or meet people away from dating apps.
“We were really honing in on that idea of community, people meeting each other, good food, good drinks, great ambience,” McGovern said, who has a background in event planning and marketing. “I wanted to find some sort of way to meet people in-person that wasn’t on a dating app, and I was kind of over that whole (online dating) scene.”
In an age where so much is done on an app – making friends, finding romance or community – many are finding the online chatter overwhelming and are stepping away from their phones and searching for connections IRL.
McGovern and her guests are not the only ones who are looking for that in-person connection, romantic or not.
Gen Z and younger millennials appear to be asking for a different balance beyond relationships found on social media. A 2025 survey conducted by The Harris Poll for Quad found 81% of Gen Z adults and 78% of millennials often wished they could disconnect from digital devices more easily.
They are craving what UC San Diego computational social neuroscience researcher Eshin Jolly called "social nourishment.”
“The need to belong, the need to feel connected, is not getting satisfied,” Jolly said. “But in-person, like, that’s where I have the opportunity to do that."
For Jolly, social nourishment comes from the rich information we exchange when we interact face to face – the words we say, our expressions and the small signals that help us understand one another.
Americans spend an average of six hours a day on digital media, according to the U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on Social Connection and Community. One in three U.S. adults said they're online "almost constantly." Among teenagers, that figure has doubled since 2015.
“People want to feel something genuine with some people,” Jolly said. “They're missing that. And it turns out that you can get that in a short kind of genuine amount of time because you get all of this rich information and you kind of figure it out.”
An old-school jam session
People are also looking for IRL experiences that don’t necessarily have to be geared toward one-on-one connections, but can be groups of people with shared interests – basically your grandparents’ version of Reddit threads.
In May, Future Is Color held a listening room experience at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, where people sat and listened to vinyl records in a living-room setting. A crowd bobbed their heads as Fela Kuti’s Afrobeats created an in-sync environment, allowing participants to talk about the music, the artist and their personal experiences listening to them.
Future is Color founder Erwin Hines calls it a form of cultural liberation.
“What music does is it connects us with everybody else that's in that same room because we're having this unified and collective experience of attention being focused on the same thing,” Hines said.
“Music has always been a way for Black Americans to hold our stories, carry our stories and give our stories to the next generation,” he said. “And oftentimes those stories contained coded resistance and coded liberation, or like, this is how we liberate ourselves, this is how we understand ourselves, this is how we tap deeper into knowledge of self.”
For attendees, that shared experience often creates a sense of belonging.
“I was really looking for a space to pause,” one attendee in the listening room said. “I really feel like now, we're constantly moving and not really having conversations around music and culture. And I just love the idea of a phoneless space where people were really thinking about music, listening deeply.”
This isn't necessarily a movement away from technology. Many of these gatherings are organized and discovered through the same phones people are trying to step away from. It's about being more conscious of what our devices can provide – and recognizing what they can't.
“We're like, ‘ah, we're not getting what we need.’ And so some number of us are trying to do something differently to nourish the need first,” Jolly said. “And then have social technology play a different role in their lives.”
