© Warner Bros. / Courtesy: Everett Collection

You know the barista who starts making your order the second you walk in. The neighbor at the next desk who always asks how your dog’s vet appointment went. The person you nod to in the kitchen every single morning, whose name you may not even know.

None of these people are your best friend. You’d probably never invite them to dinner. And yet — in a February 2026 SELF piece, writer Ellen O’Brien made the case for something a lot of us have quietly suspected: showing up to the same place, regularly, and becoming a familiar face there is genuinely good for you. O’Brien describes a standing Friday-night ritual at her neighborhood pizza place — same booth, same order — that’s led to real friendships with the staff over the years, and admits to feeling a little sheepish about it in a city as big as New York.

It’s a very Central Perk kind of impulse — the fictional coffee shop from Friends where the same faces show up episode after episode — and it turns out the science backs it up in a big way. Researchers have a technical name for it — “weak ties” — but here at VIDA, we like to call them what they actually feel like: loose connections.

What Are “Loose Connections,” Exactly?

The research behind this goes back to a landmark 1973 paper by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, appropriately titled “The Strength of Weak Ties.” Surveying how 282 men in the United States found their jobs, Granovetter discovered that casual connections and loose acquaintances were more useful than close relationships for landing work. It’s the research behind that now-familiar saying: “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”

Note: we’re borrowing Granovetter’s findings here, but not his phrase. “Weak ties” always struck us as a strange way to describe something that does so much good — so throughout this piece, we’re calling them loose connections instead. Same research, better name!

Follow-up research sharpened the finding. Among professional and managerial workers, new job leads were more likely to come through loose connections (27.8%) than through close ones (16.7%) — with the rest falling somewhere in between. Why? Your close friends and family tend to know the same people and the same information you do. Your loose connections — the acquaintance from a networking event, the person you chat with at pickup, your old coworker’s roommate — sit in different circles entirely. They’re the bridge to whatever you don’t already know.

That bridging function doesn’t stop at career opportunities. It applies to new ideas, new perspectives, new resources — and, as it turns out, a measurable boost in day-to-day happiness. More than four decades after Granovetter’s original paper, Oxford University researchers picked up the thread and found something just as relevant to daily life: people who were regulars at a particular establishment were more socially engaged, more content, and more trusting of others in their community than people who weren’t regulars anywhere.

And here at VIDA, we know this to be true!

The Science: Casual Connection Makes You Happier, Too

In a well-known 2014 study, psychologists Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia set out to test whether wellbeing was tied only to our closest relationships — or whether our looser, more peripheral connections mattered too. Students reported greater happiness and a stronger sense of belonging on days when they interacted with more classmates than usual</cite> — even classmates who were little more than familiar faces.

In a companion study, the researchers went further, splitting coffee shop customers into two groups: one told to have a brief, warm exchange with the barista, the other told to be as efficient as possible. People who had a real social interaction — smiling, making eye contact, having a short conversation — experienced more positive affect than those who just got in and out, and the effect appeared to be driven by feelings of belonging.

Sandstrom later summarized it simply: these small, low-stakes exchanges “make us feel good — like we’re connected to people. It makes us feel more trust in the world and more of a sense of community.” She also draws a helpful distinction between a stranger and a true loose connection —it comes down to mutual recognition: you know each other, even a little, and that’s enough for it to count.

This is the research the SELF article is drawing on — and it’s a genuinely reassuring finding for anyone who’s felt like their “real” social life had to be limited to close friends and family to matter. It doesn’t. Showing up to the same place regularly, and letting yourself be recognized there, is its own form of flourishing.

The “Third Place” Is Still Out There — We Just Have to Show Up

There’s a common complaint that we’ve lost our “third places” — the spots that aren’t home or work where people naturally gather and socialize. Harvard-trained social scientist Kasley Killam, MPH, told SELF that’s not quite true. The spaces themselves are still there; the missing ingredient is us actually showing up to them regularly enough to become known.</cite> Becoming a regular somewhere isn’t just a personal wellbeing hack — it’s a small act of rebuilding the kind of community fabric a lot of us assume has simply disappeared.

That fabric matters more than ever. An AARP survey found more than a third of American adults report feeling lonely, and licensed clinical psychologist Maya Borgueta, PsyD, points out that loneliness tends to be self-reinforcing — feeling isolated makes people stay home more, which deepens the isolation further. Her suggested antidote is refreshingly low-effort: rather than trying to build an entire new friend group from scratch, something as simple as treating a coffee shop as a regular, familiar stop — knowing the barista, exchanging a few words — can meaningfully interrupt that cycle.

The research backs up the “any interaction counts” idea, too. A 2022 study published in PNAS found that people who talked with a broader mix of both close and loose connections over the course of a day reported being happier than those who stuck to a narrower circle. Variety, it turns out, is part of what makes loose connections work — not just quantity.

Why We Can Only Hold So Many Relationships — And Why That’s the Point

Here’s a number worth sitting with: British anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research suggests the human brain can comfortably maintain somewhere around 150 stable relationships at once — a figure that’s come to be known as Dunbar’s number. (Later researchers have pushed back on the precision of that exact figure, but the underlying idea holds up: our capacity for meaningful relationships is finite, not infinite, no matter how many contacts are saved in our phones.)

That’s a real constraint, and it’s actually good news. It means you don’t need — and honestly can’t sustain — an unlimited number of deep relationships to live a full, connected life. What you need is a healthy mix: a small inner circle of close ties, and then a wider, lighter layer of loose connections that don’t draw on that same limited emotional bandwidth.

This is part of why VIDA has always been intentional about not overselling our community. A coworking space that crams in as many members as the square footage allows might look good on a spreadsheet, but it stops being a place where you actually recognize people. Keeping our member community at a human scale isn’t just about desk availability — it’s about making sure there are still enough familiar faces, and few enough total people, that becoming a “regular” is actually possible.

Loose Connections and a Flourishing Life

A flourishing life isn’t built on a handful of deep relationships alone. It’s built on a network — close ties for support, trust, and intimacy, and loose connections for perspective, opportunity, novelty, and that steady, low-grade sense of belonging that comes from being known somewhere, by someone, even a little.

Loose connections are also uniquely resilient. They don’t require the emotional bandwidth that close friendships do. You don’t need to schedule a call, remember a birthday, or process a hard conversation. You just need to show up — and the benefit accrues almost automatically. That’s exactly why they can live comfortably alongside a capped, Dunbar-sized circle of closer relationships instead of competing with it.

That matters more than ever for the growing number of people working remotely or hybrid, whose days can otherwise be almost entirely stripped of casual, ambient social contact. Working from home doesn’t just remove your commute — it quietly removes the hallway hellos, the “how was your weekend,” the person who notices when you seem off. Rebuilding a place where those moments can happen again isn’t a small thing. It’s core infrastructure for a well-lived life.

This Works for Every Personality Type — Including Introverts

If the idea of “more social interaction” makes you want to close this tab, hang on — loose connections are, by definition, low-pressure. There’s no vulnerability required, no deep conversation expected, no social battery drained the way it might be at a big networking event.

For introverts especially, this is the appeal: you can work heads-down for hours, put in headphones, and disappear into focus — and still get the benefit of a familiar face, a quick “good morning,” or a five-minute chat while the coffee brews. No performance required. For extroverts, the appeal is more obvious: a room full of energy and easy, spontaneous connection. Either way, the wellbeing research holds.

Why Coworking Is a Loose-Connection Engine

This is where coworking earns its keep. A coworking space is, structurally, a machine for generating exactly the kind of casual, recurring contact that Granovetter, Sandstrom, and Dunn’s research points to. Unlike working from home — or even a rotating cast of coffee shops — a coworking community gives you the same faces, in the same place, on a repeating rhythm. You become a regular. And the research says that’s precisely the point.

At VIDA, we’ve built the entire model around this idea, long before we had the research to back it up:

  • PT Flex membership ($150/month for five drop-in sessions) is a low-commitment way to start building that “regular” rhythm — enough repeated contact to start recognizing faces and being recognized in return.
  • Monthly Wellness Days — table massage, chair massage, mini-facials, and acupuncture — create low-pressure, recurring moments where members naturally cross paths.
  • Community lunches and monthly happy hours are built-in, no-effort-required opportunities for exactly the kind of light, loose-connection interaction the research shows matters most.
  • VIDA Masterminds, our free 12-week accountability cohort, is where some of those loose connections naturally deepen into something stronger — proof that today’s friendly acquaintance can become tomorrow’s real support system, and part of your capped 150.
  • VIDA Virtual brings the same principle online for members who want community and consistency without the commute — recurring sessions and events with a familiar group, week after week.

And because we keep our community intentionally human-scaled rather than maximized for headcount, all of this actually works the way it’s supposed to — you can still learn people’s names.

None of this requires you to “network” in the way that word usually makes people cringe. It just requires showing up — and letting the room do the rest.

Start Becoming a Regular

You don’t need a packed calendar of deep, effortful relationships to flourish. You need a place where you’re recognized — small enough to remember your name, big enough to keep things interesting — and the research is clear that even the smallest, most casual version of that is doing real work for your wellbeing.

Book a tour at VIDA Portland or VIDA Beaverton and see what it feels like to have a place where you’re a regular. Or explore VIDA Virtual if you want the same sense of community without the commute.

VIDA is a coworking community designed to #MakeLifeWork for our members. With locations in Portland and Beaverton, Oregon, we offer private offices, dedicated desks, and open coworking — alongside thoughtfully curated amenities and an incredible member community.