Have you ever paused in the middle of a crowded room and wondered how much of what we call “connection” is really just simultaneous participation? We gather in stadiums, around conference tables, in neighborhood living rooms, and at corporate mixers, ostensibly to be together. Yet so often, we rely on a shared activity—a glass in hand, a game on the screen, a digital wager placed on a phone—to mediate the uncomfortable space between two human beings. We inherit these social scripts so seamlessly that they begin to feel like natural laws. But when a ritual becomes the prerequisite for presence, it worth asking: have we forgotten how to connect with each other directly, or have we simply built a culture that makes unmediated presence feel too risky?
This was the question hovering in the air during my recent conversation on the Sober Life Rocks podcast with Saul Malek. Saul is a national gambling prevention educator, advocate, and author who spends his days speaking to college campuses and community groups about the realities of gambling harm. He isn’t anti-gambling—in fact, he is fiercely committed to being pro-education rather than the “fun police” breaking up a innocent Sunday afternoon bingo game. What fascinated me about Saul’s work wasn’t just the mechanics of sports betting or prediction markets, but his observation of how rapidly a behavior can transform from a casual pastime into a cultural requirement. Among young adults today, the prevailing sentiment has quietly shifted: many now believe a sporting event is quite literally unwatchable unless you have “skin in the game.”
Listening to Saul describe how digital wagers have become a default conversational currency among twenty-somethings struck a familiar chord in me. For decades, we have seen alcohol play the exact same role in adult life. We treat these default behaviors as harmless icebreakers, assuming they are the glue holding our social fabric together. But as Saul and I talked, a deeper realization began to take shape: whether it is alcohol, sports betting, micro-transactions, or endlessly scrolling on our phones, we frequently lean on external drivers to manufacture a sense of shared experience. In doing so, we unintentionally construct environments where full participation requires a specific form of compliance.
When Saul described his own years living inside a gambling addiction, he used a phrase that stopped me in my tracks: he called it a “mental prison built behind the bars of confusion and chaos.” What made it a prison was not just the financial wreckage, but the profound isolation that came with it. On paper, gambling is marketed as the ultimate social activity—buddies sitting around a screen, office pools, casino nights. Yet as his compulsion grew, the presence of other people transformed from a source of connection into a distraction from the high. Addiction, by its very nature, takes an activity originally designed to bring people together and slowly strips away everything until you are entirely alone in a room, even when surrounded by crowd.
This tension between the illusion of connection and the reality of isolation reminded me of my own journey. Years ago, when I was hiding my struggle with alcoholism, I convinced myself that drinking was just part of how I navigated my fast-paced life as a career woman and mother. I wasn’t losing jobs or causing public scenes; on the outside, I was the PTA vice president, organizing events and showing up for everyone. But internally, I was operating from a place of quiet desperation, using a substance to manage the weight of my life while growing increasingly detached from the people I loved. I spent years making myself smaller, terrified that if I stepped out of line or revealed what was happening beneath the surface, I would lose my place at the table entirely.
It is easy to assume that the solution to these hidden burdens is simply individual discipline—that a person just needs to “make better choices.” But that perspective overlooks the powerful role our environments play in shaping our behavior. When an office culture makes the Friday happy hour or the annual fantasy football pool the sole mechanism for professional bonding, it creates an invisible barrier for anyone who cannot—or chooses not to—participate. We inadvertently ask people to choose between protecting their own well-being and fully belonging to the group. True hospitality, whether in our personal lives or our corporate workplaces, requires something far more thoughtful than simply offering an alternative beverage or a secondary activity. It requires us to redesign the very architecture of how we gather.
Ultimately, this conversation extends far beyond the realm of recovery, sports wagers, or alcohol-free living. It reaches into the heart of modern psychology, workplace culture, and leadership. It asks us to look critically at the environments we design and the social norms we take for granted. If the opposite of addiction is true human connection, then our primary goal as event organizers, leaders, parents, and friends must be to build spaces where people feel seen and valued for who they are, rather than what they are consuming or participating in.
We don’t need to banish every traditional ritual or police every social gathering to build a healthier culture. But we do need to cultivate the courage to ask better questions of ourselves and the groups we lead. When we look at the habits, events, and defaults that organize our days, the most important question isn’t merely, “Is this activity harmless?” A far more transformative question—one worth carrying into our homes, our boardrooms, and our community spaces—is simply this: How do we create spaces where no one ever has to choose between their own well-being and their right to belong?
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