Last week, I went to Lollapalooza — alone last weekend. To be clear, I was there for work. But in between band interviews and sets, I was also observing the culture of the festival: what people were wearing, who they were most excited for, what food would go viral this time around.
Here’s the thing about music festivals that I keep forgetting until I’m standing in one: you cannot stay outside of them. The crowd does something to you. Physically. You end up next to strangers who are feeling what you’re feeling, moving the way you’re moving, and whatever distance you arrived with just kind of dissolves. I’ve loved concerts my whole life and I think that’s mostly it — it’s one of the rare places where being near people you’ve never met feels natural, even necessary. Nobody thinks it’s weird.
What caught me off guard this year was how deliberately that was being engineered.
T-Mobile had a station where you could customize bandana charm necklaces — not pick one up and leave, but sit down and make one, next to whoever else was sitting there. The Aperol activation was a whole disco-themed grove, and the brand’s stated goal, in its own words, wasn’t awareness or sampling. It was to “bring people together through music, celebration and spontaneous moments of connection.” Ulta offered touch-ups, but what was actually happening in those chairs was conversation. These weren’t incidental. Brands spent real money figuring out how to give strangers a reason to linger with each other, and it worked, and I kept wondering why it felt so urgent.
The short answer is that we’re lonely. Like, genuinely, statistically, medically lonely. In 2023, the Surgeon General declared it a public health epidemic. Forty percent of Americans say they feel lonely at least sometimes, and young adults — the most connected generation in history, by any metric — report the highest rates. We have devices that can reach anyone on earth in seconds. We are more isolated than we’ve been in decades. I don’t think anyone is surprised by this anymore. It’s just become the background noise.
What I didn’t expect was to see people actively trying to fix it at a music festival.
There’s a sociological concept called collective effervescence — Durkheim’s term for what happens when people gather in physical space around something shared. The electric feeling at a concert or a ceremony or a game. Research has actually shown that attending live music reduces feelings of isolation even when you don’t talk to a single person. The crowd itself is doing something. Being surrounded by bodies that are feeling what you’re feeling registers as contact, even without words.
But the brands at Lolla seemed to understand that people wanted more than the crowd. The activations that actually worked weren’t the flashy ones. They were the ones that gave you something to do with your hands and a reason to stay put for a few minutes. Researchers who study loneliness say people don’t need a grand event to come together — they need a premise. An excuse to be near other people and act like it matters. The bandana station was a premise. The disco grove was a premise.
I’m not saying brands stumbled into solving the loneliness epidemic. The data isn’t moving, the trend lines are going the wrong direction, and a craft station sponsored by a telecom company is not going to fix any sort of structural isolation. But something was happening in those tents that felt real — felt more like what people actually came for than the free stuff or the photo ops. People showed up to a 400,000-person music festival and chose to spend part of their day making things with strangers. That urgency is hard to ignore.
I’m still thinking about why I found that more interesting than Charli XCX.
