I showed up to school on a Friday morning in 1997 and the entire hallway had chosen a side, Ross or Rachel?
The night before, millions of us watched Ross and Rachel’s relationship implode on Friends. Rachel found out Ross had slept with someone else just hours after their fight, and Ross fired back with the now-legendary defense: “We were on a break!” By first period, the school had split into two factions. Team Ross and Team Rachel. People were debating it at lockers, in the cafeteria, between classes. A kid I’d never spoken to turned to me in the hallway and said, “Dude, they were on a break.” I disagreed. We argued for five minutes. And just like that, I had a new connection with someone I’d walked past for months without a word. Nobody planned this. There was no group chat, or hashtags, organizing it. Many of us just watched the same thing, and the next morning, we had our topic of conversation. Even those who didn’t watch the episode knew exactly what had happened by the end of school because everyone was talking about it. The shared experience did the heavy lifting for us. It was social glue hiding inside a Thursday night sitcom.
Now think about the last show you watched. Who else in your life watched the same episode, on the same night and was ready to talk about it with you the next day. Probably only a few people right? Your algorithm feeds you a custom buffet of content that nobody else at your lunch table is eating. You’re three episodes deep into a Korean thriller your coworker has never heard of, while she’s obsessed with a true crime docuseries you’ll never click on. Occasionally something breaks through…a Super Bowl, a Stranger Things finale, a celebrity moment that hijacks every timeline for 24 hours. But those moments are getting rarer. And the gaps between them are getting wider.
We didn’t lose shared experiences by accident. We traded them for personalization.
Here’s why that matters more than most people realize. Sociologist Émile Durkheim identified over a century ago that shared emotional experiences reinforce social bonds between group members, a phenomenon he called “collective effervescence”. When people experience something together, even something as simple as watching the same show, it creates belonging that solo consumption simply can’t replicate. A 2023 study published in Communications Biology confirmed that people who watched content together showed synchronized emotional responses and reported feeling significantly more connected to one another.
The first principle In leadership program, Dance Floor Theory™, is that the more social connections between people on a dance floor, the more fun that dance is going to be, and the longer it’s going to last. Shared experiences are one of the fastest ways to build those connections on a large scale. They give strangers common ground. They give coworkers something to bond over besides deadline stress and passive-aggressive calendar invites. Back in 1997, the Ross and Rachel debate wasn’t just gossip about fictional characters. It was a tiny thread connecting me to classmates I barely talked to. Multiply that across an entire culture, week after week, and you had a foundation of community that most of us never thought to appreciate…until it quietly disappeared.
Today, everyone is getting their own custom-curated programming. And while we do find people online who share our niche interests, the next day at work, school, church, or even around the dinner table, there is less and less overlap in what we’ve experienced. A core ingredient of community…shared experiences…is slowly being eroded. And with that erosion comes all the predictable side effects: declining trust, rising loneliness, and a general sense that we’re all just living parallel lives in the same zip code.
The fix isn’t to cancel your streaming subscriptions and go back to three channels. That ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and is currently streaming as a limited series on Hulu. But leaders, parents, and community builders can be intentional about creating shared experiences where they don’t naturally exist anymore.
Take Action
- Create a shared media moment. Pick a show, podcast, or documentary for your team or family to watch together. Then actually talk about it. Old-school water cooler style.
- Build traditions around shared experiences. Monthly movie nights, book clubs, or even a “what are you watching” Slack channel that surfaces overlap and sparks real conversation.
- Stop outsourcing connections to algorithms. Your feed is designed to keep you engaged. Not your community. Deliberately choose experiences that overlap with the people around you. If you know your co-worker is obsessed with Love Is Blind, then pull up a chair, butter some popcorn, and bond over yelling ‘DO NOT MARRY HIM’ at your screen like it’s a public service.
The algorithms will keep getting better at knowing exactly what you want. That’s the product working as designed. But community was never built on everyone getting exactly what they wanted. It was built on an entire school picking sides over whether Ross and Rachel were actually on a break. The less we share, the less we connect. And connection isn’t a streaming add-on. It’s the whole point.
