Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
How many people in the room know someone that's committed suicide?
I'd like you to raise your hand with me if you do,
but keep your hand up.
And now, look around the room, with your hand up.
Suicide is a tragedy.
Fifty percent of us in America know someone that's committed it,
and like all tragedies, it's a call for action.
Today I'd like to tell you a story
about the loss of two of my friends to suicide
and how that was a starting point for a platform
that now brings people together over lunch.
When I first started my PhD at MIT, about five years ago,
I had heard the statistics about campus suicides.
But, you know, the interesting thing about statistics is that it's just that,
they're just statistics, they don't mean anything
until they touch you in a personal way.
So two years into my PhD, approximately,
a friend of mine made the unfortunate decision to take his own life.
And I remember when I first heard the news,
I was really shocked by it.
I thought, "Why would somebody who is getting this prestigious degree,
who is so close to graduation and has his whole life in front of him
make a decision to end it all?
Why?"
But then, you know, that feeling of shock made a quick change
when I learned that if he had been found just a few minutes sooner,
he could have been resuscitated and brought back.
He might be here in the audience today, sitting with you.
I started to ask myself,
"What part did I play in this, or not play in this?"
Maybe if I had -
when I passed him in the hallway or earlier that week -
said a couple of words or invited him out for dinner,
maybe the course of destiny would have been different,
maybe I could have been that one person that altered his destiny.
Suicide is a tragedy,
and like all tragedies, we learn to accept it as time goes on.
And as I was coming to terms with the loss of this first friend,
I was hit by the loss of another,
and this time it was much closer to home.
This time it was a childhood friend, someone I knew for 15 years.
I grew up with this person, riding bikes down the street,
digging for fossils in desert lots,
all the things that kids do.
And you know -
Well, at least in New Mexico.
(Laughter)
"Did anybody hear the news about the fossil that was found?"
Yeah.
In all seriousness, though,
when this friend of mine made the decision to take her life,
that half-life on the shock to regret,
it was very, very quick to just become a sensation of regret.
I asked myself, you know, in the time that we had both kind of moved away
and we'd started to live our own lives and had drifted apart,
maybe I'd played a role in that.
Maybe if I would have been in better touch,
destiny would have turned out different.
Maybe I did have some role to play in this
because one person really can change destiny.
And this set of back-to-back suicides really did have an impact on me.
It does till today.
I started wondering,
"How as a society did we get to a point
where suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people?
And why does, year after year, the number and the incidents continue to rise?"
I'm not going to sit here and pretend I know the answer to that question.
I'm not educated enough,
or I don't research this enough to give you a complete answer.
What I can tell you, though,
is that social isolation is part of the problem.
It's really unprecedented, isn't it?
You know, this device that sits in our pocket,
or whatever version of this that sits in your pockets,
it's facilitated communication that's historically unprecedented.
You can pick up your telephone
and speak to another person on the other side of the planet,
live,
and almost for free in all cases.
But somehow, in the increasing of the bandwidth of communication,
there's this growing sense that we've sacrificed something
about what communication was supposed to facilitate in the first place,
which was that genuine connection with the other person.
The quantity and the quality have somehow become unbalanced.
You know, an average person spends about two hours a day on social media,
but half of us eat our lunch alone on any given day.
It's a paradox.
I'm guilty of going and crawling LinkedIn,
saying, "I'm going to find that next connection.
It's going to really revolutionize my career."
But then I don't know anyone who works on my floor at my workplace.
It's crazy, isn't it? It's really crazy.
So, you know, I was thinking about this paradox,
and I decided to confide in a friend of mine and a colleague,
Tuka Alhanai, who's actually here in the audience today.
And Tuka said to me,
"Well, this is great that you've found out all these great statistics,
but again, it's just statistics.
What are you going to do about it?"
And what we did about it over the next two years
was a platform called "Connect."
The idea of Connect is very, very simple:
you tell us who you are,
when you're free,
what you like to eat,
and we tell you who to meet, when to meet and where.
The point of Connect was to not increase your face-to-screen time,
but increase your face-to-face time with other people.
All the interactions are one-on-one,
they're platonic, they're in person,
and if you're at our university campus, we even pay for your lunch.
So you can quote me on this.
There is actually such a thing as a free lunch.
(Laughter)
Connect is not intended to be the next Facebook.
It is not currently the next Facebook.
There are no profile pictures,
there's no chat,
there's no advertisements -
You're not going to know if the person you'll meet wears a headscarf,
how old they are or what their racial background is,
not until you meet them, one-on-one, in person and face-to-face.
Over the last couple of years,
Connect has facilitated 7,000 connections, both in the Boston area and outside,
and it's really blown my mind.
I didn't expect when we built this that this would have happened.
Ninety percent of the users enjoy their experience,
and 50% of the users have made a lasting friend.
Do you remember what I said earlier, though?
Fifty percent of us eat lunch alone. What a lucky coincidence that is, right?
It was something beautiful when we first saw that.
But again, what am I doing? I'm just quoting statistics, right?
It doesn't mean anything until it touches you personally.
And just two months ago,
the outcome of all this work did touch me personally,
when just one guy who had used the platform,
completely unprovoked,
sent me and Tuka a very simple email.
He just said, "Hi there.
I want to say that this platform was responsible
for some of my best memories at MIT.
Thank you."
And I have to say, as somebody who is fortunate to attend an institution
that really has accelerated my own academic progress,
that email felt better
than many of the things I've ever done at MIT as an academic.
Even the growth of Connect
is the story of how one person chose to make a difference.
Initially, it was just going to be a platform that's sat at MIT,
and it did good things at MIT and we were going to leave it like that.
But then another member of the audience who's here today,
Hedya, from the University of Toledo,
decided she wanted to send an email and said,
"Hey, this would be great at my school."
And just like that,
destiny was altered.
And we've since configured Connect so that now anyone can email us and say,
"I want this at my school."
And we can, at the turn of a key, launch it.
And if you're one of those people, I can't wait to hear from you.
The future of Connect
is not just something to be contained within the walls of academia.
We believe that it can solve problems of social isolation among the elderly,
or at least play a part in that process,
and we think that the issue I brought up about workplaces -
you don't know anyone who works in your office space -
it could play a part in solving that problem too.
But I want to make something very clear:
Connect, it's not a panacea,
it's not going to solve every problem
that has to do with our lack of connectedness.
What it is is it's one piece in a mosaic of things that we can do
to be better connected as people.
Another one of those things that we can do
is something I'm going to ask every single one of you in the audience to do today:
keep your heart and your mind open,
today, here, at the TEDx session,
to the opportunity of making a new friend.
Because you really never know:
you could be that one person that changes someone's destiny,
or you could meet that one person that changes yours.
Thank you.
(Applause)