Building Genuine Deep Connections with Nini Fritz

Our life and success as a person have relied on our ability to form relationships with others. The most valuable lessons, chances, and blessings in life come from our interactions with others. However, how can we establish meaningful connections that bring out the best in ourselves and the people around us? In this episode, Work Happiness Project Founder Nini Fritz joins us to talk about genuine connection. She offers valuable insights on how to cultivate genuine, meaningful connections and emphasizes the importance of choosing people who uplift you and enrich your life. If you're looking to deepen your relationships and connections, this conversation is for you. Tune in now to gain valuable insights on fostering genuine connections that bring joy and fulfillment to your life. --- Listen to the podcast here: Building Genuine Deep Connections with Nini Fritz Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less, and, today, I want to talk to you about a really important topic and that is building genuine deep connections. Looks like an entire culture, a lot of people are suffering from the consequences of not building as deep of connections as we once did. We see a lot of problems with the loneliness epidemic and people that feel like they just really don’t fit in. My guest today, Nini Fritz, is the founder of The Work Happiness Project as well as The Digital Detox Connections Stronger than Wi Fi Program, sharing one of my great passions about getting people off the internet and into real life, connecting with real people and connecting with the real world. --- Nini, welcome to the program. Thank you so much. Lovely introduction. I’m glad. I usually try to think through these introductions a little bit. You did well. All right, well, let’s start with talking about what you’re observing and what we all are observing in the world around us today. We just went through the pandemic but even before the pandemic, there were people increasingly moving their lives online and people becoming increasingly disconnected from one another in the world. Yeah, that’s correct and, well, I think we live in this time age of this loneliness paradox. It’s pretty much a connection paradox. I think that is actually like an even better description. It’s statistically proven that we are like the most connected generation ever existed when you look at all like the online connections we have, but we’re also proven to be the loneliest generation in history. And, yeah, I think that’s very shocking, fun fact that we all have to accept. There’s misconception of having thousands of LinkedIn followers, millions of YouTube subscribers, a few hundred Instagram followers, Facebook friends, whatever it is, but when it comes down to needing someone to call or like a shoulder to lean on, we look at all these connections we have and then we realize the people we can actually go to, if we’re lucky, is like a handful of quality connections. And I think this gap between the perceived connection and the actual connections we have makes us feel much lonelier. When you feel like you share your meal on social media, post a picture of your pizza, but you don’t have anyone to share your meal with, that makes us feel like this is hyper — yeah, this pathetic connection pretty much and that is very dangerous, actually, for human connection to think we have that but we actually don’t have it and then it makes us feel much lonelier and much more disconnected. Now, just to preserve my own innocence, I just looked this up now. My LinkedIn profile only has 960 connections so I’m not guilty of this thousands of connections thing quite yet. So, what do you think is creating these weaker connections? Because it seems like, in the past, we’d have fewer total connections but the connections we had were more likely to be deeper. Is it kind of this whole idea of I just posted, look at my za, my pizza on social media, and that doesn’t really create a meaningful discussion that actually connects with people or is there something else behind it? Yeah, I think this sums it up pretty well. We have to differentiate between weak ties and strong ties. So, I always kind of describe them like metal. You can have like a lot of like loose, weak metals that they don’t bond very strongly, like it’s not like a safety net you build, like if you fall, the weak ties are not going to catch you because the system just collapses. So, if we want to invest in strong ties, this is actually what keeps the safety net together so when we fall, when we have a downtime, this is the safety net that keeps us up. But in this online world, it is exactly what you say. So, we go to a party and then people are going to be like, “Oh, let’s stay connected,” so what you do is like exchanging your Instagram or at a networking event, it’s your LinkedIn, so the way of staying connected is not like, “Oh, I’m gonna give you a call and we’re gonna meet up for coffee and share genuine conversation and get to know each other,” our way of staying connected is I scroll through my feed, you pop up on a post or on a story so I’m up to date what kind of pizza you’re having for lunch or where you go on a holiday so you feel connected because you’re kind of on track with what’s going on in this person’s life and the person who posted it scrolls through like, “Oh, who liked my post?” or, “Who’s seen my story?” and then it brings them back into like your field of awareness and be like, “Oh, cool, this guy, I don’t know, I had a holiday fling with five years ago in Ibiza, he posted his lunch, cool, I’m feeling connected,” but, yeah, we just have to be clear that a thumbs up on social media or like a double tap like, it’s not the glue that bonds. That’s not how you build a genuine connection. It supports an existing connection and it’s, of course, an easier entrance to build up on a real life conversation when you know what that person has been up to lately or when you know their hobbies, their interests, when you come in, like, let’s say on a quote they shared recently and it’s like, “Oh, that really resonated with me,” so it’s not black and white, it’s not that you say, “Oh, all social media is bad,” we just have to see it as a tool to help us increase the connection or deepen the connection but not as a substitute to actually build the connection. I do wonder though, about 20 years ago, when people were first getting onto Myspace, eventually would be the Facebook and Facebook, is there anyone that could have seen this coming as a result of this new phenomenon, we can call Web 2.0, online interaction, as opposed to Web 1.0 was just reading stuff online, Web 3.0 is going to be different, I don’t even want to begin to speculate that, but is there any way people could have seen this coming or is this one of those surprising side effects that no one would have been able to know that social media would have eventually led to this? Good question. Well, I would say my answer is not based on any research articles but I think the people who created the internet were probably visionaries who really had in mind to like, you know, the World Wide Web, which if you look at it this way, it’s like a big spider web of connecting people, so I do think their intention was probably to connect people across the oceans with the click on the key and it’s just turn on your computer and send a message to someone at the other end of the world. So I think if you’re crazy enough to build the internet, you should be crazy enough to come up with this vision but I’m pretty sure they did not have in mind that it should be used as a substitute for human connection. And, also, when it comes to early connection platforms, such as Myspace or Facebook, if we think about the origin of where it stems from, it was like a uni network so it was meant for — like Facebook, kind of like everyone at university shows their face in a book so you know who they are, what they do, and kind of get a name to the faces you see around so it wasn’t meant to be like a connection tool with people you haven’t met yet, it’s kind of like a digital friends album to stay in touch with the people in your closest surrounding. Yeah. And then I think it’s like the natural trend of any hype, you see the good of it and you build up, build up, build up until it peaks and you realize, oh, it actually has downsides as well and I think now we’re in this smooth transition phase that we kind of crave a little going back to the roots and so technology and online connections, I think they have reached their peak now, maybe there’s still a little bit to go but I think now we’re already on our way to, yeah, seeking more meaningful connections. If you look at big startups or big tech companies in the Silicon Valley, they’re even doing digital detox retreats — Oh, wow. — which is kind of like a summer camp for adults in terms of getting off your screen, getting off technology, sit around the bonfire, roast some marshmallows, to actually bring back the human connections and they’re the ones who created all the stuff that makes us addicted to technology and I think that in itself, yeah, means a lot. I mean, I love that even they are doing it. Yeah. So where we stand, end of March 2023, by the time this episode will be out, it’ll be April 2023, do you think most people have come to the understanding about this value of number of connections versus the quality of the connection, the depth of the connection? Or do you think most people haven’t quite gotten there yet even though most people I think by now realize that there is a problem with loneliness in general? Unfortunately, I have to answer this question with a no. I don’t think that people acknowledge that. Like the fact that we’re having this podcast now means