There's a strange thing that happens every four years. Strangers hug in pubs. Lecture halls empty out. Someone's nan learns the offside rule. For a few weeks, millions of people who have nothing else in common are watching the same thing at the same time, feeling the same things.
And it feels good. It feels like something we've been missing.
If you're old enough, you'll remember setting the video recorder for The X-Files, then going into school or work the next day to talk about it. You had to talk about it, because everyone had seen the same episode. There were only five TV channels. Your local CD store sold a handful of the latest compilations and put out new releases a few times a month, and that was music. The newspaper came once a day and the whole street watched the same news at six. Culture arrived slowly, in a trickle, and everyone drank from the same tap.
It sounds quaint now, but it did something important. It gave us a constant supply of low-stakes common ground. You didn't need to be close friends with someone to talk about last night's TV. Shared culture was social glue, and it was everywhere.
Today we are, on paper, the most connected generation in history, and loneliness is at record levels. Part of the answer is that the trickle became a flood. Every day we're hit with more than any of us can keep up with. YouTube Shorts, TikTok feeds, endless catalogues, each of us spinning off into our own individual stream of content. The algorithm learns what we like and serves us more of it, so we rarely stumble into anything we didn't choose. And honestly, we love it. It's our happy place. It's only when something like a World Cup rolls around that we remember how different things used to feel.
I couldn't tell you what my partner watches on socials. She's in her feed, I'm deep in camera reviews and reading about the latest AI models. We're sitting in the same house consuming completely different worlds. It's too easy. The path of least resistance now leads away from each other.
We don't make time to be bored anymore either. Boredom used to be the gap where connection happened. You talked to the person next to you because there was nothing else to do. We met people on trains, in cafes, at the pub. Now every empty moment gets filled instantly, and the gap never opens.
None of this was a deliberate trade, but we swapped shared moments for convenience and lost countless small openings for conversation, often with people who aren't already like us. When everyone is watching something different, there's nothing to say to the person next to you. So we say nothing.
The World Cup is one of the last truly shared moments left. It can't be time-shifted. It can't be personalised. A match kicks off at a fixed time, and if you want to be part of it, you show up alongside everyone else. People from every background, every belief, every corner of campus and the world. The World Cup doesn't bring people together because they agree. It brings them together because they're all facing the same direction at the same time. The student from Lagos and the student from Leeds are watching the same penalty, holding the same breath. When else could you message your colleagues at 3am with a flag emoji, or brag about not having slept for three days? You're connected to a single vine.
We used to get this feeling in ordinary life too. Family barbecues where your parents invited half the community to sit down and share a drink into the early hours. We didn't always agree with Gary's opinions, but we saw past them, because Gary was just the family friend who turned up to everything: the pub, the park, the Sunday roast. Now the idea of being seen with a Gary, let alone having him round, feels a step too far.
The feeling the World Cup gives us shouldn't arrive only once every four years. It points at something we need constantly: connection to other people, especially people we wouldn't ordinarily meet. We need to hear different views and our opinions challenged. To have awkward conversations that we didn't plan. That's healthy for a campus, and it's healthy for a mind.
This is why peer support matters more than ever. Not as a service or an intervention, but as the everyday, human-to-human version of what the World Cup does at scale. Someone to chat with at 2am. Someone whose experience is nothing like yours can offer a perspective you would never have found on your feed.
As a founder and long-time champion of peer support, here is my honest admission. In an ideal world, TalkCampus shouldn't need to exist. As a company we're constantly torn, because we desperately want to get people off their devices, back to the barbecue, back to the pub, back to the person next to them on the train. But the reality is that students are on their phones, and if that's where they are, that's where connection has to start.
It doesn't need to be grand either. Every year at TalkLife, the whole team watches the Great British Bake Off together and runs a small sweep. It's one hour a week watching a bunch of bakers baking, and somehow it's the hour that ex-team members and new joiners alike say they remember.
Do we have an instant solution for community? No. But there's a small start available to anyone reading this today. Ask a colleague what album they've been listening to. What they're watching. What hobbies they've picked up lately. Ask the question you really can’t be bothered asking. You might hate the album, and I think that's the point. And for those of us who remember the five channels and the VCR, rose-tinted as the memory may be, we owe it to the generations coming up behind us to bring some of that community back.
The final whistle has blown, the flags I'm sure have started to come down (unless you're in Spain), and the world will go back to its separate screens. But the need doesn't go anywhere. We're built for shared moments. The question is whether we wait four years for the next one, or build them into every day.