A Letter from the Founder

We’re more connected than ever, and somehow lonelier.

The Surgeon General called it a public-health crisis — the loneliness epidemic, and it is showing up in the news more and more. We spend more time than ever on our screens and less looking after each other. Most of us have family and friends. Many of us do not stay as connected as we would like. Life gets loud, the weeks stack up, and the person you keep meaning to text slowly goes quiet.

There are a lot of apps trying to address this, and nearly all of them focus on meeting new people: swiping for new friends, dinner with six people you have never met. Nothing wrong with wanting to grow our circle. But I think that starts at the wrong end. Loneliness is rarely a shortage of people. It is what happens when the people we already have slowly drift out of reach. So the question I have been asking myself is not how to meet more people. It is how to keep the ones I have close, before the distance sets in.

We may have drifted, but I am confident most of them would welcome a message, a call, a coffee, if I just reached out. And what good is meeting a bunch of new people if we are not tending the ones we already have — the people who care how we feel and what we need? If meeting new people is the goal, the best way is usually through the ones we already know and trust.

Here is the conclusion I have slowly come to about myself: I may not be wired to reach out consistently. I mean to. I think about it often, and I know how much it matters. But when the moment comes, my brain reaches for the thing I can check off — the email, the task — over the call that has no deadline. This is one area where I welcome help.

So a few years ago I thought: what if I had a tool that kept the people who matter in front of me, and took me from reminder to message in seconds? I knew I would do better.

I looked for something like this all over, and could not find it.

So I built Hearthen — for myself, and for my son. We teach our kids to study, to save, to train for the thing they want. I am not sure we teach them how to stay close to the people who matter: how to reach out first, how to notice when someone has gone quiet, how to be the friend who shows up. Those are skills, in life and in a career. They do not come naturally to everyone.

Hearthen is a gentle coach for your relationships — family, friends, the people you work with. It nudges you at the right time, helps you find the words in your own voice, and quietly keeps track so you do not have to. I even tried to make it fun.

Nurture the relationships you have, and loneliness has a much harder time finding you.

It is on the App Store today — free to try for a month, no account, no ads, and your data never leaves your phone. Download it here.

If you give it a try, I would love to know what you think — hello@hearthenapp.com.