Nobody Says Goodbye to the Spreadsheet

I. The Exit Interview Nobody Gives

When people leave a job, they write a resignation letter about the role. The pay. The commute. The lack of growth. They say the right things. Professional things.

Then they go to the pub with the people they’re leaving behind, and they cry.

Not about the job. About the people.

Nobody says goodbye to the spreadsheet. Nobody gets emotional about the quarterly targets. Nobody writes a heartfelt card to the CRM system or buys farewell drinks for the project management software.

They say goodbye to Sarah, who always knew when they were having a bad day. To Marcus, who made them laugh during the 9am standup. To the whole stupid Tuesday lunch crew who argued about nothing and made the week bearable. To the 3pm coffee run that was never about the coffee.

That’s what a job is. That’s what it’s always been.

And that’s what three hundred million people are about to lose.

II. The Data That Should Terrify Every Economist

In 2023, the Pew Research Center surveyed 5,902 American workers and asked them to rate their satisfaction across every dimension of their job. Pay. Promotion prospects. The work itself. Training. Benefits. Management.

The highest-rated element — by a significant margin — was none of these.

It was co-worker relationships.

Sixty-seven percent of workers said they were extremely or very satisfied with their relationship with colleagues. Only 51 percent were satisfied with their job overall. Only 34 percent were satisfied with their pay. Among young workers aged 18 to 29, the gap was even starker: 65 percent satisfied with co-workers versus just 46 percent satisfied with their day-to-day tasks.

Read that again. People are more satisfied with the people at their job than with the job.

Then KPMG went further. In 2025, they surveyed over a thousand full-time professionals and found something extraordinary. Fifty-seven percent of workers said they would choose a role paying ten percent below market — if it came with close work friendships — over a role paying ten percent above market without them.

That’s a twenty percent salary premium. For friendship.

Let me say that differently. More than half the workforce would take a pay cut to work with people they like. The financial value of workplace belonging isn’t marginal. It’s worth more to people than a fifth of their salary.

KPMG called it “The Friendship Premium.” I think it’s the most important economic finding of the decade. Because it reveals something that labour economics has systematically ignored: people don’t go to work for the work. They go for the people.

III. The Invisible Infrastructure

Gallup has been studying workplace engagement for decades. Their Q12 survey — twelve questions that predict business unit performance across industries and countries — includes one question that causes more pushback from executives than any other.

Question 10: “I have a best friend at work.”

It sounds soft. Unserious. Every time Gallup presents it, some executive scoffs. Best friend? At work? What does that have to do with performance?

Everything, apparently.

According to Gallup’s Q12 research, employees who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be fully engaged. Without one, the chances of being engaged drop to one in twelve. Since the pandemic, the best-friend item has become an even stronger predictor of intent to stay, recommendation of the workplace, and overall life satisfaction.

Seven times. Not seven percent. Seven times.

The Survey Center on American Life found that the workplace is the single most common place Americans make close friends. Fifty-four percent of adults with close friends say they met at least one through work. Not through school. Not through their neighbourhood. Not online. At work.

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, analysing billions of emails and meetings, found that 74 percent of employees would come to the office more frequently if they knew their work friends would be there. Not for the work. Not for the meetings. For the people.

This is the invisible infrastructure. The social architecture that nobody designed but everyone depends on. The morning greeting that costs nothing and means everything. The shared groan when another meeting appears in the calendar. The inside joke nobody else would understand. The accumulation of a thousand small, unremarkable moments that somehow make you feel like you belong.

No one puts “maintains the social fabric of the workplace” on a job description. But it’s the thing that makes work survivable for most people — and for many, it’s the thing that makes life survivable.

IV. The Harvard Answer

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been running since 1938. Eighty-seven years. The longest study of adult life ever conducted. It has tracked hundreds of individuals from their teenage years into old age, measuring everything — health, wealth, career success, relationships, habits, happiness.

The finding, after nearly a century of data, is unambiguous.

Dr Robert Waldinger, the study’s current director, summarises it in a single sentence: “The clearest message from the study is that good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

Not careers. Not money. Not status. Not achievement. Relationships.

At age 50, it wasn’t cholesterol levels that predicted who would be healthy and happy at 80. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The workaholics who neglected relationships were, in Waldinger’s words, “among the saddest folks in the study and were filled with regret when they were in their 80s.”

And workplace relationships are not a lesser category. They are, for many adults, the primary category. Especially for men — who research consistently shows have fewer close friendships, are less likely to seek social support, and are more likely to rely on work as their main source of social connection.

The percentage of men with zero close friends has increased fivefold since 1990: from 3 percent to 15 percent. Men with six or more close friends halved: from 55 percent to 27 percent. For millions of men, the office is the last remaining site of regular, in-person, unstructured social contact.

Take that away, and what’s left?

V. What Remote Work Already Proved

We don’t have to guess what happens when you remove workplace social infrastructure. The pandemic ran the experiment for us.

When offices closed and everyone went remote, researchers at Indeed surveyed workers about what they missed. The number one answer, at 73 percent, was socialising with colleagues. Not the work. Not the office. Not the equipment or the perks. The people.

Seventy-three percent also missed casual, impromptu chats — the water-cooler conversations that no Slack channel has ever replicated. Sixty-five percent said remote work felt lonely.

Buffer’s annual State of Remote Work survey found that a third of remote workers said their biggest struggle was “I stay home too often because I don’t have a reason to leave.” Twenty-three percent cited loneliness as their greatest difficulty. And yet 98 percent said they wanted to keep working remotely.

That’s the paradox. People love the freedom. They hate the isolation. They want the flexibility. They miss the humans.

Gallup’s 2024 data quantified the damage: fully remote employees report 25 percent loneliness versus 16 percent for on-site workers. Overall, one in five employees worldwide experiences daily loneliness. Cigna’s research found that lonely workers are five times more likely to miss work due to stress, seven times more likely to disengage, and three times more likely to underperform. The cost to US employers: $154 billion annually in stress-related absenteeism alone.

And here’s the part that should alarm everyone: KPMG found that 45 percent of workers now feel “isolated and alone” at work at least sometimes. That figure nearly doubled from 25 percent in just one year — between November 2024 and 2025.

Remote work didn’t remove commuting. It removed belonging. It didn’t free people from the office. It severed them from the tribe.

VI. Now Multiply by Three Hundred Million

Remote work displaced people from offices but kept them employed. They still had colleagues — at a distance. They still had meetings, even if they hated them. They still had a team, a manager, a shared project, a reason to open their laptop and interact with other human beings.

AI won’t do that. AI won’t relocate workers. It will replace them.

Goldman Sachs estimates up to 300 million full-time jobs globally are exposed to AI automation — a projection that grows significantly when physical robotics are included. That figure, sobering as it is, does not yet account for the accelerating deployment of physical robotics — humanoid and industrial — which extends AI disruption beyond knowledge work into logistics, manufacturing, hospitality services, and retail. The real number, within a decade, may be considerably larger. The IMF says 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies face significant AI exposure. Entry-level job postings in the United States have dropped 35 percent since 2023. In AI-exposed fields, junior roles have collapsed: software development postings for entry-level positions fell from 43 percent of listings to 28 percent.

The layoffs are not forecasts. They’re done.

The bottom rung of the career ladder is being pulled away from an entire generation who will never build the workplace friendships that their parents took for granted.

Sebastian Junger understood this long before the economists:

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

AI doesn’t make people redundant. It makes them unnecessary. And unnecessary is worse than unemployed. Unemployed means you’re between tribes. Unnecessary means there’s no tribe to go back to.

Three hundred million people. Losing not just a salary, but the last place in modern life where they were known by name. Where someone said “good morning” and meant it. Where they ate lunch with the same people every day and complained about the same things and felt, without ever naming it, that they belonged.

VII. The Tsunami in the Data

If the workplace is the primary site of adult belonging, and AI is dismantling the workplace, then the question isn’t academic. It’s urgent. Where will three hundred million people go when the place that gave them routine, identity, and tribe no longer exists?

The early signals are already visible.

US gym membership hit 77 million in 2024 — an all-time record. Up 20 percent from 2019. One in four Americans now holds a fitness facility membership. European gym membership reached 71.6 million — also an all-time record. Running clubs surged 59 percent in 2024. By 2025, they had increased 3.5 times. Fitness event attendance exploded — HYROX alone grew from 650 participants in 2017 to over 650,000 in 2024. Parkrun has surpassed 10 million registered participants worldwide.

But here’s the part the industry needs to hear: this growth isn’t driven by a sudden global desire to improve cardiovascular health. It’s driven by loneliness. By displacement. By millions of people searching for the belonging that used to come free with a job.

ABC Fitness found that 57 percent of active consumers say social interaction and connection are the main reasons they join a fitness community. Not fitness goals. Not weight loss. Not health metrics. Connection. Among Gen Z, 55 percent cited social connections as their top motivation for joining. Strava’s data confirms it: over half of respondents made new friends through fitness groups. Gen Z are four times more likely to want to meet people through working out than at a bar.

The retention data tells the same story. Members who feel part of a community are three times more likely to stay long-term. Group class members are 56 percent less likely to cancel than solo gym-goers. Forty-two percent of members say working out with friends is what keeps them committed.

These aren’t fitness numbers. They’re social migration numbers. And what we’re seeing today — record memberships, surging run clubs, packed events — is just the first wave. The tsunami hasn’t arrived yet. When AI displaces hundreds of millions from offices over the next decade, the wave of people searching for somewhere to belong will dwarf anything the fitness and leisure industry has ever experienced.

The question is whether the industry is ready for them.

VIII. The Industry That Isn’t Ready

It isn’t. Not yet. And that’s both the crisis and the opportunity.

Most fitness businesses are still built around exercise. The programming is about reps and sets. The marketing is about body transformations. The KPIs are about check-ins and class utilisation. The entire operating model assumes that people walk through the door because they want to get fitter.

But the person who’s about to walk through that door isn’t coming for fitness. They’re coming because they lost their job three months ago and haven’t spoken to another human face to face in a week. They’re coming because they used to have a team and now they have a laptop and four walls. They’re coming because every institution that once gave them belonging — the office, the church, the civic club, the pub — has either closed or doesn’t feel like theirs.

That person doesn’t need a personal best. They need a “good morning.” They need a coach who remembers their name. They need the 6am crew to notice when they don’t show up. They need the post-workout coffee that turns a room full of strangers into something that feels like a tribe.

The fitness and wellness industry has to fundamentally rethink what it’s selling. Not memberships. Not classes. Not equipment access. Belonging. The industry must redesign itself — its spaces, its staffing, its culture, its very identity — to be the social infrastructure that three hundred million people are about to need.

That means longer opening hours and spaces designed for lingering, not just sweating. Cafes and social areas that encourage the post-workout conversation where community actually forms. Community managers alongside personal trainers. Mental health awareness built into staff training. Programming that creates ritual and routine — the same class, the same time, the same people, week after week — because propinquity, the documented phenomenon that repeated contact and physical proximity are the strongest predictors of friendship formation, is the engine of belonging.

It means partnerships with healthcare systems, as social prescribing (where healthcare providers refer patients to community-based activities — such as gym memberships, group fitness, or leisure programmes — as a treatment for physical and mental health conditions) turns doctors into referral sources. It means corporate belonging budgets, as companies that cut offices redirect those savings into wellness partnerships. It means elder programmes, as the loneliest demographic — over-65s — becomes the most loyal. It means welcoming people who’ve never set foot in a gym and are terrified to walk through the door.

The facilities that understand this will become something unprecedented: the new third place. Not a gym with a community. A community with a gym. The church for those who don’t pray. The office for those who don’t commute. The civic club for those who don’t join.

The facilities that don’t understand it will keep selling reps and sets to a shrinking audience while the tsunami washes past them.

IX. The Inheritance

Every wave of economic disruption in human history follows the same arc. An old gathering place collapses. A new one rises. The farm was the centre of community for thousands of years. Then the factory replaced the farm. Then the office replaced the factory. Each one gave people a reason to leave the house, a tribe to belong to, a place where they mattered.

Now AI is replacing the office. And the question isn’t whether a new gathering place will emerge. It always does. The question is whether the fitness, wellness, and leisure industry will step up to claim the inheritance — or squander it.

The potential is staggering. Think about what the workplace used to provide: routine, identity, belonging, the feeling that somebody would notice if you didn’t show up. Now think about what a transformed fitness community could provide: the same class at the same time with the same people. A new identity that has nothing to do with a job title. A coach who asks how your week was. A tribe that forms not by accident of employment but by choice.

Arthur Brooks at Harvard says happiness requires three things: enjoyment (pleasure shared with others), satisfaction (the reward for working hard), and meaning (knowing your effort has purpose). Most workplaces deliver one of those at best. A fitness community can deliver all three. You laugh, you groan, you high-five. You earn every rep. You showed up for yourself and for the people next to you.

Eric Klinenberg at NYU calls these “palaces for the people” — the physical places that shape how communities form. When social infrastructure is strong, communities flourish. When it crumbles, people fend for themselves.

“The future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces.”

Shared spaces. Not shared platforms. Not shared group chats. Shared, physical, analogue spaces where real humans show up and sweat alongside each other and are witnessed by other conscious beings.

The gym of the next decade won’t look like a gym. It will be a community centre with barbells. A third place with a treadmill. A palace for the people who’ve lost every other palace. But only if the industry builds it. Only if operators, investors, trainers, and policymakers recognise that what’s coming isn’t a market opportunity. It’s a social responsibility. Millions of people are about to lose the last place where belonging happened by accident. Someone has to build the place where it happens by design.

The fitness and leisure industry is uniquely positioned to be that someone. It has the spaces. It has the culture. It has the biological advantage of shared physical effort — the one social mechanism that technology cannot replicate. What it needs is the self-awareness to stop thinking it sells exercise and start understanding it sells the thing that three hundred million people are about to need more than anything else on earth.

A room full of real humans who chose to show up.

The spreadsheet never mattered. The people did. They still do. And they’re coming.

The only question is whether you’re ready.

Your Moment

Here’s what all of this means for you. Every piece of data in this essay — the friendship premium, the Gallup findings, the Harvard study, the tsunami of displacement heading your way — points to a single, extraordinary conclusion: the service you provide is about to become one of the most important things in modern life.

Not because people need to get fitter. Because people need to belong. And your facility — your gym, your studio, your pool, your club — is one of the last places on earth where belonging happens in person, in real time, between real humans.

The three hundred million people who are about to lose their workplace tribe aren’t a threat to your business. They’re the biggest opportunity your industry has ever seen. They’re looking for exactly what you already know how to build: a room where people show up, work hard together, and leave feeling like they matter.

You don’t just run a fitness business. You run a belonging business. And the world is about to need that more than it’s ever needed anything. Step into it. Own it. Build for it.

Keep reading. The articles that follow will show you precisely how deep this opportunity goes — and how to seize it.