A Retirement Home Visit Changed Everything
A Retirement Home Visit Changed Everything
By David, Founder & CEO of Kenektic
October 27, 2025
In my last post, I told you about the kid who ate lunch against a wall in seventh grade. About the college student who sat alone on a barstool while his one friend worked the room. About the guy who looked around his wedding and saw the sum total of a lifetime of struggling to connect.
That was my story. I'd carried it for decades. But it was still just my story—a private thing I'd learned to live with, the way you learn to live with a bad knee or a scar you don't show people.
What turned it from something I carried into something I had to fix was watching my aunt live it at 80.
Her Building Had 100 Residents. She Knew Maybe Ten.
My aunt moved into a retirement community a few years ago. Nice place. Well-run. Activities calendar on the wall. Common rooms with big TVs. A dining hall where residents gathered every evening.
On paper, it was everything you'd want. Community. Neighbors. Shared meals. Structure.
In reality, she knew the people at her dinner table and the women in her mahjong group. Maybe ten people out of a hundred.
Not because she was difficult or unlikable. She was warm, funny, opinionated—the kind of person who, once you got to know her, you genuinely wanted around. But getting to know her required someone making that first move. And in a retirement community, just like in a seventh-grade cafeteria, nobody's lining up to make the first move.
The Dinner Table Problem
She told me she couldn't find new people to eat dinner with. Not because residents were unfriendly, but because the dining hall had settled into patterns. Groups of four or six who'd been sitting together since before she arrived. Every chair taken. Every table claimed. Not by malice—just by habit.
Think about that. A room full of people eating dinner thirty feet apart, and the thing keeping them from connecting wasn't hostility or dislike. It was the absence of an empty chair.
No open seat. No natural entry point. No one saying, "Hey, come sit with us." Not because they wouldn't have welcomed her—but because they didn't know she was looking.
It's the same wall I sat against in seventh grade, just with better lighting and a tablecloth.
The Dodgers Problem
My aunt is a Dodgers fan. Not casual—she actually watches the games. But here's the thing about being a Dodgers fan in a retirement community: the games start late. West Coast baseball means first pitch at 7:10, and by 7:30 most residents have already retreated to their rooms for the night. The game had barely started and the common room was already empty.
So she'd watch alone. In her room. A woman in a building with a hundred other people, watching a baseball game by herself because the schedule didn't align with the community's rhythms.
In a building with a hundred residents, there have to be other Dodgers fans. People who'd love to watch a game together, who'd enjoy arguing about the lineup, who'd stay up a little later if they had someone to stay up with. But how would she find them? No one's going door to door asking, "Hey, do you like baseball?"
The connections were theoretically possible. They just had no way to actually happen.
The Mirror
I'd sit there visiting my aunt, listening to her describe her days—mahjong on Tuesdays, dinner with the same four people, Dodger games alone in her room—and I'd feel something tighten in my chest.
Because I recognized it. All of it.
The dinner table with no open seat? That was the lunch table I couldn't sit at in seventh grade. The common room that emptied out before the game started? That was the barstool in college while everyone else connected around me. The hundred residents who could have been friends but had no way to find each other? That was the University of Oregon. Thousands of students. One real friend.
My aunt was living proof that the pattern never stops. The same forces that make it hard to connect at 13 make it hard to connect at 80. Loneliness doesn't age out.
The only difference between seventh-grade me and my aunt was decades. The wall was the same.
The Reframe
Here's what changed my thinking. My aunt's situation wasn't a personal failing. She was perfectly capable of connecting—she proved that with her dinner group and her mahjong friends. The problem was structural. The system around her had no mechanism for discovering compatibility, no way to surface shared interests, no tool for making that first introduction.
And that reframed my whole life.
Maybe I hadn't been bad at friendship. Maybe I'd been stuck in environments with no mechanism for helping people like me find each other. No one at Oregon was going to tap me on the shoulder at that bar and say, "Hey, there's a guy in the engineering school who also likes U2 and reads too much—you two should talk."
The introductions never happened. Not because they couldn't. Because nothing existed to make them happen.
Then the Idea Got Bigger
At first I was thinking about my aunt's building. A hundred residents. Invisible connections.
But then I started thinking past the walls.
What about people dealing with similar struggles who weren't in her building? Some residents were quietly managing mental health challenges. In a building of a hundred, maybe one other person understood what that felt like. Maybe not. But in her city? Her state? Across the country? Thousands of people who'd benefit from a small community of others who actually got it. Not a clinical setting. Just people who understood—people they could talk to honestly, without the performance of "I'm fine."
And it wasn't just mental health. What about that Dodgers fan three towns over? The person in another state who shared her sense of humor, her love of mahjong, her particular way of seeing the world? The connections didn't have to be limited by who happened to live down the hall. They could be anywhere.
But how do you find those people?
Not with a questionnaire. You don't discover who someone really is by asking them to check boxes. People tell you who they think they should be, not who they actually are. And not with a couple of scripted conversations, either. You can't get to know someone in two or three exchanges any more than you can know a city from an airport layover.
What you'd need is someone you could actually talk to. Someone you could share your deepest feelings with over time—gradually, the way you open up to a real friend. Someone who would never judge you. Someone you could trust with the version of yourself you don't put out into the world—the real you, not the curated one.
And that someone wouldn't try to be your friend. Wouldn't replace your therapist or your doctor. Their whole purpose would be singular: get to know you well enough to help you find your people.
Real people. In small groups. Personally introduced—not thrown into a feed, not matched on a photo and a three-line bio. People who bond with you over shared life circumstances, shared interests, shared experiences that actually matter.
No follower counts. No likes. No swiping through strangers without knowing the real them. No romantic pressure. No performance. Just small groups of people who genuinely understand each other, brought together by something that took the time to learn who they really are.
I didn't know what to call that something yet. I didn't know if it was technically possible. But I knew what it needed to do:
Make the introduction.
Walk up to the wall and say, "Hey, there's someone I think you should meet."
Pull up a chair at the full table and say, "I found you a seat."
Tell the woman watching the Dodgers alone, "There's someone who's also watching. Want me to connect you?"
Not a social media platform that knows nothing about you. Not a dating app without the romance. A friend-finder that actually knows you first.
I'd later name that something kAI. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
What Comes Next
In my next post, I'll tell you about the moment I realized I could actually build this thing. It involves my best friend, a poker app, and a conversation over lunch that changed the trajectory of my life. It also involves an Apple IIc computer, a glorified version of Pong, and the realization that the last time I wrote code, I was spending my Bar Mitzvah money.
But that's a story for next time.
For now, sit with this: somewhere right now, there's someone who could be your friend. Someone who gets you. Someone who shares the things that actually matter—not the surface stuff, but the real stuff. The stuff you don't put on a profile.
You'll never meet them. Because there's no empty chair. No introduction. No one to say, "Hey, I think you two should talk."
Not yet, anyway.
Does this resonate with you? Have you ever watched someone you love struggle with loneliness—a parent, a grandparent, a friend? Have you seen the pattern repeat across generations? I'd love to hear about it. Sometimes recognizing the pattern is the first step to breaking it.
Kenektic is in development and will launch soon. If you want to be notified when we're ready, or if you want to share your story with me directly, reach out at hello@kenektic.com.
Coming Next: "How a Poker App Convinced Me I Could Code (Spoiler: I Couldn't)" — The friend, the demo, and the lunch that started everything.