On Sept. 20, a vintage phone booth sat in downtown Orlando at the newly rebranded Hotel Beauden, formerly the Grand Bohemian. Inside was a receiver and a simple prompt: tell us who you are and what kind of friend you’re looking for.
I expected a handful of brave people. Instead, more than 50 Orlando locals stepped inside and said out loud something most adults never admit: I want more friends.
They weren’t asking for much. A brunch buddy. A workout partner. Someone to play pickleball with. One caller said, “I am a mom. I work full time and a boss babe, so I am looking for that energy!”
I’ve been thinking about those recordings ever since.
I know that feeling well. I’ve moved more times than I can count since I was 17, from Hawaii and Santa Barbara to Paris, Barcelona and Milan. Every move taught me the same lesson. Finding an apartment is easy. Finding a job is doable. Finding your people is the part nobody prepares you for, and it decides whether a place ever feels like home.
Orlando is a city built by people who came here from somewhere else. That’s part of its magic, and part of its challenge. Many of us arrived without the networks of the towns we grew up in, and many of us work nights, weekends and holidays in the industries that keep this region running. That makes a standing Thursday dinner hard to pull off.
This isn’t just an Orlando problem. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory calling loneliness an epidemic, reporting that about half of American adults had experienced it. The advisory compared the health impact of social disconnection to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
Jessi Anderson is a community builder and co-founder of Harvi, a personal social concierge launching in Florida. (Photo courtesy Brittani Mello)
But here’s what struck me most about the booth: nobody who stepped inside was short on desire. They were short on a first step.
We tend to treat loneliness as a personal failing, as if the people who feel it just aren’t trying hard enough. The recordings tell a different story. These were people who showed up to a wellness event on a weekend and talked to strangers. They were trying. What most of them lacked wasn’t courage or charm. It was an easy, low-pressure way to go from “I’d love to meet someone who likes hiking” to actually hiking with that person next Saturday.
That gap is fixable, and Orlando is better positioned to fix it than most cities.
Communities like Wellness Haus, founded by Melissa Amimo, bring Orlando residents together around shared interests. Run clubs, volunteer groups and neighborhood meetups are growing across Central Florida. Local businesses, like the hotel that opened its doors to a phone booth full of strangers, can do more to become places where people are invited to connect, not just to spend.
And each of us can do something simpler: be the one who asks. Invite the coworker who just moved here to lunch. Say yes to the event you’d normally skip. Text the person you met once and liked. Research on friendship suggests we consistently underestimate how much people enjoy talking with us, and how much they appreciate it when we reach out.
The 50 people in that booth did the hardest part. They admitted what they wanted, out loud, in a room full of strangers. The rest of us owe them, and ourselves, the next move.
So the next time someone in Orlando tells you they’re looking for a friend, believe them. Then pick up the phone.
Jessi Anderson is a community builder and co-founder of Harvi, a personal social concierge launching in Florida.