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Australia's runs from 3 to 9 August. This year’s theme, Make Room for Connection, is built on the simple idea that connection doesn't happen by accident. It grows in the spaces we make for each other. 

Businesses worked that out years ago. They've been making room and, fair enough, charging admission. 

The scale of loneliness explains why. . This jumps up to  among people aged 15 to 25. Lonely Australians visit their GP about ten times a year compared with six for others, costing the health system . Need at that scale never stays unmonetised for long. 

What connection costs now

Now, you can buy a seat at a table of strangers.  use a personality quiz to match diners together, filling restaurant tables around Australia every Wednesday night. You can pay to join a run club or a supper club. You can subscribe to talk to an AI companion that always texts back. You can even travel alone in good company; Australia for solo travel interest in 2026. 

None of this is sinister. Markets exist to meet needs. But before tapping our cards, it's worth asking what we're actually buying. In marketing, we ask what job a product is hired to do and the job here is intimate: make me feel less alone. 

The case for paid connection

Some of it works. A  found AI companions reduced loneliness on par with talking to a real person, and more than passive scrolling. Users even underestimated how much the chatbot would help them. What made the difference was feeling heard. 

Dinner apps solve a different problem by easing the first meeting, which is the step lonely people often find hardest. 

Even tiny purchases can carry connection. In a , people who smiled and chatted with the barista while buying coffee left happier and with a stronger sense of belonging than those who kept the interaction purely efficient. Connection can ride along with a flat white.

Read the fine print

So, what’s the catch? There are three obvious ones. 

• Durability.  followed the online posts of about 2,000 users of the AI companion Replika, a year before and a year after they adopted it. While the short-term comfort was real, over time, their posts showed more markers of loneliness and depression than a comparison group. Intimacy without any friction makes real people seem high maintenance. They're messy. They take effort. 
• Safety. In March, Australia's eSafety Commissioner . This is cause for concern as roughly 200,000 Australian children aged 10 to 17 have used one. 
• Incentives. A subscription earns most from a customer who stays lonely. A dinner app profits when you show up. An AI companion profits when you never log off. All three are designed to keep you lonely. 

There's a quieter irony too. While some parts of the economy sells connection, others have spent a decade removing opportunities for it; more than. We engineered small talk out of the shop so now they can sell it back to us as a subscription. 

Two tests to do before you ‘buy’ connection 

The bridge test: Does the product actually move you toward people or just stand in for them? A stranger dinner is an example of a bridge whereas an AI companion that becomes your main confidant is a substitute. Bridges build your capacity for connection while substitutes just rent it back to you. 

The exit test: A service that builds real connection makes itself redundant. The best dinner app should eventually be unnecessary. Be wary of anything designed for daily engagement, forever. If the product never finishes the job, the job was never the point. 

Make Room for Connection is good advice for individuals. It's an even better brief for business. The loneliness economy will keep growing either way. But the version of connection worth building — and worth buying from — is the one designed to eventually make itself redundant.