The loneliness epidemic is real – and it’s here in Singapore too. A poll conducted by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) showed that respondents in the age 21 to 34 bracket were more likely to report higher levels of social isolation, loneliness and anxiety when interacting with others offline compared to those in an older cohort.
According to IPS, this was brought on by the protracted isolation many faced during the pandemic, which resulted in young people missing out on opportunities to form strong friendships with classmates or colleagues rooted in physical interactions.
Enter Timeleft, a friend-making platform which recently launched in Singapore. Instead of digital interactions, it champions face-to-face meetings and spontaneous connections during dinner at mystery locations.
Would you be willing to have dinner with a group of strangers? Well, some 120,000 people in 130 cities including New York, Melbourne, Rome and London have already answered with a resounding yes since the app’s inception in 2023, making it one of the fastest growing social platforms in recent memory.
The concept is straightforward enough – you answer a personality quiz when you sign up. Indicate your interests, affinities and beliefs, and you get matched up with like-minded folks at a dinner venue that will only be revealed on the morning of.
These dinners take place every Wednesday and can be booked up to three weeks in advance. The mystery locations are a part of the charm, but rest assured they are located in and around the city centre, so users won’t be flung off to the boondocks on short notice.
Timeleft charges $19.98 for a single meetup, but you can also opt for a subscription ranging from $149 for one month or $499 for half a year. Payment for food and drink will be left up to the diners’ discretion.
Just remember: Timeleft is no matchmaker. The company emphasises that it is not a dating app. Think of it as that one person in every friend group who takes the effort to pick a place, rope in all of their friends and introduce them to each other.
Dinner with strangers
What’s it like to have a mystery dinner with strangers? It was refreshing, to say the least, when I signed up for a session. Unlike meeting up with old friends where talk usually turns to the usual complaints about our jobs, updates about loved ones or upcoming travel itineraries, it turned out to be an evening filled with interesting conversations and different perspectives on current affairs.
There were supposed to be six people in my group but two did not show up. The company says it would typically schedule six to accommodate no-shows, which was what happened in my case. (You’ll be banned from the app if you accumulate two unnotified absences.)
Who was I supposed to meet? A day before, the app revealed 83 percent of the group were local, while 17 percent were from France. Some were business owners, while others were in finance or real estate. Zodiac signs were revealed too, with the majority being Scorpio and Sagittarius.
The restaurant was revealed only in the morning on the day of the meet, which was located in Robertson Quay. It was exciting to meet up with strangers that I’ve been matched with – who would they be and would we even have things to talk about?
The three strangers turned out to be lovely people, and despite a little awkwardness in the beginning, we quickly warmed up to each other. (For privacy reasons, I’ll refer to them by their first names or initials.) Ethan is a “gin composer” who was opening his own restaurant serving bespoke gin. Yen works in real estate, while YT, who just returned from France, is in the finance industry.
We ordered our food and started chatting about, well, ourselves and our hobbies. We talked about Netflix shows, food and travel – and it seemed that being in the same age group made it easier to relate to one another. The icebreaker games on the app also proved to be a big help. One of the games simply asked questions such as, if we could choose to be any animal, what would it be – which led to a fun psycho-analysis of every member’s choice.
Once dinner ended, we left without exchanging phone numbers or social media handles, but that’s ok. It was eye-opening just to chat with people outside of my usual social circle, and I was happy to spend an evening feeling less lonely.
Find out more about Timeleft here.
Text by Alvin Lim and Nida Seah.
