Knocknock is proudly old school, and knocking on a door might be the most underrated technology we’ve got.

An algorithm picked your dinner. A chatbot sorted your energy bill. Your groceries arrived without a single word exchanged.

None of that is bad. Most of it is brilliant. But notice what disappeared along with the effort: the people.

Every one of those errands used to involve a human being. A butcher. A neighbour. A bloke down the street who had the thing you needed. The friction was annoying. The friction was also where we met each other.

Efficiency has a hidden invoice

Engineers worked this out long before anyone said “AI”. In Ironies of Automation, Lisanne Bainbridge (1983) showed that the more a machine takes over, the more the human skill it replaced quietly withers, right up until you need it back.

The modern version is already measurable. Surveying 319 knowledge workers, Lee and colleagues (2025) found an inverse relationship: the more confidence people had in the AI, the less critical thinking they reported doing.

And the social bill is landing. The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection (2025) reports that around one in six people worldwide are lonely, and that loneliness is linked to roughly 870,000 deaths a year. Here at home, the AIHW puts loneliness at 15% of Australians in 2024, and 35–44 year olds, at 17%, are the loneliest group of all.

Never better served. Rarely less connected. Those two facts are related.

The people you barely know matter more than you’d think

Granovetter’s The Strength of Weak Ties (1973) showed that loose acquaintances, not close mates, carry new information and opportunities into your life. Your inner circle already knows what you know.

Sandstrom and Dunn (2014) measured it: people who had more interactions with weak ties on a given day reported more happiness and belonging that day. And Epley and Schroeder (2014) put commuters on trains and asked them to talk to a stranger. Nearly everyone expected it to be awkward. Nearly everyone enjoyed it.

We’re bad at predicting this, which is exactly why we keep choosing the app that removes it.

So: borrow the drill. Meet the neighbour.

Need something? Don’t buy it. Borrow it from someone nearby for a small fee. We’ve written before about the pressure washer you’ll use twice. That’s $20 to borrow versus $300 to own, store and eventually dump. Bardhi and Eckhardt (2012) call it access-based consumption: you never wanted the object, you wanted what it does.

Own something? List it. That gear is doing nothing at 3pm on a Tuesday. Lending it out is a bit of responsive income without changing your routine. It’s the logic we set out on rising fuel prices. And you meet the person at your door you’d otherwise have nodded at for ten years.

Look at what the transaction actually is. Somebody arrives. You hand over the thing. You explain the trick with the choke. They bring it back and tell you how the job went. Two conversations you weren’t going to have.

What you’re really lending

An item is never just an item. The trailer is a house move. The projector is a backyard movie night. The camping gear is a kid’s first weekend away.

Van Boven and Gilovich (2003) established that experiences make us happier, and keep making us happier, in a way possessions don’t. It’s why the retail therapy hit fades so fast. Lend something and you’re handing over the experience it makes possible. Then you get to hear how it went. That’s the part we’re proudest of, and we wrote about it in Borrowing, Belonging & the Power of a Simple Connection.

Old school, not naive

Being old school about human contact doesn’t mean being careless. It’s the modern plumbing that makes the neighbourly bit work: ID-verified users through ConnectID, refundable bonds, bank-authorised PayTo agreements, reviews and a dispute process behind every borrow.

Let AI do the boring bits. Let your street do the good bits.

This week, before you tap “buy now” on something you’ll use once, see what’s sitting idle a few streets away. Worst case, you save some money. Best case, you meet someone whose name you should already know.

Rent what you need. Share what you don’t.

Join the movement →

References

  • Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2026). Social isolation and loneliness. AIHW, Australian Government. (HILDA Survey, waves 1–24.)
  • Bainbridge, L. (1983). Ironies of automation. Automatica, 19(6), 775–779.
  • Bardhi, F., & Eckhardt, G. M. (2012). Access-based consumption: The case of car sharing. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(4), 881–898.
  • Epley, N., & Schroeder, J. (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5), 1980–1999.
  • Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.
  • Lee, H.-P., Sarkar, A., Tankelevitch, L., Drosos, I., Rintel, S., Banks, R., & Wilson, N. (2025). The impact of generative AI on critical thinking: Self-reported reductions in cognitive effort and confidence effects from a survey of knowledge workers. Proceedings of CHI ’25.
  • Sandstrom, G. M., & Dunn, E. W. (2014). Social interactions and well-being: The surprising power of weak ties. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(7), 910–922.
  • Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T. (2003). To do or to have? That is the question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(6), 1193–1202.
  • World Health Organization Commission on Social Connection. (2025). From loneliness to social connection: Charting a path to healthier societies. WHO, 30 June 2025.