“We’re not meant to live the way we are.”

Countless times, this thought emerged on my platonic getaway. What is a platonic getaway? A romantic getaway with friends. To celebrate the success of Platonic, I rented a villa in Mexico for a month and invited friends to rotate in any time they wanted.

“We’re not meant to live the way we are,” I thought as a Mexican friend canceled on me last minute and my friends Rabia and Zaria brought me roses. What might have taken a day or so to emotionally shake off took hours. Friends regulate our tough emotions, I knew. But living with friends forced me to communicate these emotions, to be upfront about my distress, a distress I’d typically see as too trivial to expend friends’ resources on.

“We’re not meant to live the way we are,” I thought as I received an accusatory text from a family member on my birthday, only to then hear a knock on my door. It was my friend Kana, gifting me a wooden guest book inscribed with “Platonic Love, Too” on the cover. I teared up, feeling seen and cared for in ways that dislodged the negative residue of that text.

“We’re not meant to live the way we are,” I thought as I listened to nearly every friend who rotated into the trip describe themselves as “restored” or “renewed” upon departing.

A platonic getaway is an anomaly in the ways we live. But the way we live is an anomaly of how we’ve always lived. What is necessary for us to thrive—connection—is treated as superfluous. Sociologist Émile Durkheim calls this “anomie,” a disjuncture between the norms of society and what people need to thrive.

Our culture compels us to venerate work as if it’s salvation—the one true path to happiness and fulfillment. Of course, most of us focus on work because we have to rather than because we want to. But when it comes to work, we are taught we should want to, that work is the most justifiable pursuit in life.

And yet, work success doesn’t make us happy. Psychologists coined the term “arrival fallacy” to mark our misguided assumption that when we “arrive” at meeting our goals, we’ll be endlessly happy. It’s only connection (particularly high-quality connection) that stabilizes our mental health.

In a society where up to half of us are lonely and more than one in five of us lives with mental illness, we can’t trust society to tell us the right way to live.

As for me, I’m refraining from using the success of Platonic as fodder to further worship the false prophet of work. Instead, I’m channeling the resources that coincide with its success into living the life I truly want. Platonic getaways and all.

Here are some ideas for how you can creatively pump more connection into your life:

• If you work from home, plan a weekly co-working date with a friend.

• Find “time affluence” with friends through a trip or sleepover.

• Experiment with hanging out with friends even when you don’t feel up to it. Note how you feel after. An introverted friend of mine said when it comes to social opportunities, instead of asking himself “do I want to go?,” he asks himself “will I be glad I went?”

• Track your day for the time when you feel most lonely (when you wake up? Before bed?). Commit to spending those moments sending a text, voice note, or phone call to a friend.

• Experiment with being an hour less productive a week and plan to spend that time, instead, with a friend. Note how you feel.