If You Work at a Club, You Matter More Than You Know

In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory most Americans never heard about. Murthy, the country's top doctor and a Harvard-trained physician who has served under two presidents, was sounding the alarm on something that does not look like a public health crisis at first glance.

He called it our epidemic of loneliness and isolation.

The data behind the advisory is sobering. Lacking social connection raises the risk of premature death by roughly 29 percent. It increases the risk of heart disease by 29 percent and stroke by 32 percent. Among older adults, it lifts the risk of developing dementia by approximately 50 percent. Murthy compared the mortality impact of being socially disconnected to "smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day."

Roughly half of American adults are experiencing this in some form right now.

This is not a feeling. It is a body count.

Robert Putnam Saw the Cause Coming

Putnam, a longtime professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, has spent his career studying social capital - the networks of trust and connection that hold communities together. His 2000 book Bowling Alone is one of the most cited works in the social sciences over the last half century.

The title comes from a striking observation. More Americans were bowling than ever before. But fewer were doing it in leagues. The activity continued. The community around it had quietly disappeared.

Putnam catalogued the same pattern across nearly every form of communal life. Lodges. Civic organizations. Religious congregations. Volunteer associations. PTA meetings. Card games on Wednesday nights. Neighborhood gatherings. The bowling leagues were just the metaphor. The real story was that the social infrastructure of American life was being hollowed out.

And buried inside that book, decades before the Surgeon General formalized the connection, Putnam wrote about the toll on health. He cited research showing that for someone who belongs to no group, deciding to join one "cuts in half your odds of dying next year." He went so far as to argue that for a smoker who belongs to no groups, statistically speaking, joining a group is roughly comparable to quitting smoking.

Twenty-three years apart, from completely different disciplines, Putnam and Murthy were describing the same thing from opposite directions. One in 2000, in the language of social science. The other in 2023, in the language of medicine. Both pointing at exactly the same truth.

Most of What Putnam Catalogued Is Gone or Dying

Bowling leagues are down roughly 95 percent from their peak. Fraternal orders are a fraction of what they once were. Mainline religious congregations have continued to thin. PTA participation, civic clubs, neighborhood associations, weeknight choirs, men's lunch groups, women's volunteer leagues - the institutions where Americans used to know each other on a weekly basis have closed, consolidated, or quietly faded into history.

The places where ordinary people once built ordinary friendships are not coming back.

Clubs Are One of the Rare Survivors

Private clubs are one of the few institutional forms in American life that did not collapse under the same pressures. They bent. They modernized. They lost some traditions and built new ones. They reinvented programming for new generations and adapted to changes in family life, work, and technology that broke other institutions.

But they are still here.

In many cases, clubs are stronger now than they were twenty years ago. Quieter than they used to be, perhaps, but still standing. Still gathering. Still convening members on Tuesday nights and Sunday mornings and every season in between.

Which means clubs are doing something almost no one else in American life is still doing at scale.

They are bringing people together, week after week, in person, by name.

Belonging Is Medicine

Every signup notice that goes out for a member dinner. Every event that fills up because the staff promoted it well. Every member-led group that meets every Wednesday because someone makes sure the room is set up. Every "welcome back" at the front desk. Every name remembered, every grandchild asked about, every quiet check-in with a member who has not been around in a while.

These are not amenities. They are not customer service touches. They are not even just engagement.

They are health interventions.

Murthy's advisory is unambiguous about this. Connection lowers mortality. It reduces the risk of heart disease, stroke, and dementia. It strengthens immune function and slows cognitive decline. Putnam's research said the same thing in different language a generation earlier. Belonging extends lives.

Clubs are in the connection business.

Therefore clubs are in the longevity business.

Which Means the Work Is Bigger Than the Building

The General Manager who fights for a programming budget. The Membership Director who follows up with the member who has not been seen in three weeks. The bartender who remembers a regular's drink. The activity coordinator who keeps the bridge group running. The communications person who makes sure the right notice reaches the right member at the right time. The front desk employee who greets every member by name.

None of them entered this work thinking of it in these terms. None of them were trained in public health. But the cumulative effect of their work, day after day, year after year, is measurable in years of life and quality of years of life for the members they serve.

That is the quiet weight of what happens at a club.

It is bigger than the building. It is bigger than the calendar. It is bigger than the financials.
It always has been. And in a country that is losing the places where people gather, it has never mattered more than it does right now.

To all club staff - you matter.