We Are Starving in a World of Plenty

By Matthew Kaufman, author of The Campfire Effect: How to Engineer Belonging in a Disconnected World

There is a moment every summer that stops me in my tracks.

It happens on the first day of camp. The buses pull up to the main entrance, and hundreds of children step off, clutching duffel bags and wearing the wide-eyed look of people entering a foreign country. They don’t know anyone. They don’t know where to sit. Some are fighting tears. A few are pretending they aren’t scared at all, which is its own kind of heartbreak.

A few weeks later, those same children are finishing each other’s sentences. They’re defending each other in capture the flag. They’re singing songs they didn’t know existed a week ago, badly and beautifully and at the top of their lungs. And when the bus comes to take them home, they cry. Not because camp is over, but because they have tasted something rare, and they know the world outside doesn’t offer it as freely.

I have watched this transformation happen thousands of times over decades as a camp leader. And for most of those years, I chalked it up to the magic of summer. The lake, the campfire, the freedom from screens.

But it isn’t magic. It’s biology. And understanding that biology changed the way I see everything.

The Ache We Can’t Name

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health crisis, noting that the health impact of social disconnection rivals smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. That statistic is alarming, but it doesn’t capture what loneliness actually feels like. It doesn’t feel like a diagnosis. It feels like a dull ache. It feels like sitting in a room full of people and wondering why you still feel alone.

We have built a world optimized for speed, convenience, and efficiency. We can order groceries without speaking to a human being. We can work entire careers without meeting our colleagues in person. We can live next door to someone for a decade and never learn their name.

We have optimized for everything except the one thing our brains were built for: each other.

For 200,000 years, human beings lived in small groups of thirty to fifty people. We woke up together, worked together, ate together, and told stories around a fire at night. Our nervous systems evolved for that kind of proximity. We are wired to seek the visual cue of a nod, the warmth of shared laughter, the subtle signals that say, “You are safe here. You belong.”

When those signals disappear, the brain doesn’t just feel sad. It goes into alarm mode. To your ancient nervous system, isolation is not an inconvenience. It is a threat to survival. Because on the savanna, if you were alone, you were dead.

That is the ache. It isn’t weakness. It is your biology telling you something important.

What the Campfire Taught Me

After decades of watching strangers become families in less than a week, I started asking a different question. Instead of “Why does camp feel so good?” I asked, “What is actually happening in the brain?”

The answer turned out to be a sequence of five neurochemicals, each one building on the last.

It begins with safety. Before any of us can take a risk, share something vulnerable, or open ourselves to another person, we need to feel safe. That feeling has a name: oxytocin. At camp, we trigger it through rituals, shared meals, and small daily acts of care. A counselor who remembers your name. A cabin that sings a song together every night before bed. These aren’t decorations. They are the biological foundation of trust.

Once safety is established, the brain starts reaching for progress. We need to feel like we are moving toward something. Dopamine, the chemical of motivation, fires when we can see a goal and believe we can reach it. At camp, it’s the buoy on the lake. In life, it’s any moment where the path forward becomes visible.

Then comes the hard part. Growth requires friction. Cortisol, our stress hormone, gets a bad reputation, but it isn’t the enemy. Unmanaged stress is the enemy. A child standing at the top of a climbing wall is terrified, but a counselor is on belay below. The stress is real. The support is also real. That combination is how resilience is built. Stress plus support equals growth. Stress alone equals damage.

After the struggle comes recognition. Serotonin floods the brain when we feel seen, valued, and significant to our group. Not because we won a competition, but because someone paused long enough to say, “I noticed what you did. It mattered.” That is the chemistry of dignity.

And finally, joy. Endorphins release through laughter, song, movement, and shared absurdity. They recharge the brain and prepare it to begin the whole cycle again. Joy is not a luxury. It is the fuel that keeps the entire system turning.

I call this cycle The Campfire Effect. It functions like a flywheel. Once it starts spinning, it generates its own momentum. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

The Campfire Is Portable

Here is what took me the longest to understand: this cycle is not about camp. Camp is simply one of the few remaining places on earth where the conditions happen to be right.

The same chemistry that turns strangers into a family in a cabin can turn a disconnected neighborhood into a village. It can turn a silent dinner table into a nightly ritual that children actually look forward to. It can turn a disengaged team into a group of people who genuinely want to show up for each other.

The fire doesn’t belong to any single place. It belongs to anyone willing to light it.

Most of us are waiting for connection to happen to us. We are waiting for the right community to find us, the right friend to appear, the right moment to feel like we belong. But belonging is not something you find. It is something you build.

Most communities are accidental. The best ones are intentional. And the difference between the two is not luck or location. It is the decision to create the conditions where trust becomes inevitable.

You don’t need a lake. You don’t need a ropes course. You don’t need a campfire, although I’d never turn one down.

You just need to understand the chemistry. And then you need to choose to start.

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Matt Kaufman has spent over forty years in summer camp, first as a camper, then as a counselor, and now as the director of Camp Ramaquois in New York. He trained as an engineer and has spent his career applying that discipline to the most complex system imaginable: human belonging. His book, The Campfire Effect: How to Engineer Belonging in a Disconnected World, reveals the neuroscience behind what makes people feel like they belong, and provides practical tools for building intentional community in workplaces, classrooms, and families.