(RNS) – SoulCycle, the relentlessly vibe-driven indoor cycling class that peddles positive vibes at $40 a class, has often been called a cult following. Now, the company’s founders, Elizabeth Cutler and Julie Rice, are taking the spiritual foundations of SoulCycle and finally making them clear.
The duo’s latest venture, Peoplehood, doesn’t claim to burn calories or tone thighs. Instead, participants pay to attend 55-minute “meetings”: leader-moderated conversations between strangers about emotionally and spiritually intense topics. Participants receive conversation prompts, predetermined gesture scripts for listening and expressing support, and are encouraged to pair up to discuss their fears and dreams with strangers.
According to Katherine Rosman’s New York Times coverage of the new venture (in which I am quoted), the founders envision Peoplehood as the SoulCycle for, well, soul: an extension of their discovery that the spinning class isn’t just one for followers more aesthetic side offers attractive exterior but a chance to work on their interior.
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It’s tempting to dismiss what goes on in Peoplehood classes as cerebral charlatanry at best—and dangerous pseudoscience at worst: Rosman’s article quotes a concerned psychiatrist, who tells Rosman that techniques used in group therapy could be hazardous to participants’ mental health . Christine Emba of The Washington Post argued convincingly that the “guided spirituality” sold at Peoplehood seminars is a simple recreation of religious life: one that has the devotion and moral rigor required of belonging to an actual community are replaced by a mere hour-long simulacrum of intimacy.
But if, in fact, Peoplehood is simply a chance to trade $40 or more for an opportunity to feel—rather than actually be—spiritually challenged, it may well fill a need. After all, it’s not like his target audience is swimming in connection. More and more people in urban areas where SoulCycle thrives are feeling alienated from more traditional and institutional forms of community, whether religious or secular or family.
You can’t blame Peoplehood for offering any kind of solution. At a time when nearly two-thirds of young adults say they’re experiencing loneliness after two years of pandemic-related isolation, they’re paying $40 or more (Peoplehood always has the cost of its seminars, which are still in beta not yet published) for a chance at emotional intimacy may seem absolutely desirable.
As one of the founders Rosman said, “We are modern medicine for the loneliness epidemic.”
At its best, Peoplehood could be viewed as a speed-dating event, where intense discussions aim to get people on the fast track, just to emotional, not physical, intimacy. Sometimes it can be easier to cultivate such connections with strangers than with those we know in the “real world” — as the many long-distance friends I met as a teenager on online blogging networks like LiveJournal can attest. The idea of paying for access to a space where people are encouraged to get to know each other and discuss difficult or thought-provoking topics has the potential to be fruitful.
What we reject is the idea of offering connection as a product. For Peoplehood to be financially successful, it needs to do what SoulCycle did: get people coming back weekly or even daily. And putting a price tag on human connections doesn’t just consume friendship; It limits the community to those who have the spare cash to even spend on a 55 minute “gathering”.
One thing Peoplehood doesn’t offer is a common goal – a project – around which its participants can nurture and maintain a relationship: one that would allow them to form not just individual emotional bonds, but communal ones. Peoplehood doesn’t foster friendships through sports or (my favorite teenage method) theater; it is not a choir or a volunteer group. It’s not even SoulCycle – a highly individualistic practice, but one in which the participants, at least superficially, work side by side towards the goal of collective skill improvement.
Emotionally intense conversations may be immediately rewarding as a form of self-relief, but Peoplehood doesn’t sound like it questions what such conversations are ultimately for, or what the ultimate purpose of intimacy or intensity really is. Without the building blocks of a sturdier friendship, Peoplehood risks becoming a kind of gig-economy crowd-sourced version of therapy, with amateurs taking turns treating each other on the (very expensive) couch.
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