Why do I bring people together?

Over the past three years, I’ve had the privilege of meeting a remarkable number of expats in Tallinn. Along the way, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the lives led by the international community here—especially when it comes to socialising. Which is the aspect our Daily Meetups publication will be focusing on. 

One small but telling thing I’ve noticed is how often people are surprised to learn that Daily Meetups was founded by an Estonian. A guy in his late twenties, no less—an age when social circles are still very much “active” and many people haven’t yet leaned into their family lives.

I’m also surprisingly often mistaken for being Dutch, American, or something adjacent. After stepping back from organising meetups myself, I asked some expat friends why I’m rarely thoughts to be Estonian. I gotta say, their answer caught me off guard.

They used words like open and authentic.

Apparently, to many people coming from abroad, Estonians are imagined as something… else. And by behaving differently, I was unintentionally violating that expectation.

Which brings me to a question that sits at the heart of this blog:

Are locals—in any country—actually aware of how difficult it is for foreigners to feel welcome? Even tolerated? How hard it is to hold onto the hope that, someday, they might build a real life here?

And even if we acknowledge that locals rarely socialise with foreigners outside of work—should we do anything about it? Can we?

That’s what I’m trying to find out.

(I’ll try to say “we Estonians” throughout, even though I seem to exist somewhere between locals and expats. Perhaps that’s precisely why I’m the right person for something like Daily Meetups.)

It Didn’t Start as a Mission

I’ll be honest: the original purpose behind Daily Meetups wasn’t particularly thought out. I didn’t post something on a Facebook group for expats, hoping to reshape international perception of Estonians or to solve societal problems.

In the summer of 2022, as pandemic restrictions eased, I just needed to get out—like everyone else. I was very lucky to have Estonian friends to hang out with, during the lockdown, but everyone could feel these routines becoming repetitive. Ironically, Daily Meetups is built on repetition—but with a very different intention.

I also genuinely enjoy socialising (and doing most of my thinking) in English. After spending time in the US and South America during my gap year, and later studying Artificial Intelligence in Groningen, English became my default language for ideas, discussions, and curiosity. 

Loving Estonia, Differently

I don’t consider myself an “average” Estonian.
(Above average, obviously. Just kidding.)

But really, herein lies the rub—I’ve never been particularly good at immersing myself in the finer details of my culture. Or any culture, for that matter, as I’m more interested in people than their history. I like to perceive a nation as it tries to be today, rather than what it has been like in the past.

Estonia wears its culture like armor, with our customs deeply ingrained and language highly valued. Whenever I happen to drift from any extremely patriotic beliefs that Estonians expect me to uphold… there are times I feel like an outsider. 

Feeling like an outsider can come about particularly with topics that I will be handling in this Daily Meetups publication, such as the importance of maintaining our language and what characteristics should constitute ‘an Estonian’.

Sometimes, that can look like indifference. It isn’t. I’m only trying to be rational and prevent making mistakes that would, once again, land us under the occupation of another country. 

I care deeply about our sovereignty, and our place in the world. I try to watch local films. I have my favorite Estonian artists—often my friends being the ones to keep me in the loop.

My parents, on the other hand, regularly remind me to keep up with Estonian news. 

Why Daily Meetups Had to Be Non-Profit

Which brings me to my motivation for building Daily Meetups and why I want to keep it a non-profit. Even as the rest of my career will likely revolve around building for-profit tools that support the same mission of bringing people together, doing so in ways that are more scalable.

Not because other problems aren’t worth solving—but because creating opportunities for new relationships to form has always resonated with me the most. Why?

• It’s universal. I get to live wherever I want, and do a fair bit of travelling for work. This has been the dream ever since I was little. That being said, I wouldn’t wanna be only living with my luggage as George Clooney did in “Up in the Air”. I saw the film as a teenager and it brought me down to earth (pun intended) — not all the way down, though.
  
  

• It’s timeless. The fears we experience about having a good time with random people will never be “solved” once and for all. There are simply too many variables involved that change over time. We have seen how dating apps changed how we approach finding romantic partners and lifelong companions, in a mere 10-year period. In addition to emerging tech, people change along with how they perceive one another. Bottom line, I needn’t worry about job security as the problem will never be solved.
  
  

• As opposed to many other sectors, particularly startups on the cutting edge, this here is not winner-take-all.  Let’s just say there’s a reason Match Group has felt the need to acquire any social app that gains traction.
  They are doing their best to prevent a kind of social feudalism, with small self-governing communities, working towards one centralized empire. Unlike digital dictatorships, where occupying one platform means controlling an entire market, relationships resist the one-app-fits-all mentality. They form locally, operate independently, and don’t scale neatly.
  
  

Last but not least, it feels weird that we haven’t dealt with this already. We’ve solved problems that are orders of magnitude more complex than helping people have a good time meeting each other in real life.

We’ve built systems that land rockets back on moving platforms in the ocean. Made autonomous vehicles into the safer mode of transportation, on average. Mapped the human genome. Trained AIs to diagnose diseases, translate languages in real time and predict protein folding. And been the work of the last 15 years. 

And yet, we still struggle with something far more basic: making it easy for people, wherever they’re from and wherever they happen to be, to have a good time with each other. 

We seem to prefer the passive form of entertainment such as watching Netflix or scrolling social media. No wonder. These attention-seeking sectors have gone through true innovation, improving their products over the past 15 years. Social apps, on the other hand, haven’t really revolutionised much. 

Too often, I see founders tackling this problem with some new technical solution. Primarily, a powerful algorithm that supposedly brings you together with the soulmate. 

Well, perhaps the problem isn’t technically difficult at all—it’s just that not enough innovators in the social app space have treated belonging as a serious design challenge (not necessarily technical). 

Why This Matters Now

This blog won’t spend time convincing you the problem exists. If you’re even mildly observant in your everyday life, the symptoms are everywhere: screen time, avoiding eye contact, the lack of casual greetings passing by. 

Naturally, our social skills will degrade. It’s not our fault, either. It’s just another muscle that we exercise less, and will thus atrophy like any other. 

In this publication, we’ll link to articles, videos, and research when useful. But the focus will remain practical: exploring solutions that address how 21st-century life has reshaped the way we connect.

This “epidemic” needs to be dealt with everywhere, before it is too late to reverse the damage done by phones and all the accompanying junk. But Estonia needs to deal with this pronto. This has been re-affirmed by the many conversations, research, and world events over the past three years. 

While the so-called loneliness epidemic has taken root all around the world, Estonia in particular needs to deal with it now. When I started Daily Meetups 3 years ago, things didn’t seem so dire. But the conversations with expats and the research I’ve done have all indicated a certain need for urgency—not to mention the recent world events that have sped up the timeline, even further. 

Tallinn, despite its small size, is the perfect testing ground for various meetups formats that could become social apps. I plan to stay here until I feel that the newcomers have real, viable ways to find their people.

Not because the Estonian market could make a difference on our bottom line. 

Rather, because of the difference we can make by helping E