Our Story

The substance was never
the problem. The cage was.

Soberpedia exists because of one belief: people who choose purpose over escape deserve somewhere to belong.

You moved again. New zip code. New walls. New silence. The last place had a neighbor who waved. A coffee shop where they knew your name. A Tuesday night thing you almost started going to regularly. Gone. All of it. Reset to zero.

They told you the bar was where you'd find your people. Then you stopped drinking and realized the bar was never about people. It was about noise to fill the quiet.

Two-thirds of your generation figured that out too. Eight hundred and thirty billion dollars in alcohol revenue disappeared because an entire generation chose clarity over escape. Good. But now what?

The apps were supposed to fix it. Swipe, match, connect. Seventy-five percent of your generation burned out on that lie. The apps didn't connect you to anyone. They connected you to your phone.

So the bars are emptying. The apps are failing. You moved to a new city for a job that keeps you on a screen. You don't know your neighbors. And every system that was supposed to solve this either collapsed, pivoted to something else, or was never built for you in the first place.

You're not broken. The infrastructure is.

A scientist named Bruce Alexander built two environments for lab rats. One was a bare cage — isolated, empty, nothing but a bottle of morphine water. The other was Rat Park — space, company, things to do, other rats to be with. The isolated rats drank the morphine compulsively. The Rat Park rats mostly ignored it.

Alexander proved something that changes everything if you let it: people don't need to be fixed. They need to belong somewhere worth belonging to.

Belong is not a soft word.

Belong is the thing that keeps people sober. Belong is what makes someone renew a lease instead of moving again. Belong is the difference between a customer and a member. Between a transaction and a community. Between getting through the month and having a reason to.

The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety.
It's connection.

— Johann Hari, inspired by Bruce Alexander's Rat Park experiment

What We're Building

Soberpedia is the recovery resource
for how people actually live now.

Part of the Rentcentives ecosystem — a purpose-driven membership organization for renters and people in recovery. Soberpedia provides AI-powered recovery resources, because people who choose purpose over escape deserve real tools, not just pamphlets.