Everything is Lonely
Bring Back the Cringe and Reconnect
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.
While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.
You can buy my book Permissionless here.
I don’t want to spend the next 5 minutes of your time hand-wringing like a NYT pundit.
I’m disinterested in passing judgment on my peers and the world around me for daring to commit the sin of scrolling through a phone; as far as I can tell, the tech influencers’ performative obsession with dumbphones has yet to save anyone from their isolation or rescue our social lives from their collective downward spiral.
But at the same time - we can’t pretend it’s not happening. Can we?
We can’t pretend that we’re as social now as we used to be; that we’re as connected to our neighbors, to our families, to our friends, as our parents and their parents. We’re tribes of one, increasingly cut off from each other and losing touch with ourselves, too.
It’s the modern paradox. If you can look past it, I envy you.
I find I can’t look away.
We’re hyper-connected, in the most shallow version of the word. We can - technically - reach out to any other human being, anywhere in the world and start a conversation. But we’re profoundly isolated - collecting lists of friends and contacts, while sending blue bubbles into the void.
I can give you stats, but you’ve already seen them.
I know you’ve already felt it.
We are a society that has been restructured for solitude, while being made less independent than ever, while our human biology keeps demanding community.
Something has to break.
Or perhaps, it’s already broken.
The End of the Third Place
When I was a kid, we moved around a lot.
We were an Air Force family, and my Dad was restless; whenever we put down roots, he tore them up again, and it was a new house in a new suburb, in a new state. Well, as soon as we settled in, I always did the same thing: I built a treehouse or a bolthole (or a make-believe TARDIS) where I could escape from Dad’s anger and rage and the noise of my world, and be alone.
It was my third space, and there was nothing unique about my urge to create one. We’ve always craved somewhere to go, somewhere to be, somewhere to belong, outside of our own four walls.
When more and more of us are living in rented dogboxes and working from home, variouisly broke and low on time, we need a “Clubhouse” more than ever.
But the third spaces are shrinking.
Cafes are still an option, but they’re running low on business, and they can’t absorb customers who take up space for an hour+ without spending enough to make their COGs worthwhile. And with the cost of living rising, how many folks can afford to buy 2+ coffees, a Danish and a cheese toastie just so they have somewhere else to exist?
We have fewer communal spaces now - and the ones we do have are losing funding and resources. Every suburb I visit now is trending toward commercialized, transactional environments. And I don’t believe for-profit businesses are a bad thing; I’m a part-owner of a bar and my mates run restaurants and cafes.
But a community needs something else.
You can’t build belonging around a bill.
We’re Individuals. That Didn’t Used to Be a Bad Thing.
…and it’s still not a bad thing.
Not really.
But it depends on your definition of the individual and your definition of independence.
We’re anti-dependent lately; we have a hyper-focus on the self.
Our New Self-Care insists we must avoid going out and having a couple of drinks as though it were a deeply sinful and taboo activity, that our spare moments must be spent at the gym, “training” - for what, it’s never clear - and avoiding anything that might constitute a vice.
TikTok’s would-be Freuds and unqualified therapy-speaking, totem-waving mystics keep telling us that we have to set boundaries; but the boundaries are selfish, and their adherents withdraw from their friends and loved ones over perceived slights and ambiguous and enigmatic “harms” that are ill-defined and ill met.
“I cut off my family. I cut off my sister. I left the group chat.”
We celebrate these things as acts of courage.
And perhaps they were!
But if you listen to the complaints of social media’s loudest sufferers, it’s hard not to suspect that if you’re that surrounded by that many toxic offenders, the one thing they have in common is you…
When it comes down to a personal choice, we’re picking loneliness. We don’t start families, we don’t date, we don’t settle down. Even “Settling Down” has mutated in its meaning; instead of seeing ourselves as courageous builders who create a settlement in the wilderness and build a home as a generational act, we hear the word “Settle” and assume its only interpretation must be “Settling” for less.
Builders and makers go viral on Twitter, decrying their mates who have given up their dreams and abandoned their potential if they have a kid, as though our biological purpose is to create the world’s 300th AI coding harness rather than reproduce.
We’re trending towards being alone.
And being alone doesn’t have to equate to loneliness.
But somehow, it does anyway.
Remote Working Isn’t Always a Good Thing
There are a million reasons why working from home is a gift.
But the more we lock ourselves away in our offices and endure Zoom calls and reply to torrents of Slack messages and emails, the less we actually interact with other human beings.
Remember those?
Remember how it felt to go out for a midday cup of coffee with someone you actually liked to break the monotony of your day? Remember casual workplace interactions where you had to actually apply your social skills in micro-moments of shared belonging?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Unless, of course, their workforce has gone remote too?
We’ve blurred our lines of demarcation. Home life has now become work life, creating bubbles of isolation, even from the people we actually live with. If you don’t pack up your bag and head home, if your work laptop is within arm’s reach, how present are you actually with your kid?
He wants to watch Avatar with you.
That’s a perfectly reasonable request.
But if you only watch it from the corner of your eye while you monitor a pointless Slack thread, you’ve failed to meet that request. You’re a hermit in your own home, cut off on your own couch from the people you nominally love.
The Illusion of the Feed
Social media is bad, blah blah blah.
You could almost copy and paste any other luddite-manifesto right here, and it’d make no difference. Why? Because we know it all already. There is nobody out there, nobody reading this, nobody scrolling past it, who genuinely believes social media is a Good Thing™️.
We’re not even in denial about it - we openly talk about how much the infinite scroll, the comparison compulsion, the outrage farming and the brain-rotting short-form videos are fucking with our mental health.
You can pitch it at any dinner party as an easy topic, and settle back to let a table full of people agree with each other that this thing sucks.
Doesn’t stop us, though, does it?
Even when we promise each other we’ll take a break, we’re right back an hour later, checking how many likes we’ve received on our brave posts about taking a break. I’d call it pathological, but the word has been coopted by the Instagram Amateur Psychologist Class.
The TL:DR is this. We’ve substituted the lowest-effort and lowest-denominator digital engagement and connection for anything approaching a deep, reciprocal relationship; and we’ve done it at scale and on the cheap.
The Single-Serve Entertainment Economy
On-demand streaming has increasingly slaughtered the time we used to spend on communal, water-cooler TV watching; and hyper-personal algorithms keep fencing us off from each other into isolated cultural experiences made Just For You.
In some families, the living room isn’t even multiplayer anymore.
You’ll have three generations, sharing the same space, in their own headsets and tablets and AirPods and binge-lists.
But it’s unnatural, and we crave something else. It’s why Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has dominated the internet for weeks; we desperately want something shared to fight and fawn over, something we can all hold, whether we hate it or not, that will make us feel like we have at least one thing in common.
Unfortunately, we’re a species drawn to convenience.
And algorithms are the pinnacle of convenience.
The Cost of the Anti-Social Century
Derek Thompson calls this the Anti-Social Century.
And that rings true as a diagnosis.
Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021. (He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.)
Chronic loneliness, depression and anxiety shouldn’t be the crises of our time. Surely, by now, we should be solving flying cars with Jetsons-level tech, not crying in the shower. But here we are.
We’re more anxious than ever.
We’re more fragile, too.
We’re sedentary and screen-obsessed, filtering our entire lives through glass rectangles on a yearly upgrade cycle. We’re more divided, more prone to living inside echo chambers, less likely to know the names of the folks who live one door over.
And we don’t trust each other.
In fact, we trust strangers on the internet more than the people we meet. Not that we “meet” them anymore; we don’t even make eye contact with strangers.
The Economics of Solitude
Living alone is a highly catered-to, optimized, and streamlined consumer category.
It’s no longer an economic impossibility, although it’s arguably more expensive than living in a unit. It might actually be the most monetizable human condition in history; it’s a condition of persistent pain and anxiety, and people in crisis are more likely to spend than people who aren’t.
We have single-serve meals and solo travel packages and now micro-living options built specifically for the family unit of one. And it’s easy to lay the blame for it on capital itself; but I don’t think there’s any grand plan here, enacted by some shadowy cabal to make us lonely and // or dependent. It’s simply capital pivoting to monetize the atomized individual, in the way that capital always adapts. The coordination failure and the profiteering happened at the same time.
A solo chef box is a relatively harmless product.
But we haven’t stopped there.
We’re in the early stages of AI companionship becoming normalized; virtual girlfriends (and much more rarely, boyfriends) and subscription-based parasocial relationships are getting normalized at an astonishing rate. The Pareto-optimal parts of our interactions and relationships (validation, comfort, belonging, the feeling of being known) are getting unbundled. And we’re making the high-variance friction of actual human relationships semi-optional.
The people who actually love you have their own needs; they get sick, they get sad, they get stressed out, and they might actually choose to abandon you. They have agency that isn’t necessarily used the same way as yours. But you don’t have to deal with that anymore! You can front a monthly fee and get a perfectly calibrated simulation of unconditional love and // or positive regard, whichever comes first.
And then of course - almost inevitably - you get the for-profit cleanup crew. You get the mental health and wellness industry offering remedial fixes for isolation. They have therapy apps and mindfulness retreats and affirmations and boundary after boundary, and now AI therapy too. Anything to slap a band-aid on the symptoms without addressing a single cause.
It’s an economy of rational agents, responding to rational consumer demand.
But it’s also a perfectly closed economic loop.
We created the ideal conditions for atomization, and then we sold ourselves a synthetic patch for the resulting void, and now we’re selling ourselves the emotional suppressants and painkillers to cope with the fact that the patch isn’t real.
The Urban Design of Isolation
If the first level of isolation is economic and the second digital, the third is spatial.
We’re building cities optimized for a Nash equilibrium of privacy. Every individual is either consciously or subconsciously minimizing their exposure to strangers and chance encounters; micro-apartments and co-living spaces are nominally designed to be millennial-friendly communes, but in practice they’re little more than hyper-efficient storage units for isolated individuals who sleep and work in safely demarcated boxes.
The aggregate result is a worsening social desert.
Meanwhile, those who can afford to are retreating from the shared world into gated communities with private amenities. The ideal is to pay a premium to ensure they never have to share a swimming pool with the public at large. Even the neutral spaces left behind are engineered against human lingering; our architecture is hostile, divided, and unergonomic; park benches ward off couples and families as much as the homeless; and unstructured public squares have functionally ceased to exist.
Our zoning laws - and of course, there are more and more of them every year - divide human existence into separate quarters and isolated pods for living, working, playing, and praying. You have to drive from one to another, sealed in a metal box, never actually interfacing with the ambient organism of a city full of living, breathing people.
Reclaiming Our Social Nature
If the gravity of everything we’re building and buying is pulling us toward isolation, how do we reclaim a social nature?
It takes a philosophical reframing of the entire concept of “social friction.” For the last fifty years, absolute convenience has been the supreme god of consumer culture, but it’s the enemy of human contact, friendship, and familial love. IE, if you actually optimize your life so you never have to go to the store, and you certainly never have to wait in line, you never have to talk to a cashier, ask a stranger for directions, or maintain the simple skill of small talk.
And yes, small talk is a wonderful thing. It’s the subtle glue that bonds us, far more than spouting off about whether or not we’re living in a simulation, or whether God or Elvis are dead. It’s talking about the weather, how much it sucks, and how much the crops need the rain, etc.
There are choices you can make - choices I can make. To go pick up Pad Thai in person instead of getting it delivered to your door via an app. To refuse to outsource every minor chore to a slab of glass and a service-economy. And yes, to wile away a few minutes of your time in low-information and occasionally cringe and embarrassing ritual of “chit chat.”
Believe me, it won’t kill you.
You need to have the tolerance to survive the initial awkwardness it takes to build a relationship worth a damn.
It’s Not Kids These Days
I don’t want to get to the end of a screed and be dismissed as though I have a problem with “kids these days,” etc. Of course, it’s not; it’s older generations retreating into Facebook, as much as Gen Z withdrawing into TikTok. It’s everyone. It’s probably you; and it’s definitely me, I’m willing to admit it.
If everything is loneliness, it’s a measurable and impending health crisis, with a mortality risk roughly the same as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day; and if we don’t stage an intervention for ourselves, we’re looking at a decade, and then another, and then a century of decaying cohesion, dying trust, and human thriving becoming near-obsolete.
Humans are biologically built for community.
Our operating systems might be hyper-individualistic now, but they’re still running on paleolithic hardware, and the problem isn’t with the hardware. Wanting to be around folks you actually give a shit about isn’t unnatural, and it’s not a weakness. It’s fundamentally what makes us human.
We’ve given up a lot. But we haven’t given away the whole game. Not yet. And until we’re all so many red-jump-suit-wearing Wall-E-ignoring space travelers, I think we still have a chance to reclaim the cringeworthy, meat-based relationships that actually built our civilization in the first place.
I certainly hope we do.
I’ll leave you with that; I’m walking down to the local bookstore and getting a black coffee. Wish me luck.