The paradox of connected loneliness
Browsing through social media and online conversations today, you notice something strange: more and more young people, and not just them, seem to be praising isolation. But it’s not simple misanthropy. It’s something more complex and, frankly, more worrying.
The society that erased public spaces (digital and physical)
Let’s start with the concrete facts. Watch the guy on the bus: he’s connected to three apps at once, yet he doesn’t hear a word of the conversation next to him. It’s not intentional rudeness. It’s because the phone has killed that small art of conversational serendipity, that chance encounter that could have turned into a chat, a spontaneous exchange.
But the problem doesn’t start with the smartphone. It starts earlier: there are no longer common spaces where you can simply be without a specific purpose. Twenty years ago, a public square was a place of life. Today? A parking lot. The courtyards where children used to play no longer exist in new buildings. Bars are no longer the heart of the community—they’ve become places where you simply pass by someone while rushing to the next thing.
New generations never even had that. For them, public space has always been virtual space, and virtual space is not neutral—it’s algorithms, likes, judgment.
A warning about naive nostalgia
But let’s stop for a moment. I’m not saying “the old times were better.” Those common spaces had a dark side we often forget. If everyone played soccer, whoever didn’t love soccer was simply left out. If you were different from the norm, the community could be suffocating and repressive.
I don’t want to say “let’s recreate the squares of the past.” I want to say “we lost something of value without creating something better in its place.” And that difference is crucial.
The epidemic of distrust
There’s another dimension: today’s young people—and increasingly adults too—are deeply distrustful. Of what? Everything. Of strangers, of new contacts, of anyone who isn’t already their peer.
Why? Here’s where precarity comes in. When you don’t know if you’ll have a job in six months, when every relationship is mediated by profiles that control what you show, when you’ve learned that “people can’t be relied on,” the instinctive defense is to withdraw. It’s not a rational, conscious choice. It’s a neurophysiological response.
And then: where do you meet new people? On dating apps? On social media? These spaces are intrinsically performative. They’re not entirely real; they’re curated. And people know it, and people feel it, and the result is a profound erosion of empathy. If everyone is performing in their own film, why should I actually care about this kind of interaction?
The illusion of personal choice
The culture of self-improvement—”do it yourself,” “push past your comfort zone,” “be independent”—sounds positive on paper. And indeed, autonomy has genuinely increased. Today’s young people know how to do things that previous generations never imagined having to do alone.
But here’s the trick: this message is sold as a virtue, when often it’s an economic strategy. If everyone does everything alone, you don’t need community, associations, or publicly funded common spaces. It’s less expensive for the government, for corporations, and for the system. “Be autonomous” also means “don’t expect structural support.”
And so the young person convinces themselves that wanting to be with others is a weakness, that isolation is a superior choice. It’s not. It’s a psychological defense that the system has transformed into a virtue.
When isolation becomes inevitable
Here we arrive at the “non-young.” A 45-year-old man whose old friends have disappeared because they have wives, children, and mortgages. It’s not a choice. It’s the result of desynchronized lives. Before, there was a more or less shared script: you finish school, work together, you get married around the same age, you have kids. Now?
Now a thirty-year-old can exist in a bubble: single, precarious, childless. Another is already on their second child. A third isn’t sure whether they ever want to get married. Time has stretched, scattered. The serendipity of synchronization has disappeared.
And then: money. Or rather, the lack of it. A young person can’t even afford to go to a bar or the cinema every weekend. An adult with a family doesn’t have the time or energy for social hobbies. In both cases, isolation isn’t a virtuous choice. It’s a material constraint disguised as personal preference.
The difficulty of reaching consensus
There’s also an element that’s often overlooked: the complexity of coordination. Before, if you agreed on something (soccer, a movie, a drink), you did it, and that was it. Now everyone has preferences, intolerances, and ethical objections to everything—and truthfully, they’re right to have them; it’s just that when everyone is right, nothing gets done.
It’s easier to stay home alone, scroll, not have to compromise on anything, not have to adapt to someone else’s pace, not have to pretend to be interested in something you don’t like. One more experience that, however, is increasingly perceived as a burden.
The stress that digs deeper
And underneath all this: the stress of precarity. Your tolerance for trivial conversations is zero when you’re anxious about whether your contract ends in three months. Your patience for managing interpersonal conflicts runs out when you’re already managing the internal conflict of an uncertain life.
Frustration grows, tolerance collapses, and the refuge becomes: being alone. It’s less complicated.
The performativity of loneliness (the real deception)
There’s an element that emerges from social media and comments that’s almost invisible: many young people talk about a loneliness they’ve never truly experienced.
Look at the comments under a post: “friends don’t exist,” “we’re all alone,” “true friendship is a myth.” These are absolute, doctrinal statements. But how many of those who write them have actually experienced authentic community and then lost it? How many have tasted what it means to have a group that stands by you, that truly knows you?
Here’s the thing: they’ve inherited the narrative of loneliness without having experienced its opposite. It’s become an identity position, almost a status symbol. “I am consciously alone” sounds more sophisticated than “I’m afraid I don’t know how to connect.”
And it’s a great shame, because it means they’ve lost not just reality, but also the memory of what could be different. They’re not living isolation—they’re performing isolation. And once you perform it, it becomes real.
What’s missing
The problem isn’t that young people are less sociable by nature. It’s that society has simultaneously:
- Dismantled common spaces (courtyards, squares, associations, community centers)
- Made technology the primary mediator of every relationship (it’s not neutral—it has its own rules, its own algorithms)
- Pushed the ideology of total autonomy (liberating but also isolating)
- Made everything precarious (economic, relational, even identity-wise)
- Created an overload of choice (paralyzing) and performance (exhausting)
The result is that being alone becomes rational, no longer even a choice, but a survival strategy. It’s not a pathology. It’s a perfect adaptation to a system that punishes you for every hour you don’t dedicate to productivity.
The real danger: the manipulability of fragmentation
But here’s the point that many underestimate, and which is probably the most important:
Isolated individuals are controllable individuals.
Throughout history, great changes—progress, revolutions, conquests of rights—have never come from people alone with their smartphones. They’ve come from groups that stood by each other. Workers organizing, communities mobilizing, and movements creating collective force.
If you fragment the population—make it invisible to itself, convince it that loneliness is a choice, that friends don’t exist, that resistance is useless—then you can impose anything from above. Cuts to rights? Isolated people don’t have the power to resist. Precarity? Easier when everyone believes they’re the only one suffering. Information manipulation? When you’re not in a community that verifies reality together, you believe everything.
Isolation is not a lifestyle. It’s a control strategy, perceived as individual freedom.
And the young person who repeats “friends don’t exist” doesn’t realize they’re also saying, “I have no collective power,” “I can’t resist,” “I’m fragile.” They don’t know it, but they’re internalizing it.
What could change
It’s not a question of “going back to socializing” or “putting down your phone.” Those are individual solutions to structural problems—they’re reassuring but useless.
We would need to:
- Recreate public common spaces that don’t require economic justification (the “third place” beyond home and work), but make them consciously inclusive—not squares where “strange” people are excluded, but spaces where diversity is structural
- Desacralize autonomy as an absolute virtue—it’s beautiful to be independent, but community isn’t weakness; it’s a strength
- Stabilize the economy so people have the mental space for relationships (I can’t be part of a community if I’m anxious about survival)
- Rethink technology not as neutral, but as infrastructure with social effects (and consciously choose alternatives)
- Make room for slowness again—time for conversations that lead nowhere
- Above all: remind young people that friends exist, that community exists, that it has value, and that giving it up also means giving up your own power
The final challenge: authenticity vs. trend
Many young people are tired of following trends. They’re tired of pretending, of performing, of conforming. In this sense, preferring to be alone because at least there you don’t have to pretend—that’s healthy.
But the risk is confusing “I don’t want to pretend” with “I don’t want to be with others.” Because if you find the right people—people you don’t have to pretend around — suddenly isolation doesn’t look so virtuous.
Here’s the thing: it’s not isolation that’s the problem. It’s that we experience it as inevitable.
If you have an authentic community, relationships become the refuge, not the discomfort. If you don’t have one, then yes, being alone is easier.
This is a generation (and increasingly also adults) that has instinctively understood that shallow relationships hurt more than being alone. That has seen collective compromise collapse. That has learned to go it alone because it couldn’t count on anything.
And so it has chosen—or rather, adapted—to solipsism. And then started presenting this adaptation as if it were a conscious and superior choice.
The pity is that, by presenting loneliness as a virtue, they’ve lost the memory of what it means to have people to lean on. Of what it means when a group decides to move together. Of how collective resistance works.
And while they scroll, those who build the system watch, satisfied. Solitary people don’t organize. Solitary people don’t resist. Solitary people accept the unacceptable.
It’s not even a conscious choice, in most cases. It’s what happens when you remove the bridges and blame your feet for not crossing the river. And then you transform that powerlessness into a philosophy of life.
The real question isn’t, “How do we convince young people to be together?” (That would be paternalistic.) It’s, “How do we recreate a society where:
- being together isn’t a sacrifice
- community is inclusive rather than exclusive
- people truly know that friends exist, because they’ve experienced it
- resisting together is possible and necessary?“
As long as the answer remains “I don’t know,” they’ll keep scrolling alone. And while they do, injustice will take advantage of their dispersion.
This isn’t an invitation to nostalgia. It’s an invitation to recognize true power—the power that comes when people decide to stop being alone, not because they’re weak, but because they’re strong together.
