The phone is propped on the kitchen counter. The Diet Coke is open. The frozen pizza is in the oven. You are alone, and you are filming it, and you are telling the camera that this is enough.
You are lying.
The Atlantic documented the phenomenon this month. People filming themselves taking walks alone, staring out windows alone, eating frozen pizza alone on a Friday night. They call it loneliness influencing. They call it lonelinessmaxxing. The names are ironic and the irony is the insulation. You cannot be wounded by a word you coined yourself. This is not empowerment. It is surrender dressed up as a lifestyle brand. We are witnessing the sanitization of human despair, the packaging of existential isolation into a marketable aesthetic. You are being told that drinking a Diet Coke alone on a Friday night, staring blankly out a window, or microwaving a frozen pizza in solitary confinement is a profound act of self-actualization. It is not. It is a cowardly retreat from the necessary friction of being alive.
Dave Schilling wrote about it in the Guardian this week. He is forty-one. He was dumped a month before his birthday. He has a failed marriage behind him and an eight-year-old son and two breakups in the last three hundred and sixty-five days. He is the king of serial monogamy, by his own accounting. He has spent thousands of dollars on therapy. He still does not know why he cries at sporting events in front of women who would prefer he did not. He still does not know why he is blubbering over perceived slights while the partners he dates just want to get on with life.
He is more honest than you are. He admits he wants to be loved. He admits the solitude is not the solution. He admits that posting a video of resolute aloneness is still reaching out—that the validation only goes one way because you have built it to only go one way, and the one way is toward you.
But Dave is still writing it for the Guardian. He is still monetizing the confession. He is still turning his failed relationships into a comment section. He is turning his serial romantic failures into a public commodity, modeling a confessional style that treats personal chaos as content for mass consumption.
This is the structure. The loneliness influencers perform contentment-in-solitude. The confessional essayists perform hope-in-spite-of-failure. Both are content. Both extract engagement from the wound. Both teach the audience that the wound is something to be performed rather than something to be felt.
You, loneliness influencer, with your Diet Coke and your frozen pizza and your clean apartment with the good lighting—you are not healing anyone. You are teaching people that disconnection is a lifestyle brand. You are teaching them that the ache in their chest at two in the morning is a content opportunity. You are teaching them that the thing they should be fighting—the isolation that is killing them, the isolation that the surgeon general called an epidemic before anyone knew what a loneliness influencer was—is actually the cure, despite the fact that few social media influencers are credentialed to give such advice. The digital landscape is already saturated with bad actors; as we watch half of adults under fifty get their health advice from social media, it was only a matter of time before emotional resilience was hijacked by influencers monetizing our collective withdrawal. They sell us the fantasy that needing no one is the ultimate flex. They strip away the messy, uncomfortable reality of human connection—the traffic jams, the crowded restaurants, the difficult conversations—and replace it with a sterile, one-way broadcast of resolute and admirable aloneness.
There is a metallic taste under your tongue when you post the video. It does not leave. You cannot wash it out. The comments come in—goals, this is the dream, I needed this today—and the metallic taste is still there, and you tell yourself it is the Diet Coke, and it is not the Diet Coke.
Your throat closes when you swallow. The frozen pizza has no taste. You have made a life of performing the absence of need, and the absence of need has become the need, and the need has hollowed something behind your sternum that the comments cannot fill.
You know—you know, because you are not stupid—that the woman watching your video at two in the morning is watching it because she is alone and she is afraid and she wants someone to tell her that being alone and afraid is not the same thing as being broken. You could tell her that. You could tell her that being alone and afraid is the normal response to a society that has organized human connection out of the affordable life and replaced it with a screen and a subscription and a frozen pizza and a video of someone else eating a frozen pizza alone.
Instead you tell her it is fine. Instead you tell her it is aspirational. Instead you tell her that the thing that is hurting her is the thing she should want.
Culture has long enforced the idea that being alone is a fast track to becoming a paranoid recluse fleeing to a cabin in Montana. But the pendulum has swung into an equally toxic extreme. Instead of doing the excruciating, necessary work of opening oneself up to another human being, we are now rewarded with algorithmic praise for performing our own abandonment.
Your jaw aches at breakfast. The morning scroll has tightened something in your shoulders that was not there when you started. The numbers are good. The numbers are always good. The numbers do not sleep next to you at night. The numbers do not know that you cry at sporting events. The numbers do not care that you were dumped a month before your birthday. The numbers are the numbers, and you have built a life on them, and the life is a Diet Coke on a Friday night and a camera propped on the kitchen counter and the metallic taste that does not leave.
Let us be absolutely clear: needing validation is human. Wanting to be understood for your flaws, not just your aesthetic, is not an unreasonable expectation. It is the baseline requirement of a meaningful life. To choose the frictionless void of a smartphone screen over the unpredictable, painful, and ultimately rewarding friction of actual human affection is to choose a living death.
Dave knows this. Dave is still hoping. Dave still wants to be appreciated for the things he does well and understood for the things he does not. Dave still wants to be loved for the entire human being he is, not the show he puts on for the world.
Dave, the show is the problem. The show is what you are selling. The show is what the loneliness influencers are selling. The show is the economy, and you are in it, and the economy does not care whether you are performing contentment or performing hope. The economy cares that you are performing.
There is a pressure behind your eye that does not respond to sleep. You—the person reading this, the person who has posted the video or written the essay or scrolled past both and felt briefly, quietly, almost imperceptibly better about your own solitude because at least you are not monetizing it—you know what the wound is. You know the difference between being alone and being lonely. You know the difference between solitude and isolation. You know that the influencer is not giving you permission to be alone. The influencer is giving you permission to stop fighting. The influencer is giving you permission to stop reaching out. The influencer is giving you permission to die a little more each night, alone on the couch, while someone on a screen eats a frozen pizza and calls it a life.
Do not take the permission.
Do not believe the person who tells you that the cure for loneliness is loneliness. Do not believe the person who tells you that the absence of need is freedom. Do not believe the person who has built a brand on performing the thing that is killing you and calling it liberation. Anyone who tells you that hiding from the world is a victory is selling you a consolation prize.
She of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living. That is from the Gospel of Mark, and it is about a widow who gave everything, and it is not about you. But the wanting is the point. The wanting is not the shame. The wanting is the human condition. Dave Schilling wants to be loved. The loneliness influencer wants to be loved. The woman watching at two in the morning wants to be loved. The wanting is not the failure. The performance is the failure. The camera is the failure. The frozen pizza is the failure.
The cure is the terrifying, inefficient, uncontrollable work of letting another person see you without the show, and the cure is not guaranteed, and the cure may fail as many times as Dave Schilling has failed, and the cure is still the only thing that is not a Diet Coke on a Friday night and a comments section and a metallic taste that does not leave.
We must reject the seductive lie that solitude is a cure for the chaos of intimacy. The chaos is the point. The blubbering, the failing, the trying again—that is where life actually happens. The wanting is the door. Do not close the door and film yourself closing it and call it freedom. Demand the messy, uncomfortable, beautiful reality of being known, or you will end up exactly where these influencers want you: completely, quietly, and permanently alone.