Capitalism and convenience are making us lonely
As companies keep reducing the friction in our lives, are we happy trading convenience for human connection?
$80 an hour - that’s the going rate in Los Angeles for a professional hugger.
Carl, a divorced software developer, found himself visiting one each week to be stroked and held. He moved to the city for his six-figure salary job, having left his ex-wife and child back in Idaho. Without friends or contacts in the city, his social life was non-existent. Weekends would stretch on endlessly, and he felt suffocated by his loneliness.
But after his first session with a professional hugger, he found it “transformative… I went from really depressed and very unproductive at work to someone whose productivity skyrocketed.”
Soon though, once a week was not enough.
Carl’s appetite for hugs escalated into requiring several professional huggers per week, and his monthly bill shot up to over $2,000.
When asked on how he could afford this, he responded (with pride) that he’d come up with an ingenious hack, “To pay for it I now live in my car. A 2001 Ford Econoline I bought for $4,000.”
A tragic story as told by Noreena Hertz in her book, The Lonely Century: A Call to Reconnect, which looks at the causes behind this age of unprecedented loneliness. Carl’s story highlights a perverse situation: capitalism has stepped in to offer a solution to a problem which itself helped cause.
Everything, everywhere, all at once has made your neighbour redundant
With businesses chasing profits and competing to meet our endless desires, choice and convenience keep reaching ever greater heights.
Next-day delivery becomes same-day delivery becomes delivery in 10 minutes or less. But as things get faster and cheaper, they come at the cost of social connection.
Why knock on your neighbour’s door for a cup of sugar and risk a long, awkward, boring chit-chat, when you can have some delivered from your phone with a few clicks? Why ring your auntie for that pie recipe, when you can just look it up online?
Whatever need we have (or don’t know we have yet), a company will pop up to address that pain point to give us a more frictionless existence.
However, it is precisely these pieces of friction in our lives that promote social ties and community building.
Someone does a favour for you, then later you find ways to repay it back, and over time these repeated interactions enmesh people’s lives together.
A study by Banerjee et al., showed that in Indian villages where microfinance schemes were introduced, social ties within the community were eroded over time. When people no longer had to rely on each other for loans, not only did old familiar relationships weaken, new serendipitous meetings between different people also fell.
Chaotic social networks between villagers gave way to a more hub and spoke model, with formal institutions at the centre.
What happened in these Indian villages is a microcosm for the way capitalism and technology is affecting us all.
Economies of scale means that goods and services tend to be provided by big companies in the long run. You stop shopping at your local butcher, baker, and candlestick maker because you can get everything quicker and cheaper at the supermarket.
The interconnected relationships that used to make up a community are now lost to big institutions that mediate more and more of our daily interactions.
This matters, because over and over again, studies show that the single most important determinant of a happy life are healthy relationships.
Small moments of connection have a bigger impact than you think
You might feel that the words ‘community’ and ‘relationship’ are an ambitious overreach to describe banal conversations about the weather with your shopkeeper. But Hertz makes a case that these ‘micro-interactions’ with our local barista or barber, positively impact our wellbeing much more than we think.
The mere ‘act’ of being friendly can offer an emotional boost. And however short or performative these interactions might be, they offer brief moments where we recognise our shared humanity.
On the flip-side, avoiding these interactions can stunt us emotionally.
As we shield ourselves from these small moments of connection, our social inertia compounds on itself. To quote Jacqueline Olds, professor of psychology at Harvard:
“Lonely people will often put up a protective shell that denies the need for human warmth and company. Consciously or not, they start to send out signals, often non-verbal ones, telling other people to “leave me by myself, I don’t need you, go away”.”
So the more people become withdrawn, the deeper their loneliness becomes, and the harder it gets to climb out of it.
For those that are chronically lonely, they will be far more attentive to other people and social stimuli, in the same way that a hungry person will pay more attention to food. But ironically, they will also be more fearful of engaging socially. Cumulative experiences of rejection will put their brains into self-preservation mode, and they will see hostility and danger where there is none.
Lonely people are thus pushed further into their loneliness, even whilst they yearn for human connection.
Our social anxiety guides us towards rejection-free socialising
For the socially awkward, there are many ways to seek out an approximation of human intimacy, without the risk of social rejection:
- Professional huggers.
- Rent-a-friend services.
- Virtual boyfriend/girlfriend, who will message you several times a day with supportive texts and emojis.
- The mukbang phenomenon — watching vloggers eat food onscreen whilst eating alongside them. Viewers can tip their favourite mukbangers and get a shout out or thank you. Often used as a substitute for the communal experience of eating with others.
- OnlyFans — a watered down boyfriend/girlfriend experience, where people pay for a personal connection with their favourite models. As well as NSFW content (which is freely available across the internet from other pornstars), subscribers receive continual doses of flattery and attention from someone that feels more “real”.
What these relationships lack in authenticity, they benefit from a lack of baggage. People don’t have to put time and effort into dealing with the messiness of real-life.
These are all examples of monetised loneliness. And they succeed because they capitalise on people’s fear of social rejection.
The most prevalent example of this can be found in dating apps, which have dramatically softened the harsh sting of courtship rejection. Having an awkward conversation with someone at a bar on a night out, under the glare of all your friends, is far more intimidating than swiping right on the sofa.
No match notification? No harm, no foul. Rather than actually using dating apps to go on dates, most just use it as a form of esteem-boosting procrastination.
Whilst far more convenient, these friction-reducing technologies have the hidden cost of atrophying social skills.
People’s expectations of relationships get distorted (some mukbang viewers report finding real friendships ‘burdensome’), and time spent on virtual relationships crowd out time meeting people in real life.
Those that are most au fait with technology — young people — are also most susceptible to these risks.
When asked, 37% of Gen Z say that technology has damaged their ability to maintain strong relationships and develop people skills. In another study, Gen Z reported higher levels of loneliness than senior citizens, and all other generations.
Modern life will push you towards loneliness unless you push back
It is ironic that people have become lonelier despite being surrounded by more people than at any other point in human history.
To find jobs, people sacrifice the typically tighter familial and community bonds of their rural hometowns as they migrate into the cities (like our friend Carl, the software engineer). This is a long term historical trend that began with the industrial revolution, and despite the pandemic and WFH revolution, shows no sign of slowing down.
A recent 2021 large-scale study in the UK found that the more dense the urban area people were living in, the higher the levels of reported loneliness and self-isolation.
In big cities there are just far too many people to care about.
The sheer mass of individuals that people encounter every day cultivates a certain anonymity, and with it, an increasing detachment to those around you.
Mix in the long working hours and high pressure that comes with the urban rat race, and the result is a population that struggles to acknowledge the existence of strangers, let alone nurture or maintain social bonds within their community.
The word sonder is one of those “untranslatable” words that describes ‘the profound feeling of realising that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.’
Tectonic forces in modern society will continue to push us away from that feeling of sonder, as we become wrapped up in the busyness of our lives and seek the convenient salve of frictionless services.
If we want to avoid loneliness though, and find that connection with those around us, we might have to add a little bit more friction to our lives.
In other words, suck it up and make conversation with your local barista.