Nearly 40% of Americans now have online-only friendships

A study shows that In 1990, 3% of people had no friends, And in 2021 that number have increased to 12%, meanwhile amount of people having more than 10 friends has come down to just 13% in 2021 from 33% in 1990, These numbers doesn’t mean much until You feel it,

Have you ever went to hangout with your friends and watch them opening their phone in mid conversation and just start scrolling, and they are not even doing anything, like the same thing they do when they are alone, just scrolling for no purpose, just for the sake of scrolling and I hate that, like bro we only meet one time in 2 days and you are still busy on your phone? And turns out I am not alone who thinks like that, people are not trying to socialise with other humans, well they are but not in a healthy way.

In Pre Internet era, if you ever felt bored or wanted to relax from your stressful life, you’d just go to a third place to hang out with your friends making our brain feel safe and it gets time to relax and fix your mood, But now imagine in 2025, You want to chill out? well there is an app for that, You want to find a partner? Well there is an app for that, You want to hangout with your friends? Well there is an ap~ and the list goes on and on, anything that you ever need to move your body and actually have to work to get it, Now you can just click two buttons and everything gets done within some seconds, without you moving any major part of your body. and these are not even that bad things, I can easily imagine a scenario where I actually need a grocery urgently, I can use the apps to get it very fast, But the biggest problem I have with a genre of apps and that are Social Media, A genre of apps that are designed to make you “feel” connected, and use dark patterns to look like you are hanging out with your friends, well in reality you haven’t seen their face for more than 10 days, leading you to live in a fake world where only you matter rather than a real one,

The general arguments you will get from any “social media supporter” is there is lot of good things that happen because we are connected, and I completely agree with that, There are without a doubt Internet is the best technology human have created (If it’s not AI) but you have to understand when Internet first came out, It was a static page, where no matter how much you refresh a website the content would never change, while in today internet Every Click, Likes, Comments and even watch time changes how your home page will look different than your friends, so you can be on the platform as much as you can, Now internet is not just the tool that is there for you to be informed and have information, Now it has become a very big advertisement board, Not the entire internet but the big part of it, And I am not against showing ad, I am against the companies that have gone as far as to manipulate a person into making a him use their platform for more than 5 hours a day.

> How a cat will find time to meet other cats if his 5 hours of a day goes into searching for a fish that doesn’t exist