Someone Is Getting Rich From Your Loneliness

I've spent 16 years obsessed with loneliness.

As a psychologist, I've sat with patients who had so many people in their lives yet felt like they had no one to call. As a creator, I've learned what it takes to build a community for people who have nowhere else to go. In my last startup, I tried, and failed, to solve this.

And I keep arriving at the same conclusion.

The problem isn't our phones. The problem is how wildly profitable our loneliness is.

They Promised Us Connection (and We Believed Them)

This didn't start with Instagram.

A hundred years ago, the automobile, the suburb, and the TV promised us more access to people. Each one did the opposite. They slowly dismantled the spaces where communities naturally came together and isolated us in our tiny boxes.

Social media is just the most recent version of this story.

It arrived at exactly the right moment, when friendship was already in decline. Between 1990 and 2021, the percentage of Americans reporting no close friends at all quadrupled, from 3% to 12%. About half of all U.S. adults now report experiencing loneliness.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, all of them made the same promise: new ways to connect.

It's the greatest hunger within us, the desire to be with each other. And they preyed on that.

We Were Never the Customer. We Were the Product.

Before social media, our most social technology was the telephone.

We paid for it.

Same with email, the first social technology of the internet era. We paid a provider for access. We were the customer.

Social media broke that model entirely.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, none of them have ever charged us a dollar. And if you aren't paying, you aren't the customer.

You're the inventory.

Silicon Valley deployed some of the smartest minds in the world to solve one problem: how to turn your desire for connection into time spent on a platform.

The infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, streaks, algorithmic feeds, none of these help you talk to your friends or deepen your marriage. What they do is build a system of surveillance so effective at getting you to watch content that it makes you want to watch more content.

All of this is by design, perfected through A/B testing, and deployed at a global scale.

The Algorithm Optimized for Isolation (Not for Us)

The more effective this machine gets, the lonelier we become.

Instagram's purpose was never to help you stay close to the people you love. It's to keep you on Instagram long enough to squeeze ads between the content. If it only showed you posts from friends, you'd eventually run out of things to see, feel satisfied, and close the app.

A satisfied user is bad for social media businesses.

That's why only 7% of what you see on Instagram is content from people you actually know. The other 93% is influencers and ads, designed to keep you watching, not connecting.

If you feel ashamed for reaching for your phone when you're lonely or bored (or if you're me, when you're on the toilet), don't.

You're not weak. This isn't a willpower problem. You're being out-computed by supercomputers run by trillion-dollar companies.

Here's what makes this particularly cruel.

Loneliness exists for a reason. It's a stop signal. A biological alarm, like hunger, designed to push you back toward the people around you. Social media intercepts that signal and offers a pixelated substitute that has just enough scent of human contact to quiet the alarm without actually resolving the problem that started it.

It's like giving candy to someone who is starving. The craving stops. The starvation continues.

It Doesn't Have to Be This Way

The telephone was supposed to isolate us too. Critics in the 1920s worried it would replace the front porch, the town square, the neighborly knock on the door. And in some ways it did. But we also figured out what it was good for and what it couldn't replace.

Social media is young.

The loneliness economy is not inevitable. It's a business model. And business models can be disrupted.

The same hunger that built these platforms can build something different. Something designed for real world experiences, not platform engagement. For people, not pixels.

The craving for real connection never disappeared. It just got hijacked.

And we can take it back.