Hello friend.
I’ve been noticing something peculiar popping up on my social media feeds recently: the rise of ‘loneliness influencers.’
The videos tend to follow a similar pattern. A young creator films themselves spending an evening alone, cooking for one, going shopping, eating dinner or simply pottering around their flat with nobody else there.
Nothing particularly exciting happens, but this is a growing niche.
I’m no marketing guru, but I suspect part of the reason is that people recognise themselves in what they're seeing.
Recent ONS figures found that around 22-24% of adults reported feeling lonely always, often or some of the time. But among 16- to 29-year-olds, that figure rises to 30%, making them the loneliest adult age group in Britain.
Here we are with WhatsApp, Instagram, FaceTime, Discord, TikTok, and approximately 400 other ways to contact another human being, yet a significant number of young adults tell us they feel lonely.
How I long for the days when things were simple with MySpace and Tom with his whiteboard (now I’m really showing my age.)
It's easy to blame the phone.
I'm beginning to wonder whether that's only part of the story.
The Loss of 'Third Spaces'
When I was growing up, I remember going to house parties with my folks. The adults would disappear downstairs to dance, drink and generally have a good time while us kids were shoved into a room with a bunch of kids we didn’t know and essentially told:
"Go and play."
And that was that.
There were no smartphones, tablets or consoles to disappear into. You had to muddle your way through the awkwardness and somehow, by the end of the evening, we'd all be amigos and amigas.
Try that now.
I reckon you'd walk back into the room an hour later and find six kids sitting next to each other communicating with six other people who weren't actually there.
But here's my question: is technology the problem, or has technology arrived at exactly the same time that something else has disappeared?
For a long time, belonging didn't require much organisation. It was baked into our everyday lives. We had home, school/work and ‘third spaces.’ These were places that were designed for people to get together and socialise. Think of the bar in Cheers or Central Perk in Friends.
Religious buildings like churches, sports clubs, community organisations and pubs gave people somewhere they could regularly turn up and encounter the same faces.
Going to the cinema, crazy golf, bowling or meeting your mates for a cheeky Nando's were all an excuse to let your hair down and shoot the breeze.
None of those things guaranteed friendship, of course, but they created the conditions where friendships could happen.
Increasingly, those places and habits seem weaker. The cost of going out has made many small pleasures surprisingly expensive, working patterns have changed, and more of our entertainment now arrives directly in the home.
At exactly the same time, technology has become remarkably good at removing the need to go anywhere.
You can work from home, order your shopping from home, watch the latest films from home and have your dinner brought to the front door without speaking to anybody beyond saying "cheers mate" to the Deliveroo driver.
Individually, all of these things are brilliant conveniences but collectively, I'm not sure we have properly considered what they might be doing to us.
And what is all this ‘ease’ costing us?
We Need to Prepare Young People for AI. What About Other Humans?
This became even more interesting to me after a recent conversation with Suzannah Cryer, Head of Highfield and Brookham School, on the Maverick School Podcast.
We spent much of the conversation looking at a huge question: are we actually preparing young people for the world they're about to enter?
We talked about AI, exams, what employers increasingly value and the skills young people might need as technology transforms the workplace. But our conversation also wandered into something that doesn't receive anywhere near the same attention: the social difficulties playing out among young people and the possibility that technology may be making an already difficult problem even harder.
And that has stayed with me.
Because whenever we discuss preparing children for the AI age, we immediately reach for the shiny stuff. We talk about teaching them AI, digital literacy, recognising misinformation and perhaps coding.
All sensible.
But what if one of the increasingly valuable skills of the digital age is something considerably more old-fashioned?
Knowing how to build relationships with actual human beings.
No, there isn’t an app for that.
There is an awkwardness involved in making friends. You have to show up. You occasionally have to be bored and you have to negotiate disagreements, sit through conversations that aren't entirely about you and, God forbid, talk to somebody you don't already know.
Real friendship is built on navigating friction and tension.
And technology is incredibly good at doing exactly the opposite, and the ease and convenience we achieved in the short term is making us unhappy in the long run.
But perhaps all of that friction is precisely what makes friendship valuable.
Are We Heading for a Friendship Recession?
In my Old Man's day, there was at least an 'off' button.
You finished work, went home, had your supper and spent time with your family or mates. Nobody expected you to answer a Teams message at 9.37pm because you couldn't exactly carry the company mainframe home in your briefcase.
Now we're permanently available.
Work follows us home, entertainment follows us everywhere, social media never closes and there's always another notification demanding a tiny piece of our attention.
We are connected 24/7/365, but I'm increasingly unsure whether being permanently contactable is the same thing as being connected.
And this is where I think the conversation about young people and the future needs to broaden.
Of course we should prepare them for AI. We should help them understand the technology, recognise its risks and exploit the extraordinary opportunities it will create.
But perhaps we also need to protect the places where they learn how to be around other people.
Sports teams. Youth clubs. Community groups. Family gatherings. Hobbies. Friendships that exist somewhere other than a group chat.
Even being shoved into a room at a party and having to figure it out.
Because the question that worries me isn't really whether AI will eventually become good enough to imitate a friend.
It's whether we'll make human connection so inconvenient that an increasing number of us decide imitation is easier.
That would be a terrible trade.
We have spent the last 20 years making communication faster, cheaper and more convenient than at any other point in human history.
Perhaps the next challenge is making sure we don't become lonelier in the process.
Because for everything Silicon Valley has managed to disrupt, there's still no algorithm on Earth that can replicate what a good friend can do for you when life goes sideways.
And I hope there never is.
🎙️ Want to go deeper?
My conversation with Suzannah Cryer, Head of Highfield and Brookham School, goes much further into one of the questions sitting underneath this article:
Are we preparing young people for a world that no longer exists?
We talked about what employers actually want from the next generation, whether exams are measuring the right things, why banning AI from classrooms could backfire — and the hidden social crisis affecting young people as technology becomes an even bigger part of their lives.
If you're a young person, parent or educator trying to make sense of what the AI revolution means for the next generation, I think you'll get a lot from this conversation.
🎙️ Episode 13: AI Won't Wait for Our Education System to Catch Up
Listen on Apple Podcasts
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep13-ai-wont-wait-for-our-education-system-to-catch/id1881678199?i=1000783879611
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Podbean
https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-mt5cs-1b39098
Until next time,
Karl
