We are taught to think that life and things in general were wildly hard before the usage of machinery came along, but in truth, it was during and after the Industrial Revolution that people were exploited to levels unthinkable before; it was the Industrial Revolution that made people work unthinkable hours and grind hard.
The medieval peasants of the Ancien Régime, before the famous French Revolution, had 180 days of holiday a year, not to mention that they took it for granted that they had a few hours free in the middle of the day that they would use to sleep, eat, or do whatever they wanted to do.
Therefore, the idea that we had back then, and we still do, that life was miserable until the machines replaced human power and “liberated” us, sounds like the inversion of the truth because it was very much possible before capitalism for a community to live well on not that much labour. It was only after capitalism that people thought, “Oh, I can get rich by making more than I need and selling it.” The idea of exponential increase meant that people started to work very, very hard; it was 18th-century capitalism and industrialisation that started turning things and the atmosphere really, really grim.
What does this have to do with the loneliness epidemic or the economy, though? Well, it does, a great deal actually. And I am not saying in any way that the Industrial Revolution or capitalism are only bad, of course not. There is a lot of good in them, too. The reason we can help so many people medically today is part of that revolution, our ability to mass-produce vaccines or anything else, really. However, there are certain reasons for this so-called epidemic nowadays, and one of them is definitely the working hours of modern capitalism, when everything is expensive and therefore surviving is too.
The Numbers Nobody Wants to Talk About
“Lacking social connection carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.” — US Surgeon General, 2023
According to a major US Surgeon General advisory published in 2023, approximately half of US adults report experiencing loneliness, with some of the highest rates among young adults (Murthy, 2023). Let that land for a moment. Not a fringe statistic. Not a footnote. Half.
And yet this is the most counterintuitive fact of our era: we live in the age of technology, more connected than we have ever been on paper, and still we are lonelier than ever. The advisory puts the health implications in stark terms. Lacking social connection carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day greater than the risks associated with obesity and physical inactivity (Murthy, 2023). This is not a metaphor. This is epidemiology.
−70% Drop in in-person time with friends among 15–24 year olds from 2003 to 2020 (Murthy, 2023)
The trends in how we spend our time tell an even more specific story. From 2003 to 2020, the average time Americans spent alone increased by 24 hours per month. In the same period, time spent with friends in person dropped by 20 hours per month. For young people aged 15 to 24, in-person time with friends dropped nearly 70% over two decades from roughly 150 minutes per day in 2003 to just 40 minutes in 2020 (Murthy, 2023). Something did not just drift. Something broke.
AI Companions, Therapy Apps, and the Commodification of Connection
All of this is indeed counterintuitive because we are, as mentioned, more connected than ever. But that may also be part of the problem. AI companions, paid communities, therapy apps, parasocial relationships, and the list goes on. Why talk to a friend and risk being judged when you can communicate freely with an AI companion or open your therapy app and be in a session whenever you want? We are living in a time when parasocial relationships are more of a thing than they have ever been. People tend to hide behind avatars and carefully curated social media images, choosing to be personalities so different from who they actually are in real life.
And so to go back to the beginning: this is exactly what changed, what shifted. The Industrial Revolution brought more work, less time, and more superficial needs, while before, we had less of what we have now but more time to socialise and be human. This, of course, is one perspective. And it in no way means that life is worse now than it was then. We have never been safer. Life expectancy has never been higher. We have cures for diseases that would have killed entire villages. This morning, I walked past an electric bike with a retro design, the kind you’d see in a film like The Fifth Element or Back to the Future, and thought: we really are living in the future.
But the future has a loneliness problem.
Are We Actually Lonely, Or Just Evolving?
I am not entirely sure that we are lonely in the traditional sense. There is a possibility that we are, in fact, evolving toward being less social beings. The way our lives are built, the lack of time, our priorities, even the architecture buildings that are all vertical, symbolic of being isolated, away from nature and other people, high up in the sky. Everything we build, and the way we live, is increasingly isolated. Less social. Maybe we are not suffering from loneliness. Maybe the future human is simply meant to be more solitary. Could be that that is the next step in evolution.
Or perhaps the opposite. Birthrates would suggest otherwise, we are still wired to seek connection at a fundamental, biological level.
There is actually some scientific truth to the thought above. A study by Hammoud et al. (2021), which tracked around 800 individuals over two years examining their smartphone use and feelings, found that loneliness tends to increase in overcrowded or overpopulated environments such as modern cities, suggesting that our technology-dominated lifestyles may be making us feel less connected to one another, even when surrounded by people.
The Feedback Loop Nobody Talks About
What makes this especially troubling is not just that we are lonely, but that loneliness appears to be self-sustaining.
A 2026 study published in Communications Psychology by Shao et al. (2026), involving 157 adults tracked with five daily surveys over 20 days, found that loneliness and perceived rejection operate as a bidirectional feedback loop in real time. When someone feels lonely, they perceive more social threat. When they perceive more social threat, they feel lonelier. And critically, increases in loneliness predicted reductions in both social interaction and self-disclosure at the next time point. In plain language: the lonelier you feel, the less you reach out, which makes you lonelier still.
Individuals higher in what researchers call trait loneliness, chronic, stable loneliness, showed stronger coupling between these states and greater withdrawal. The pattern described is analogous to a flywheel: once loneliness-related threat perception sets in motion, it gains momentum, carrying forward unless something introduces enough friction to slow the cycle (Shao et al., 2026).
This is not a character flaw. It is a psychological mechanism. And it matters for how we think about the solutions.
Does Technology Help or Hurt?
The answer, perhaps frustratingly, is both.
A longitudinal study by Janssen et al. (2025), tracking 1,923 Dutch adults over four waves from 2011 to 2022, found that increased social internet use was significantly associated with lower loneliness over time. The relationship was not mediated by simply making more close friends online. The mechanism was more subtle: social internet use maintained weak ties, created a broader sense of belonging, and compensated for declining in-person contact, particularly among older adults whose mobility had reduced (Janssen et al., 2025). Online contact, when used for genuine social interaction rather than passive scrolling, appears to reduce loneliness.
The keyword there is passive. The Surgeon General’s report notes that participants who reported using social media for more than two hours a day had roughly double the odds of perceiving social isolation compared to those who used it for less than 30 minutes per day (Murthy, 2023). Meanwhile, research published in 2026 by Mauri, drawing on the European Union Loneliness Survey of 25,646 respondents across all 27 EU member states, found that passive social media use (scrolling without interacting) is positively associated with elevated loneliness set points. In other words, watching other people’s lives without participating raises the bar for what feels like enough social contact (Mauri, 2026).
The screen itself is not the enemy. How we use it is.
The Loneliness Set Point: A New Way of Understanding the Problem
Perhaps the most striking finding from recent research concerns not how lonely people are, but why the same amount of social contact can feel like enough for one person and nowhere near enough for another.
Mauri (2026), in what is likely the largest empirical study on this question to date, found that loneliness operates around individual set points, personal thresholds of social connection that each person considers satisfactory. Using data from 25,646 Europeans, the study confirmed that loneliness decreases sharply when social contact rises toward someone’s personal threshold. But once that threshold is met, more contact does not reduce loneliness further. The relationship is not linear. It is kinked.
What determines where that set point sits? The data point to three key influences: the social norms of your cultural environment, your childhood relationships, and how passively you consume social media (Mauri, 2026). People who grew up with close parental relationships and childhood friendships tend to have higher but more achievable social needs. People who scroll social media without interacting tend to develop inflated expectations because popular people appear disproportionately in feeds, distorting what a normal social life looks like.
The implication for the loneliness economy is direct: we are not simply paying for connection because connection is harder to find. We are also paying because our expectations of what connection should feel like have been quietly raised by the very platforms we use to seek it.
What We Have Outsourced to the Market
Our grandparents did not pay for community. They lived in it. The village, the parish, the workplace, the extended family, these were not products. They were structures that came free with the act of being embedded in a shared life. What we now call wellness, community, and social support were simply what happened when people lived in proximity and shared enough time to trust each other.
The loneliness economy therapy apps, AI companions, paid communities, social clubs with subscription fees, and friendship as a service are not evidence of innovation. It is evidence of a vacuum. The market has moved into the space left by the collapse of informal social infrastructure, and it is doing what markets do: charging rent.
A review published in the Interactive Journal of Medical Research by Shah and Househ (2023) noted that the monetary cost of loneliness is estimated at between £8,000 and £12,000 per person per year in the United Kingdom alone, with a further £3.14 billion annually in lost workplace productivity. The Surgeon General’s advisory separately estimated that social isolation among older adults accounts for $6.7 billion in excess Medicare spending each year (Murthy, 2023). Loneliness is not just a personal suffering. It is a macroeconomic force.
So What Do We Do With This?
The honest answer is that there is no single fix and anyone selling you one should be viewed with suspicion.
What the research collectively suggests is this: the problem is structural, not just behavioural. We cannot simply tell people to put down their phones or be more present, when the conditions of modern life, working hours, urban architecture, digital defaults, and rising housing costs that scatter families and friends have systematically dismantled the infrastructure that social connection once ran through.
Mauri (2026) makes a compelling point: effective interventions need to address both the availability of social connections and individual set points. Helping people make more friends solves one half of the equation. Helping people recalibrate inflated expectations, many of which are fed by passive social media consumption, solves the other.
And Shao et al. (2026) remind us that timing matters. Because loneliness is a self-reinforcing feedback loop, the earlier the intervention, the less momentum the cycle has built. Catching loneliness when it is still transient before it becomes a trait is not just more humane. It is more effective.
A Closing Thought
We are, by almost every metric, safer than we have ever been in human history. We live longer, die less from preventable disease, and have access to information and culture at a scale no generation before us could have imagined. And yet something, something harder to name and harder to measure has been lost.
Maybe the medieval peasant with 180 days off a year and an afternoon nap was not as miserable as we imagined. Maybe what they had, and what we have lost, was not leisure exactly, but something adjacent to it: the slow, unmeasured time in which human connection actually forms.
We did not lose it all at once. It drifted, slowly, over two centuries of industrialisation, urbanisation, and now digitalisation. And now we are paying for its absence one therapy app at a time.
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Spiro Veneti
I am a freelance Junior SEO Specialist & a content writer specialising in B2B, SaaS, and SEO strategy. With a background in Political Science, I help businesses turn expertise into content that ranks and converts. Based in Tirana, Albania.
References
Hammoud, R., Tognin, S., Bakolis, I., Ivanova, D., Fitzpatrick, N., Burgess, L., … & Bhattacharyya, S. (2021). Lonely in a crowd: investigating the association between overcrowding and loneliness using smartphone technologies. Scientific Reports, 11, 24134. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-03398-2
Janssen, J. H. M., van Tilburg, T. G., van Ingen, E. J., Corten, R., Peeters, G., & Olde Rikkert, M. G. M. (2025). The relationships between social internet use, social contact, and loneliness in older adults. Scientific Reports, 15, 25230. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-09861-8
Mauri, C. (2026). Asymmetric loneliness response to social connectedness around individual set points. Scientific Reports, 16, 2859. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-31650-6
Murthy, V. H. (2023). Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
Shah, H. A., & Househ, M. (2023). Understanding loneliness in younger people: Review of the opportunities and challenges for loneliness interventions. Interactive Journal of Medical Research, 12, e45197. https://doi.org/10.2196/45197
Shao, S., Beck, E. D., Hawks, Z., Van Bogart, K., Graham, E. K., & Ong, A. D. (2026). Loneliness modulates social threat detection in daily life. Communications Psychology, 4, 44. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00410-1
