You can’t innovate away loneliness

I’d substitute genuine social interaction with a swipe, comment, message, or like. Keeping up with friends was essentially optimized– no longer did you have to text, call, or coordinate a meeting to catch up. You could just glance at their latest post and feel some shallow sense of connection. Social media provides the facade of friendship with lit... See more

Myself and people my age have been trained under the illusion that we can effectively eliminate any and all friction from our lives. We can work from home, Amazon prime everything we need, swipe through a limitless array of mediocre dates, text our therapist, and have a person go to the grocery store for us when we don’t feel like it, all while con... See more

This arc plays out across all kinds of apps, and all kinds of human relationships, as tech companies seek to find and solve every type of “friction” and discomfort. But those efforts are rooted in the mistaken idea that being a person shouldn’t come with difficult emotions—that we aren’t often, in fact, served by hard conversations or uncomfortable... See more

Technology babies us all the time. Putting aside the marginal good these apps do for people who rely on them, their ads are clearly focused on a capable, upper-middle class that’s learned to take its neuroticism a little too seriously. They exploit what probably started as compassion-driven conversation about burnout into a recursive push for comfo... See more

That’s the existential question for humanity in the 21st century. That’s the challenge in front of all of us. Will you shoulder the risk of pursuing real human connection, as hard and intimidating and discouraging as that can be? Or will you hide in your room forever, comforted by fast food and porn and opiates and therapy and TikTok, risking nothi

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Loneliness isn’t just making us unhappy, it’s silently killing us: Social isolation is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If the situation is so critical, why aren’t we doing more to fix it? Because we’ve been collectively ashamed to talk about loneliness . Our silence has incubated one of the most insidious crises our society has to face. ... See more