Loneliness influencers: why are people suddenly boasting about having no friends? Chronicling your humdrum, solitary life has become an online trend. It is certainly perplexing. Is it also empowering?
The Rise of the Loneliness Influencer
Name: Loneliness influencers. Age: A few months old. Appearance: A solitary woman, eating a pizza at home. That sounds depressing. It really is not! It is 'introvert heaven'! Loneliness is aspirational now – or, at the very least, it is authentic.
Talk me through it. There is a growing microtrend on social media where people who live alone chronicle their routines to their followers, often making a point about how they 'have no friends'. The pizza one is called Paulina Cee.
What Does Paulina Cee Do?
She comes home from work, gets in a lift, leaves the lift, strokes her cat, makes some food, obsessively tidies up ('no clutter ever') and goes to bed. Wait, who is filming her coming out of the lift? Apparently she is. Presumably she does not upload the bits where she has to race down several flights of stairs to retrieve her phone.
Seems ... unusual. Cee is far from alone. There are many similar content creators, each espousing the quality of being completely alone all of the time.
The Appeal of Solitude
What is that quality, exactly? The videos often make a virtue of having no friends – you are freed from the burden of social expectation. You get to live exactly on your own terms – which often involves disinfecting your living space, eating supermarket pizza in front of the TV and drinking soft drinks from a wine glass.
Does it look fun? That very much depends on how you define fun. They tend to overlay their videos with acoustic, ASMR-adjacent background music, which sounds twee and cute, but then sometimes you will be blindsided by a clip of them dissociating into the middle distance for several seconds at a time.
Drama Free Diaries and Others
Who does that? That is the speciality of Drama Free Diaries, a woman who makes videos captioned with things like 'POV You are a single woman who lives alone with no kids & no friends so evenings look like this ... (No judging)'. And she does the same sort of thing as Cee? Yes, but often with soup instead of pizza. Also, she does not upload the bits where she walks through her front door, sets up her camera, leaves again and then pretends that she is walking through the door for the first time.
Are they all women? No, there is a guy called Manocutz who does a similar thing, except he walks into a gym and (presumably) sets up his phone before re-entering. And does he seem happy? He does, although it is worth pointing out that he often films himself running outside with other people. The purists would be appalled.
Why Are These Videos So Popular?
Why are the videos so popular? Perhaps it is a reflection of our remote, atomised lives. Or perhaps it is a powerful statement on how technology has destroyed centuries-old social patterns. I cannot help but feel sorry for them. You are right, it is much healthier to ignore your family while you doomscroll through dozens of these videos.
Do say: 'What shall be done about the influencer loneliness epidemic?' Don't say: 'You are never alone with a phone.'
