Is the world really a lonely place, or should some of us just try harder?

Every week is a new solution to a thoroughly modern problem. Run club, platonic match-making, dating apps pivoting to setting up dates with friends, not love interests.

If you believe the internet, the world has become a truly friendless place. And rather than feeling like the lone square peg in a world of besties, people who self-identify as lonely or lacking meaningful friendships are making an awful lot of noise. Thousands of them write comments every day – on stories about dinner parties and birthdays and thoughtful gestures – along the lines of “must be nice”.

A financial advice columnist I follow on TikTok recently hosted a rotating list of 25 friends at a summer house in Paris, and posted about the logistics and expense of achieving such a feat. The comments? “Who even has 25 friends to begin with?”

A freelance recipe creator gleefully shares videos about how she prepares and hand-delivers home-cooked bento boxes to her friends at their office jobs, as an excuse to see them more often during the week. She’s constantly met with reactions like, “If I had friends like this I bet they wouldn’t even appreciate all that effort.”

When I was a teenager, my weekends were more often spent talking on chatrooms and updating my MySpace Top 8 list than being at the parties and events everyone else seemed to be invited to. It made me feel like these commenters: excluded, alone, not thought about. But there was a pride in pretending otherwise. I had social media as an outlet for my innermost confessions, but I also think I knew, somewhere deep down, that no one wants to hang out with someone who’s no fun. So I’d need to act the part to be invited.

Something’s shifted, culturally and digitally in recent years, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed.
In June, the culture writer Ira Madison III wrote a “rant about having friends” in his newsletter. It was a response to a critic of his podcast – on which guests were often people in the entertainment industry he had an established relationship with – who wrote: “We get it Ira has a friend in every show.” The eyeroll emoji was thrown in as an especially pointed touch.

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“Frankly, we’re under siege from people who do not have friends, do not have social lives, and resent anyone else for possessing one,” Ira declared in the post, titled “An apology for having friends”.

I nodded along fervently as I read. When I dipped my toe into the terrifying world of making TikTok videos, I posted a video about the dinner party a friend had for his 32nd birthday. It was the age Bridget Jones turned in our favourite movie, so he planned a thematic dinner in honour of the beloved chain-smoking spinster. There was caper gravy, (deliberately) blue soup and a marmalade-flavoured cake. After watching the footage of us cheersing and laughing and pushing the tables aside to dance, some people who watched it felt the compulsion to comment, “At least you have friends.”