The Loneliness Economy: How Isolation Became Profitable – And What Humanists Must Do About It

We don’t like to admit how lonely we really are.

Even before COVID-19 welded the doors shut and scattered us behind screens, I could feel it creeping in my own life: the friendships that withered when they had to be scheduled two weeks in advance, the neighbors whose names I never learned, the evenings spent scrolling because reaching out felt strangely heavier than just sitting alone.

I know I’m not the only one. For years, researchers have sounded the alarm about what some now bluntly call the “age of loneliness.” Nearly half of adults in the U.S. report feeling profoundly alone. It cuts across age, income, politics and a quiet epidemic beneath all the louder crises. But what troubles me most isn’t just the loneliness itself – it’s how quickly it’s been turned into something to buy and sell.

Open your phone right now. There’s an app offering “a friend” for an hourly fee. There’s a chatbot who’ll listen without judgment for a monthly subscription. There’s an influencer-led retreat promising you’ll find your “tribe” if you can afford the ticket. There are digital wellness circles for $100 a month, virtual “cuddle” sessions, and AI boyfriends trained to say exactly what you wish someone would say.

This is the loneliness economy. And for the companies cashing in, our isolation is good for business.

It didn’t have to be like this. We didn’t arrive at a place where people pay to feel seen by accident. We got here by choice – or more precisely, by a thousand small choices made over decades: policies that stripped public spaces to the bone, jobs that scatter us from family and keep us working longer hours, technology that promised connection but delivered a cheap facsimile instead.

We traded neighborhood potlucks for Nextdoor posts about suspicious strangers. We swapped third places libraries, unions, free clubs, front porches for gig work and delivery apps. We let the commons rot, then wondered why so many of us feel like ghosts inside our own cities. When connection disappears, the market steps in to sell it back to us, piece by piece, behind paywalls and pop-up ads.

I think about how easy it is to scoff at someone who chats with an AI “friend” or pays for a rent-a-buddy session. But what if they’re not buying friendship, but the sense that someone, somewhere, thinks they matter enough to ask, How was your day? If you’re privileged enough to have that built into your life – a friend who checks in, a neighbor who waves you over for coffee – you don’t see the transaction. But plenty of people don’t.

In an economy that atomizes us, isolation isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Loneliness keeps us scrolling, shopping, paying for the hope of a heartbeat on the other side of a screen. It’s easy to market, easy to upsell, and convenient for the kind of social systems that would rather we feel alone than organize together.

What does this have to do with humanism? Everything.

Humanists say there is no supernatural lifeline waiting to catch us. No divine plan to fix our failures. No cosmic entity to comfort us when we’re hurting. That means, simply, that we have only each other.

If that’s true, then loneliness is more than a personal ache – it’s a moral crisis. When we allow our need for belonging to be bought and sold, we fracture the very thing that makes us human: our obligation to care for each other, no matter what.

Some will argue that AI companions and paid friends can be helpful, and I don’t doubt that for some they are. But they’re not a cure. They’re a neon sign pointing to how badly we’ve let the real thing wither away.

There’s no app that replaces the neighbor who knocks on your door with soup when you’re sick. No subscription can replicate the warmth of falling asleep on a friend’s couch because you stayed up too late talking about nothing and everything.

So, what do we do? We resist. And not just with slogans but with stubborn, everyday, secular acts of community that refuse to let connection be a luxury.

I see it happening all around me when I bother to look. The young parents are starting free childcare co-ops so nobody has to feel trapped alone at home. The potluck circles and radical libraries sharing skills and stories. The mutual aid groups that sprang up during COVID-19 and never really disappeared, proving that solidarity can outlast a crisis if enough people remember how to show up for each other.

When I talk to people about loneliness, I’m struck by how many hesitate to name it out loud. We disguise it under words like burnout, overwhelm, introversion, social anxiety. All of these can be true, of course. But underneath, so often, is just plain longing for other people who really see us.

But where can that happen now? Where do we gather when we can’t afford the brunch, the gym membership, the conference ticket? Who do we lean on when family is far away or estranged, when friendships scatter across cities for work, when neighbors come and go and barely nod in the hallway?

Once, we had places that made accidental togetherness almost inevitable. In some towns, it was the union hall or the bowling league. In cities, the local café or the library reading room. Faith communities, for better or worse, anchored millions in ritual connection, for free. Not all of it was perfect, or inclusive, or easy. But it was there.

Now, the replacements for these spaces (if you can call them that) come with a fee. Yoga studios with paywalls. Co-working spaces for a monthly subscription. Even public parks, once the freest commons of all, are now ringed with private security or “events” that fence off sections and charge admission for what used to just be grass.

Some days I wonder if we even remember how to belong without paying for it. I catch myself reaching for my phone instead of knocking on a neighbor’s door. I sent a text instead of dropping by. I swipe instead of sitting with the chance that maybe someone unexpected might cross my path at the bus stop or corner store.

And while I drift into my own screen, there are entire industries studying how to keep me there, how to monetize my drift toward isolation. Every ping and push notification is engineered to spike a tiny dopamine hit, so the apps can sell my attention to advertisers while promising connection I never quite get.

This is not some accidental outcome of modern life. It’s the product of design – economic, technological, and cultural design that sees human loneliness not as a tragedy but as a growth market.

It’s easy to see this crisis as just another tech problem: blame the apps, blame the phones, blame the bots. But the truth is deeper. Loneliness became profitable long before we carried screens in our pockets. It began when we decided that public goods could be hollowed out and sold back to us piecemeal from privatized health care that treats people like billable units to cities that bulldoze public benches because the wrong people might sit too long.

It’s there when local newspapers close and neighbors no longer read the same headlines. When bus lines get cut so elderly people can’t get to the senior center that used to anchor them in daily conversation. When young people bounce between gig jobs with no water cooler or break room to swap stories.

What the loneliness economy sells back to us is the mirage of belonging. It works because it’s just plausible enough. The AI friend does remember your birthday because you told it. The rent-a-friend does sit with you at dinner because you paid them. For an hour or two, the emptiness dulls a little.

I don’t blame anyone for buying these things. To do so is profoundly human, a testament to how desperately we need each other. What I do blame is a system that made it so ordinary to feel alone that the fix could be branded, marketed, and scaled like any other commodity.

So what might it look like to fight back not with outrage alone, but with a stubborn moral refusal to let this be normal? Humanists often talk about “building a better world” in big, sweeping language. But a better world has to feel different in the daily grain of life. It means making it easier, not harder, to find each other.

One simple example: I think about community fridges. Across dozens of cities, people have rolled out battered old refrigerators on street corners, stocked with free food, free diapers, free hygiene kits. Nobody makes money off them. There’s no app. No subscription. No logo. They run on the radical idea that neighbors care enough to feed each other and that’s all the permission needed.

You can’t download the warmth that comes from opening a fridge you didn’t pay for and seeing that someone thought of you even if they didn’t know your name.

Then there are tool libraries, free bike repair days, seed swaps, little commons sprouting up in alleys and basements and church halls. They don’t cure loneliness outright, but they chip away at the lie that you’re on your own.

Or take the resurgence of local co-housing, not the glossy luxury kind but the scrappy, sometimes messy attempts by ordinary people to live near people they trust to share chores, dinners, child care, errands. During the worst stretches of the pandemic, these networks kept people alive in ways the official systems simply didn’t or couldn’t.

We don’t hear these stories on the nightly news because they aren’t easily monetized. They aren’t dramatic enough for a headline, not tragic enough for clickbait. But they matter. What would happen if we told more of them? If we chose to believe that the antidote to loneliness isn’t better AI or fancier virtual reality but more radical experiments in real-life, messy togetherness?

Of course, not everyone wants to join a co-op or potluck. Some people really are happier with more solitude, and that’s real too. But solitude is not the same as involuntary isolation. The difference is choice. The difference is having a community to step back from and step back into when you’re ready.

Right now, millions of people don’t have that option. They live alone not by choice but by design: scattered by economic forces, boxed into rent they can barely afford, squeezed by jobs that demand everything and give nothing back except a paycheck and maybe a Slack channel full of coworkers they’ll never meet in person.

When we talk about solutions to loneliness, we can’t just think in terms of feelings. We have to think structurally. Loneliness is personal but it’s also political.

A single parent isn’t isolated because they lack self-help tips; they’re isolated because child care costs more than they earn in a week. An elderly person isn’t disconnected because they forgot how to socialize. They’re disconnected because the bus line shut down, the park feels unsafe, the community center closed for budget cuts.

If you care about human connection, you have to care about housing, wages, transportation, public safety, and all the invisible scaffolding that makes it possible for people to bump into each other, linger, and grow roots. And you have to care about how the loneliness economy preys on that absence. Every dollar spent on an AI boyfriend is a dollar that didn’t go toward building the real-life conditions where healthy relationships thrive.

So here’s what I think the real humanist challenge is: to take loneliness personally and seriously but never privately. To see it not as an individual shortcoming but as a social warning light. And to respond not by judging or mocking the ways people cope but by fighting for a society that makes real connection easier than the fake kind.

That means showing up for the boring work: advocating for parks, libraries, bus routes, unions, fair wages, community centers. Fighting gentrification so neighbors aren’t uprooted the second they start to know each other. Demanding labor policies that leave time for family dinners and weekend hangouts that don’t revolve around spending money.

And yes, it means each of us deciding, in the small, awkward moments, to do the thing that doesn’t scale: invite someone over. Walk across the street with cookies. Offer a ride. Pick up the phone instead of sending the text. Say yes when you’d rather stay home, sometimes.