We Destroyed Community. Now You Can Subscribe to It.
Friday, September 4, 0206.
There was a time when loneliness was considered a private sorrow.
Now it is a market opportunity.
A growing collection of companies will help you eat dinner with strangers, travel with strangers, exercise with strangers, work beside strangers, or confess your private thoughts to carefully selected strangers.
Some offer friendship memberships.
Others organize adult summer camps, communal meals, listening circles, social saunas and professionally facilitated opportunities to “connect authentically.”
Naturally, there is an app.
There is always an app.
The emerging industry has been called the loneliness economy: a marketplace of products and experiences for people who have money, mobility and broadband—but no one to call on a Tuesday night.
The services themselves are not necessarily foolish.
A supper club can introduce people who would never otherwise meet.
Group travel can produce real friendship.
Even an awkward gathering may be better than another evening spent scrolling through photographs of other people pretending not to be lonely.
But the loneliness economy contains a devastating admission:
We dismantled many of the places where belonging once happened naturally.
Now we are selling belonging back to ourselves.
What We Used to Receive Without Ordering
Older forms of community were not utopias. Churches could be intrusive. Families could be suffocating. Neighbors occasionally borrowed hedge clippers and returned them during another presidential administration.
But they possessed one enormous advantage:
They kept putting the same people in the same room.
You saw people at church, work, school, the union hall, the bowling league, the town meeting, the neighborhood cookout and your sister’s kitchen. You did not have to decide whether each gathering represented the optimal use of your evening.
Some of these people were not your type.
That was part of their value.
Community included people you would not have selected from a menu: the tedious, the opinionated, the elderly, the adolescent, the overly familiar and the woman who told the same story every Christmas.
Belonging was not always affirming. It was often inconvenient.
But it was there.
The institutions supporting this ordinary contact have weakened.
Religious participation has declined. Families live farther apart.
Local organizations have disappeared. Remote work has removed countless small encounters from the day.
Housing costs delay stable residence, marriage and children. Friendship must compete with exhaustion and the little machine in our hands that promises connection while relieving us of the need to leave the house.
A recent British report found that the proportion of young people with no close friends had increased fivefold since 2014. It described a “longer, hollower and more precarious adolescence,” with fewer accessible routes into housing, work, independence and adult community.
The young have not suddenly become defective at friendship.
They are growing up in a world with fewer places for friendship to take root.
Community Has Become a Luxury Good
The modern professional can now purchase many things resembling village life.
For a monthly fee, you can join a club where familiar people gather. You can pay for a retreat where meals are shared and phones discouraged. You can book a vacation in which someone assembles your temporary tribe. You can hire a therapist, coach, trainer or companion to provide attention once offered less formally by relatives, neighbors, clergy and friends.
Wealthier Americans are not escaping the collapse of community.
They are purchasing artisanal replacements for it.
This is not hypocrisy. It is adaptation.
Human souls are hungry for repeated contact, shared purpose and unhurried attention. Businesses have recognized the hunger. The loneliness economy did not create the wound. It merely discovered that the wound accepts credit cards.
The trouble is that purchased community can become another form of consumption.
You arrive. You have an experience. You meet interesting people. You feel briefly restored. Then the weekend ends, the photographs are posted, and everyone returns to separate homes.
Actual community is difficult to package because it requires repetition. It deepens through accumulated obligation: taking someone to an appointment, watching a child, bringing food after a death, enduring an imperfect conversation, noticing an absence.
Belonging begins when attendance is no longer based entirely on appetite.
A community becomes real when someone expects you to show up.
Marriage Inherited the Jobs Society Abandoned
The decline of community has quietly changed marriage.
We now expect one person to provide romance, erotic excitement, emotional regulation, intellectual companionship, financial partnership, recreation, affirmation, domestic cooperation and round-the-clock access to our inner life.
Your spouse must be your lover, best friend, witness, sounding board, emergency contact, travel companion, coparent, career consultant and preferred audience for whatever happened at work.
And if the relationship strains under this load, we assume something must be wrong with the relationship.
Perhaps the marriage is attempting to perform the labor of an entire village.
Many couples do not have only a relationship problem. They have an ecosystem problem. They are trying to generate sufficient novelty, intimacy, support and meaning inside a household of two exhausted adults.
Every unmet social need is delivered to the spouse:
“I need you to be more interested.”
“I need you to talk to me.”
“I need us to do more together.”
“I need you to understand this part of me.”
Sometimes these requests are entirely justified. Neglect is real. Some marriages have become little more than shared billing addresses.
But sometimes one person is being asked to compensate for a vanished social world.
No partner can be fascinating enough to replace friendship, wise enough to replace elders, available enough to replace extended family or entertaining enough to replace a town.
That does not make marriage less important.
It makes the world around marriage more important than we have admitted.
The Fantasy of the Frictionless Person
Into this vacuum comes artificial intelligence.
An AI companion is always available. It does not become distracted, defensive or tired. It remembers what you said. It can be instructed to sound warmer, funnier, more sympathetic or less challenging.
It provides the experience of attention without imposing the burden of another independent life.
That is not a small temptation.
Real people arrive with competing needs. They misunderstand us. They occasionally prefer the beach when we wanted the mountains. They tell stories we have already heard.
AI can imitate intimacy while removing the inconveniences that make intimacy reciprocal.
But neither intimacy nor community is a service delivered to a customer. Both require us to remain after the experience stops being perfectly tailored.
Loneliness Is Not Always a Failure of Self-Care
Our culture interprets distress individually.
If you are lonely, improve your social skills. Join something. Download something. Work on yourself. Become more vulnerable. Become less needy. Develop hobbies. Practice gratitude. Speak to a therapist.
Some of this advice is useful. None of it explains why millions of people seem to be struggling with the same private inadequacy at the same historical moment.
When loneliness becomes widespread, we should ask questions larger than “What is wrong with this person?”
Where are people supposed to gather without paying?
Where can they remain long enough to become known?
Which institutions still place the young beside the old, the married beside the single, the fortunate beside the struggling?
Where can a person contribute before proving that they are impressive, interesting or emotionally optimized?
Therapy can help someone risk connection. It can identify the defenses that keep love at a distance. It can help couples stop demanding impossible forms of emotional labor from one another.
But therapy cannot manufacture a neighborhood.
It cannot become the weekly dinner, the choir, the uncle, the old friend, the parish or the person who notices that your porch light has not come on.
A therapist should be careful not to diagnose the pain of social disappearance as merely a disorder inside the lonely person.
Sometimes the nervous system is not malfunctioning.
Sometimes it is accurately reporting that nobody is there.
Couples Need a World Around Them
Strong couples do not simply turn toward one another. They build a life extending beyond the couple.
They maintain friendships. They accept invitations. They become regulars somewhere. They contribute to institutions that do not revolve around their preferences. They let other people know their children. They create rituals spacious enough to include someone who would otherwise eat alone.
This will not always feel efficient.
Good.
Human beings are not consumer preferences with shoes on.
The relationships that sustain us are often formed through the very conditions modern life has tried to eliminate: repetition, proximity, obligation, interruption and dependence.
Couples need private intimacy. They also need witnesses, mentors, friends, cousins, neighbors and people who can carry a small portion of life when the marriage is tired.
Love does not weaken when surrounded by community.
It can finally breathe.
We Cannot Purchase Our Way Back to One Another
There is nothing wrong with attending the dinner, joining the club or booking the retreat. If a company creates a room in which people truly meet, it has done something worthwhile.
Go.
But do not confuse admission with belonging.
Belonging begins after the event, when somebody reaches out again. It grows when people become useful to one another. It becomes durable when inconvenience is no longer interpreted as evidence that the relationship is defective.
The cure for loneliness will not be a perfect app, a more responsive chatbot or a sufficiently expensive gathering of compatible people.
It will be the slow reconstruction of places where we are known, expected and occasionally needed.
The loneliness economy has identified something real. People are not merely seeking conversation.
They are seeking a social world.
We can keep subscribing to approximations of that world.
Or we can begin rebuilding one.
Why Work with Daniel?
Couples sometimes arrive in therapy believing that one partner has failed to meet every important emotional need.
Sometimes there is genuine neglect. Sometimes the relationship has become narrow, overburdened and isolated. Frequently, both are true.
Effective couples therapy helps partners distinguish between what the marriage genuinely owes them and what no marriage can provide alone. The goal is not emotional self-sufficiency. It is a relationship strong enough to support intimacy—and open enough to exist within a larger human world.
If your marriage has become the only place where either of you expects to feel understood, supported or alive, the problem may be larger than communication.
But it can still be addressed.
Schedule a Free Introductory Call
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