There is a new type of influencer circulating on TikTok and Instagram: the loneliness influencer. Most of these influencers are young women, and “loneliness” may be a slight misnomer. They claim that they do not feel alone, simply alone: without friends, without family, without children. And they prefer it that way.
“I really wanted to convey the normal life of someone who doesn’t have this big, cool, fun social life,” one influencer, Lana Isa, told Vox. “For example, what’s life like for someone who doesn’t really have this big social life, who isn’t really interested in dating and generally prefers to spend the night at home? If you saw a Friday night in my life, you’d basically see a girl enjoying her peace.”
However, Isa and influencers like her are just one representation of a broader trend. Faith Hill of The Atlantic, who recently wrote an article titled “The Strange Appeal of the Lonely Influencer,” said Today, explained Co-host Noel King said that while you most often hear about young men facing an epidemic of loneliness, women are also going through tough times.
“If you really look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on many of these measures and, in some cases, more so than young men,” Hill said.
Hill spoke to Noel about what’s happening with young women, how their crisis is different from men’s, and why they’re getting different coverage.
Below is an excerpt from their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full podcast, so give it a listen Today, explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
In the first half of the show, we talk to a young woman who has made a name for herself as a loneliness influencer. What do you think is happening here?
My first impulse when I heard about this genre of videos that people watch is that there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time alone.
We’ve heard a lot of people talk about the loneliness epidemic, so I thought people were getting a social connection through these videos from a safe distance, rather than spending time in person with people. Maybe something like that is happening. But I also noticed, as I watched these videos and read all the comments, that many of the people commenting seemed to have a lot going on in their lives socially, so much so that they were busy, exhausted, and burned out.
For some people, the appeal was actually in the fantasy, in the way that some people would look at influencers posting about these fabulous, exotic vacations that they can’t afford to take. People have a very complicated relationship with loneliness. People work long hours. many people [are] take care of family members without much help. Many people feel torn between these needs for social connection and loneliness.
Does that mean maybe this isn’t as sad as it seems?
I don’t think everything is sad. My heart goes out to people who need more solitude, as well as more social connection. Most people probably don’t have perfect balance and I can relate to that myself. I feel like I have too many plans or not enough.
It’s not necessarily all happiness, but that doesn’t mean there are so many people who only get social connection through these videos. I think there’s something a little more complicated going on.
We’ve all heard about the male loneliness crisis. you wrote a very interesting piece Having said this basically, in reality women are also in crisis.
I have heard a lot about men, and especially young men, who are in crisis. I think there are many reasons why we should take this seriously, and I do. But I felt like in those conversations, young women were being squashed into a point of comparison where, instead of people talking about how, on some measures, young men are struggling more than before, it got twisted into “young men are struggling more than women.”
There’s this image of the successful boss, the one who goes to college, graduates, enters the workforce with these conventional measures of success, and does so well. But if you really look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on many of these measures and, in some cases, more so than young men. So I don’t think it has to be a competition that suffers, but I did think that part of the story wasn’t coming together.
How do women fight?
Women have long reported depression and anxiety at higher rates than men. That’s getting worse. It appears that mental health across many different measures (different types of stress, distress, and suicidality) is being reported by young women at increasingly higher rates. It turns out that, on average, women attempt suicide at a higher rate than men. And the reason more men die by suicide is because they are more likely to use lethal means like firearms.
Many times this conversation really revolves around college attendance rates, and women attend and graduate from college at higher rates than men. But a woman with a bachelor’s degree still earns on average less than a man with a bachelor’s degree, even within the same field of study.
When I talked to people for this story, researchers and therapists, I heard that many young women are in for a rude awakening when they graduate from school. They’ve been in this bubble where they felt like they could grow and prosper and they were taken seriously. And then you go out into the real world, where sexism is still very real, and many women work in workplaces where they realize that they aren’t taken as seriously, or that the people around them who are in positions of power are all men. That is a difficult understanding.
Why, if both men and women are in crisis, did men focus the attention?
Women, as a general population, tend to be fairly high functioning in this narrative. I spoke to someone who had trained as a medical sociologist and he told me that a saying they used in this field was: “Men are faster, but women are sicker.”
Women are more likely to suffer from many chronic illnesses and carry on with their pain without anyone noticing. And we may not take it that seriously, because the idea that women are fighting back is not necessarily new or very surprising to many people. I think men going through tough times is more of a news story, and maybe we’ve become a little inert to women’s distress in this way.
I wonder, if you find yourself covering this, where do you find hope here?
I’m encouraged that we’re talking about [young adults] a lot. There’s been a lot of concern about Generation Z lately, and a lot of what we talk about when we talk about young men struggling also applies to young women, so we’re onto some of the right things.
A while ago I wrote another article about youth that was actually about the idea that youth is actually a very difficult phase of development. And when I published that article, I think it came as a surprise to many readers that young adults were also struggling. Even since I wrote this, people have been talking more about young adults struggling. So I think people are starting to take this seriously and understand that this is an age group that could use help.