Who's afraid of loneliness? Everyone. Except those who profit from it

We are alone. We know it. But we’re ashamed to say it. We pretend everything’s fine, that a message, a like, or a missed call is enough to make us feel like we still belong to the world. But the truth is, we’re starving for contact, for meaning, for someone to look us in the eyes without getting distracted by another notification. And while we try to fill the void with scrolling, apps, voice assistants, and dinners for one, there’s someone out there measuring that void, analyzing it, monetizing it. Because where there’s a wound, there’s a business model ready to heal it. And we, scattered pieces of a fragmented society where loneliness is a chronic, systemic, and epidemic experience, have become perfect customers, docile, fragmented, and increasingly dependent on those who sell us companionship in a box. Welcome to the capitalism of absence, where love is an algorithm, friendship a premium service, and connection... an illusion.

Loneliness: an invisible epidemic

Loneliness is a virus that doesn’t spread through saliva, but through silence. According to the World Health Organization, 100 people die every hour worldwide from physical and psychological consequences related to it. It’s like smoking, they say. Like obesity. Except it’s invisible, silent, and too often mistaken for a personal flaw. But beware: what kills is not just being alone, it’s feeling alone. A subtle and cruel difference. The numbers are alarming: in Europe, half the population feels lonely. Among young Europeans, 57% report experiencing moderate to severe loneliness. In the U.S., the majority of adults have admitted to feeling deeply lonely over the past year. And among teenagers, one in five experiences this regularly. It’s not a fleeting emotion. Chronic loneliness directly affects our brain, immune system, and heart. It increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, and dementia. It’s not just an emotional issue, it’s biological, social, and economic. It’s a public health threat. And like every systemic crisis, it creates inequality. It hits the already vulnerable hardest, migrants, the elderly, precarious youth, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and widens the gap between those with access to quality relationships and those left with emotional substitutes, often for a price.

Alone together: the Antisocial Society

Writer Derek Thompson called this era The Antisocial Century, a society where, paradoxically, digital hyperconnection has atomized relationships, collapsing their very structure. Only two categories of relationships remain: intimate ones, rarer and more fragile, and digital ones, lasting only as long as a like or a seen-and-ignored message. Everything in between, like the neighbor’s hello, the barista asking “the usual?”, or the colleague you chatted with during a break, is gone. Evaporated. And with each of those in-between connections, the invisible web that gave meaning to the word community has vanished. Meanwhile, unchecked urbanization, remote work, forced nomadism, and collapsing family ties have done the rest. Families are shrinking, neighborhoods have become dormitories, cities feel like parking lots of solitary humans with earbuds in. The mantra of self-sufficiency has replaced mutual need. We’ve been convinced that relying on others is weakness, that strength lies in isolation, in being whole alone. But that’s a lie sold as a virtue. We are social animals domesticated into individualism. And now, we walk next to each other like strangers, each inside our own bubble, connected to everything except one another.

Loneliness in Italy

In Italy, the phenomenon takes on particularly silent shades. Like everything that hurts us but we’d rather not talk about. According to data collected by UnoBravo, 25% of Italians aged 25 to 34 feel lonely, and the figure rises to 33% among those over 65. It’s a country that’s aging, and aging poorly, often alone. Cities are growing bigger and more impersonal as social ties unravel. Small families, precarious relationships, unstable jobs, and a non-existent relational welfare system. In a recent survey, over 40% of Italians under 30 reported feeling abandoned. What’s lacking isn’t just opportunities, but also places to connect. The pandemic accelerated the trend, but the groundwork was already laid: we confused independence with loneliness, efficiency with isolation. And the system doesn’t help. As discomfort grows, the state lags behind. There is no national strategy against loneliness. Yet the health, psychological, and economic consequences are evident: increased use of psychiatric drugs, social media addiction, rising dependencies. In this context, the only tangible response comes once again from the market: dating apps, Italian chatbots, digital psychological support platforms. A mini-boom of services doing what institutions no longer seem able to do, listen.

Loneliness and capital: monetizing the need for connection

Desperation has value. Feelings become data, data becomes insight, and insights turn into products.In a world that’s learned to turn every lack into consumption, loneliness has become a gold mine. The loneliness market is estimated to be worth over $500 billion. It expands in every direction: dating apps (expected to hit $17 billion by 2030), chatbots and virtual friends ($140 billion), mental health platforms (over $20 billion projected by 2033), pets and related services (over $400 billion). Not to mention social robots, digital therapy, hyperconnected assisted living, group courses, and packaged “soul tourism” experiences. Every solution is sold as relief, but is often just a pause in the pain. And behind every subscription, every chat with an empathetic AI, lies one core idea: no one really wants you, but we can sell you the illusion that someone does. Loneliness is transformed from wound into growth opportunity, for revenue.

Loneliness as a (subscription-based) service

Meanwhile, companies innovate. Some startups offer dinners among strangers, relational cooking classes, coworking with community-building. Apps like Bumble BFF facilitate platonic meetups. Character.ai, with a $150 million investment, lets you chat with any character. Replika lets its 35+ million users create a virtual companion. Social robots like ElliQor Celia keep the elderly company. Timeleft organizes dinners with strangers in 62 countries. Groundfloor in California offers social events for $200 a month. Rent-A-Friend finds you a paid human companion. At the same time, digital mental health platforms like BetterHelp provide access to over 28,000 therapists in more than 200 countries. You pay a subscription, and feel less alone. Or at least appear to. Everything is offered as a temporary solution to a permanent problem. What’s most unsettling is the growing dependence on simulated relationships. Users form real emotional bonds with fictitious entities. Some even claim to have romantic relationships with chatbots. In Japan and the U.S., the phenomenon has taken on cultural proportions. Technology promises companionship. But it doesn’t teach us how to be with others. At best, it numbs the pain.

The cost of loneliness

Capital invests where there’s scarcity. And loneliness is the greatest scarcity of our time. Modern society has destroyed social ties and replaced them with scalable services. The companies thriving in this context, from chatbots to rent-a-friend services, from mental health platforms to digital communities, aren’t free. Inclusion is a privilege for those who can afford it. Meanwhile, the emotional divide widens: between those who can afford an app that listens and those who talk to walls. Between those who can live in central co-living spaces and those left isolated in the outskirts. Loneliness is not democratic. Like every capitalist product, it is distributed unequally, and it causes pain. But loneliness is not just a personal drama. It’s a collective emergency. It has a social and economic cost. According to the Center for BrainHealth, loneliness-related absenteeism alone costs the U.S. $460 billion per year. And that’s not all. Lonely people get sicker, recover slower, work worse, study less, and live shorter lives. Families fall apart, communities empty out, social services become overwhelmed. It’s a spiral. If not stopped, it consumes everything.

Loneliness is political

Precarity, individualism, fragmented urbanization, aggressive digitalization, these are not accidents. They are strategies. And now that relational pain is endemic, the market has no interest in healing it. It manages it. Sells it. Renews it by subscription. The more we rely on synthetic relationships, the less we can handle real ones. The more we get used to empathetic chatbots, the less we tolerate others’ unpredictability, the boredom of presence, the effort of empathy. It’s an emotional misalignment. And it’s not just ethical, it’s political. Because those who are alone pay for everything: health, time, meaning. While someone else profits. But we won’t save ourselves alone. We can’t, even if we wanted to. Loneliness is the rotten fruit of a system that convinced us that independence is everything, vulnerability is weakness, and human connection is optional. But it’s not. It’s the air we breathe. The truth is: humans need other humans not to fall apart. And in a world that isolates us, rebuilding connection becomes a revolutionary act. So the final question is: Do we really want to entrust our emotions to an algorithm? Do we want our hunger for love to become someone else’s profit? Or do we want to look each other in the eyes again, to build places, times, policies, and relationships that make sure we’re never alone again? Because, in the end, even loneliness is a political choice. And if we don’t make it, we suffer it.