I have met quite a few influencers over the years and, to be frank, they’ve mostly been a strange bunch. I remember meeting one at a party a while ago, she was running around (literally) with a phone and a bunch of cables. “I don’t have data!” she screamed. “Oh hello?” I said, confused. “And I need a plug!” she declared. And then she screamed again, and promptly attached her phone to the nearest plug socket, which was stationed by her ankle. There she sat, hunched on the floor, gripping the phone and tapping it furiously.
I am only talking about my experiences here, and my sample may be wildly unrepresentative, but I have noticed patterns: they come across as twitchy and manic; they don’t make eye contact; and they seem to struggle to maintain the kind of extended volley of question-and-answer responses, shared anecdotes, or jokes, that a normal conversation requires. They basically radiate social anxiety.
So I was interested to read about the “loneliness influencers” who broadcast tales of their friendless young lives to attract a following online. They make vlogs detailing their cosy Friday nights spent alone, at home, in vibrant aspirational cities like New York – the kind of place one chooses to live mostly for the social life on offer.
A caption on a typical vlog might read: “POV you’re a childfree and single girl who lives alone, so this is how you spend your Friday night.” The video shows some version of a young woman coming home to an empty, spotless apartment with bland, generic furnishings, devoid of personal effects. She eats a healthy dinner, drinks coke out of a wine glass (to spruce things up) and then she dons a dressing gown, ready to embark on cosy pursuits such as rewatching TV shows, reading comforting mass-market fiction, running a bubble bath and so forth. Her day usually ends with a few self-care rituals (always the primacy of the self), a hot chocolate and a nice early bedtime.
It’s probably obvious that I find these vlogs depressing. It’s not the “spending time alone” part that gets me, or even the “friendlessness”. After all, a well-adjusted person should be able to spend an evening happily in their own company fairly regularly. I would argue, too, that being friendless, for a little while, is not the exotic state these videos suggest it is. It’s normal for young people to move to a new city to study, or for work, and not really know anyone. I had this experience myself when I first moved to Manchester and then London. I would be surprised were it never to happen to me again. Major life changes, such as becoming sober, having a baby, or breaking up, can shrink your social circle or cull it entirely. You could even wake up one morning, look around at your existing friends, and think: these people are not good for me.
None of this is unusual. Still, one response to finding yourself friendless is to assume this indicates a personality flaw which makes you particularly and uniquely ill-suited to the company of other people, and to retreat into the comfort of weighted blankets and dressing gowns and dogmatically followed self-care rituals. You could even record yourself for content.
But you could also go out by yourself to a cafe or a bar and talk to strangers, join a football team, a running club or a church. You could even, God forbid, jettison Wednesday’s plan for “hot chocolate and self-care” and spend an evening volunteering at a food bank or a homeless shelter. And if you want to be alone, you could take a difficult novel out to a bar, and sit reading it with a notebook to write down interesting sentences, start learning a language, or learn to sew.
It’s strange to regard a relatively empty social life as a permanent, inalterable negative state, to be retreated into and luxuriated in. Today’s young people, who spend so much of their lives on Zoom calls and Slack chats, need no further encouragement to shut themselves off from the world.
So yes, what bothers me about all this isn’t the promotion of “friendlessness” or the broadcasting of loneliness. It’s the idea that our response to these states should be so cosy and defeatist. While watching these loneliness influencers, what really struck me, though, is that their content doesn’t look like a new trend at all.
A few years ago, I described the dominant aesthetic of mainstream influencers as one characterised by bland, secluded, cosiness. You never really see their friends. They mostly stay in. They appear to inhabit intentionally bland environments, carpeted in grey and upholstered in beige; they wear bland clothes, they read bland books, they rewatch bland TV shows. Their content has always displayed a kind of baroque emptiness.
What makes a person want to become an influencer? You might say they like attention or are pursuing fame. But I have come to think that the idea of operating in a gamified social environment which can theoretically be managed from one’s bedroom is a large part of the appeal.
But the rest of us needn’t follow suit. POV: you’re a childfree and single girl who lives alone, so this is how you spend your Friday night: take yourself to a bar with a book and challenge yourself to talk to at least one stranger. Because this is your one life on this Earth, and whatever else happens, you will never experience this specific Friday night ever again.
