‘My loneliness is aspirational’: The people embracing having no friends
‘My loneliness is aspirational’: The people embracing having no friends LA Robinson Tue, 23 June 2026 at 12:09 pm UTC 8 min read Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google.
‘One woman told me it was like peace-and-quiet porn,’ says Sarah-Jane Hoadley, who creates content from her home in Windsor – Matt Writtle When I first moved to London from Canada four years ago, I spent a lot of time alone. Seeing groups of friends laughing over picky bits in the park or pints in the pub would send pangs of yearning through my gut. Pining after friends? Few things make you feel like more of a big fat loser.
So perhaps my younger self would have found solace in the latest social media trend of boldly announcing you have absolutely no mates. “Friday night alone as a happy and content introvert,” says the caption on a video by 24-year-old Canadian influencer Lana Isa (@lanasololife), who is credited with starting the trend.
These influencers say they want to challenge the idea that being alone means being lonely, and their comments sections are awash with hundreds of people sharing their own stories of isolation. It tracks, seeing as nearly a quarter of the British public says they feel lonely “often”, according to the Office for National Statistics .
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The creators in this niche are mostly women who come home to sparklingly clean flats, slide their Marks & Spencer frozen pizzas into the oven before “washing the day’s germs off” in the shower, then snuggling up in front of the TV with their dinner. Every move is considered and slow, like a wholesome version of Patrick Bateman’s skincare regimen in the opening scene of American Psycho.
“One woman told me it was like peace-and-quiet porn,” says Sarah-Jane Hoadley, a content creator from Windsor who started posting on social media under the name @dramafreediaries in January and has since amassed more than 68 million views.
Hoadley is in her 40s, single and works as a cleaner while documenting her day-to-day life living alone, relishing her freedom in her pleasant-yet-tiny 350sq-ft bedsit. She says her cosy content resonates with a wide range of people, mostly women – from those “whose kids have gone away to university and [who] are at home for the first time by themselves”, to “women who have been divorced or moved for a job” and “younger people who have just moved away for the first time”.
“The biggest criticism I get is that it’s performative,” says Hoadley. “Of course it is. I come home, then I set up the camera, I walk back out, and then I pretend I’m coming home for the first time.” But Hoadley says she does it to make others feel less alone. “People are so used to that horrible, icky feeling of comparison on social media , of feeling that your life doesn’t look like everyone else’s. I think it’s quite affirming to see someone else who’s living the same life as you. It’s achievable aspiration.”
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement But some of the videos in the loneliness niche go beyond stripping the social embarrassment and shame of having no friends; many are accompanied by pensive piano music. It’s difficult to discern whether the content is meant to be empowering or melancholy.
‘Of course it’s performative,’ says Hoadley. ‘I come home, then I set up the camera, I walk back out, and then I pretend I’m coming home for the first time’ – Matt Writtle “Become your own best friend before becoming anyone else’s,” says TikToker Tess Lavanda (@tess.lavanda) in one of her recent videos. The 22-year-old recently moved to London and is challenging herself to get comfortable doing things alone, such as celebrating her birthday or going on a night out. No doubt there’s wisdom in this – being at peace with yourself surely makes you a better friend – but there is the risk that living life solo for too long leaves you permanently introverted, comfortable in the belief that being alone is safer than risking rejection. Indeed, in one of her most popular videos (which has had more than 330,000 views) Lavanda says: “Deep down, I don’t think I even want friends.”
Hoadley knows the feeling; she recently posted a video where she forced herself to go to a party. The caption reads: “[I realised] I don’t stay in because I love it. I stay in because it’s safe.”
Prof Andrea Wigfield is the head of the Centre for Loneliness Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, and acknowledges it is “fine” to be alone sometimes. “People do enjoy solitude,” she says. “But social connection is in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs [a widely cited psychological theory of human motivation]. I talk about loneliness as being similar to being thirsty or being hungry; it’s a signal that you need to connect with other people.
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement “What I wouldn’t want us to be doing as a society is to promote the idea that actually being alone without social connection for large parts of our life is a positive thing, because it’s not.” Such an existence, Wigfield says, is linked to depression, anxiety, lack of sleep, cardiovascular disease and an increased risk of dementia in later life. ” Chronically lonely people can live 15 years less [than those who are not],” she says.
But experts acknowledge that living in social groups is stressful. A theory, developed by Robin Dunbar, author and professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, posits that an individual can only retain 150 meaningful social relationships at a time, something that has been dubbed “Dunbar’s Number” in popular psychology.
Dunbar himself calls the stress of participating in social life the London Commuter Problem. “On the Underground at rush hour, people aren’t necessarily meaning to trample on your feet, but they do,” he says. “It’s simply because it’s crowded. There’s pressure to reduce the number of people around you if it’s very intense. I think that’s what creates this sense of needing a quiet space.”
And most people can relate – if you’re part of a big social group, chances are not everyone will be your cup of tea, or you’ll rub another person up the wrong way. There are entire reality TV series dedicated to the drama: Love Island , Big Brother , Real Housewives , Geordie Shore , The Only Way is Essex … you get the idea.
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement And friendship takes real work; people are fallible. “A large part of having a friend is being inconvenienced,” says Pierce Sebastian, 30, who lives in London. When he posted a TikTok video last month about friendlessness from the male perspective – how he’d never been “one of the boys” – it was watched nearly one million times. “It’s not something men usually speak about,” he tells me. “A lot of male friendships are centred around not questioning things and just having a laugh. If you’re someone who is more intuitive, you can get excluded.”
Pierce Sebastian: ‘A lot of people are still afraid of making a real step toward connection’ – Rii Schroer Sebastian says he struggled with fitting into big groups because he wanted deeper connections. “The male loneliness epidemic, or whatever people want to call it, is really just men having to deal with the repercussions of not working on their friendships. A lot of guys don’t know how to ask their friend if they’re OK, and actually mean it.”
And it goes beyond lad culture. Thanks to Covid, and the disruption to school and university life, a lot of young people missed out on key stages of social development . It’s the great irony of this generation that they’re more connected than ever online, yet feel the most isolated – as underscored by a 2025 World Health Organisation report that found the loneliest demographic to be young people between the ages of 13 and 29.
Wigfield says research she is conducting now at Sheffield Hallam University has found that students in university halls of residence even “lack… the confidence” to use the communal areas to cook meals, so, instead, wait for the kitchen to be empty before going in.
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement It all adds up to a captive audience for the new “loneliness influencers”, as writer Rachel Pick coined them in a recent article for The Cut website. And though this digital connection may provide temporary respite from the ache of loneliness, it’s no match for in-person relationships. Wigfield affirms: “The main remedy for loneliness is meaningful connection. You can have that online, but it’s more likely to happen face to face.”
There may be a long way to go before these audiences are ready to socialise, however. Sebastian was shocked recently by the reluctance among his followers to engage with him in real time: his viral video may have been watched over 800,000 times, but when he hosted an online video meetup , just one person showed. “A lot of people are still afraid of making a real step toward connection. They’re quite comfortable with passive consumption,” he says.
Wigfield acknowledges that making friends is hard. “I can understand entirely that some people might say all this friendship lark is just too difficult. That’s fine for a short-term solution, but often we have to do things that aren’t easy, because they bring more value [to your life].”
Even loneliness influencers themselves admit they don’t want to live in isolation forever. The end goal, as Hoadley says, is “to make a circle of friends at some point. But it’s about quality over quantity.” So, perhaps followers will watch as Lavanda finds like-minded people in London, Sebastian finds a group of friends who are willing to do the work and Hoadley makes connections in Windsor.
Because, as the academic Dunbar so eloquently surmises, “It doesn’t do you any harm to have a bit of a chill out now and again. But, for God’s sake, don’t keep doing it.”
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