Loneliness is Expensive

Why looks/aura/status/maxxing may not be doing what you think it's doing...

It’s easy to frame modern day loneliness as a personal failure, or a “skill issue.” You can join a book club. Respond to your text messages faster. Follow up with people more. Make an effort. Be more vulnerable. If people have the means, or the access at their fingertips, then they have either failed or opted out of properly building or maintaining those connections.

But I believe that life increasingly rewards or at least appears to reward the opposite of collective dependence. Modern economic and social culture validates us for functioning as a self-contained and self-sustaining unit. Qualities like being professionally competitive, geographically free and flexible, smoothly adaptable, and increasingly owning risk that previously seemed to be distributed over a shared collective, are admired and saved on Pinterest for our 2027 vision boards.

Social media intensifies this perspective by framing you as an ongoing project with a quantifiable and reachable pinnacle. Time and energy are increasingly analyzed and picked apart for opportunity costs. An evening spent helping your neighbor move in psychologically causes friction with the self-help short form Tik-Tok creator whose videos are taking stock in your saved folder. You could be networking, finding a side hustle, working out, revamping your grocery list, going to a Botox consultation. Even when not considering value produced, rest can and is often framed through the lens of productivity as well, seen as choosing discipline over an unplanned change in routine.

This way, hyper-independence isn’t just something that’s just worthy of respect or admirable. It is structurally and economically responsible. And with an economy increasingly circling instability and fragility, inefficiency begins to feel less like willing inconvenience and more like opening yourself up to vulnerability.

Community once functioned as a form of shared infrastructure, collectively reducing daily points of friction in one’s survival. Families traded childcare responsibilities, friends picked each other up from airports, and the exchange of resources between neighbors and peers covered aspects like transportation, meals, housing flexibility, financial advice, and more, all informally. Over time, shifts are slowly causing us to purchase individually what once was carried collectively.

Economist Ronald Coase coined the term “transaction costs” to describe hidden and unlabeled frictions when completing any action or making any decision. Things like gathering information, negotiation, weighing competing factors, and more “hard” factors like transportation, access to tools, etc. Community historically lowered these implicit costs not primarily through labor and material support, but in knowledge as well. Thinking about moving states? A mutual there gives you a firsthand account of all of the neighborhoods and the best fit for you. Touring a new apartment? Running into a tenant on the way out and being warned about the predatory landlord. The sharing of knowledge that otherwise would be (more weakly) supported only through blinded independent research. Strong community doesn’t just provide emotional and social support. It also leads to more efficient decision making.

So, while hyper-independence continues to be framed as efficiency, in the long term, it trends in the opposite direction. Loneliness is expensive, and not just emotionally so.

This doesn’t mean modern culture disvalues relationships entirely. In fact, in certain contexts, it’s the stark opposite. Social capital is extremely prevalent. Building an online audience, networking, professional circles, and strategic interaction are all openly discussed and embraced forms of creating upward mobility. I believe that these relationships, while useful and important, operate differently, and cannot make up for the structural base built through long-term reciprocity. These relationships are prime for opportunity development. What they are less capable of providing is sustained mutual obligation, especially during periods of instability such as illness, unemployment, and external disaster. It’s almost like applying the concept of delayed gratification to local infrastructure. Quick jumps in value are attributed to strategic relationships, while stable, durable dependence is built on unoptimized time.

A reciprocal, dependent connection maintained continuously requires large amounts of unoptimized time. You have to listen to the same anxieties repeatedly, help someone through crises often at no personal advantage, and show up even when emotionally exhausted, prioritizing another person’s instability over your own.

Under conditions of constant economic pressure and emphasis on self-management, these reciprocal inefficiencies become harder to digest psychologically, especially when you have to take the first step. People may still have an intrinsic, intense desire for community but simultaneously be avoidant of the sacrifices said community requires, especially when they seem to threaten your stability.

This may be why life can feel conflictingly hyperconnected but intensely isolating. Social media platforms offer the sensation of social participation while requiring none of the maintenance community does. Algorithms reinforce our anxieties, beliefs, and identities back to us along with flooding our brains with new ways to optimize ourselves. This subtly trains us to become dependent on the platform, instead of in the people around us. It’s our built-in, quick-hit, cheap system for mimicking support, relatability, and mobility.

There is undeniable value in increased access to growth through social media, especially when you consider the democratization of previously siloed information and resources. But attempting to maximize one’s personal development and expending all one’s energy on an endless, relentless self-optimization race weakens the communal systems capable of reducing the very instability and anxiety that has you on the hamster wheel to begin with. Pressure is real, and ambition should be cultivated and fed. But there is something a bit unsettling about how slowly, acts of communal inconvenience seem to be changing from mild chosen friction to irrational, unfounded, and a show of weakness to either ask for or perform.

So, call me if you need a ride from the airport. Or help moving into a new apartment. Or a cup of sugar for your brownie recipe.