The conservative commentator Matt Walsh, in his podcast on 22nd May 2024, highlighted the very modern phenomenon of single and lonely people.
TikTok and other social media outlets are replete with videos made by people, predominately women, who appear to be stumped as to why they are single when there are so many potential partners out in the big wide world. Some believe that their single life is decided by fate and that they are destined to see out their days unloved and alone. It is very difficult to see these videos and not feel for these people; they want to find someone to share their lives with and yet either cannot find ways to meet a potential partner or cannot find a potential partner through the modern methods available to them.
This is a potential crisis for younger people, but it affects people of all ages. The term ‘unpartnered’, which has been coined to distinguish people without a partner rather than people who are in a relationship but are unmarried, has proliferated as the number of people who are alone and in search of companionship has grown steadily for years. US Census data, taken in 1970 and then again in 2012, paints a stark picture: It reveals that in 1970 40% of households were married parents with children under the age of 18, in 2012 that figure had declined to 20%. ‘One-person’ households increased from 17% to 27% in the same period. I have heard anecdotal evidence of people who not only did not have a partner, but some who were reaching the age of 30 and yet had never had a serious relationship.
Why might this be? Why would there be such a sizeable and growing number of people who are unpartnered and apparently unable to build relationships with people that grow into marriage or at least a co-habiting situation?
One feasible explanation is the proliferation of technology. Social media websites have existed for almost as long as the internet, but 2007 was a pivotal year because of the release of the iPhone. While smartphones of a sort had existed before 2007, the iPhone gave people for the first time a powerful computer in their pocket that could browse the internet with the same ease as using a desktop computer. The iPhone revolutionised mobile communications and the way we use them. When this ease of internet use is examined alongside the launch of social media sites like Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, it can be seen that, perhaps unwittingly or possibly not, people were for the first time given the means and the opportunity to grow social networks with a device in their pocket – to make friends and build relationships with people, some of whom that they may have never met and may never meet. It is very difficult to argue that this has been an entirely welcome development.
A friend of mine, who is the same age as me, has described in the past the modern reality of his son, now aged 21, and his social interactions. When my friend and I were 21, we socialised by going to the pub, or the cinema, or the snooker club (although I was never any good at snooker, I was more a billiards man). The only contact which wasn’t face to face between us was via the telephone, as there were no other ways of making contact other than by writing letters. Yet my friend’s son ‘interacts’ with his friends without leaving the house. He contacts them via the vast range of social media and instant messaging apps available and, as far as he is concerned, he is socialising with all of them. Even though to an older generation person like myself, this cannot in any way constitute meaningful socialising, to him it feels like entirely normal behaviour.
In her book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier examines the phenomenon of young women who opt to undergo gender transitioning medical interventions, including double mastectomies and testosterone injections. Part of her examination was the effect that the proliferation of technology like smartphones on young girls and how these devices have given them access not only to social media, but pornography as well, and how access to these had shaped their attitudes and outlooks.
Shrier wrote: “Extensive daily internet use provides casual conversance with every sort of sexual fetish. They [young girls] know what a “furry” is and have seen bondage porn. They’re au fait with the “lesbian” videos so popular on PornHub. The average age at which they first viewed pornography is eleven.“
“In 1994, 74 percent of seventeen-year-old women had had a “special romantic relationship” in the past eighteen months. In 2014, when the Pew Research Center asked seventeen-year-olds whether they had ‘ever dated, hooked up with or otherwise had a romantic relationship with another person’—seemingly a broader category than the earlier one—only 46 percent said yes.”
Shrier has been clear that she believes that the proliferation of social media and the means by which to access it – including smartphones – has led to the decline in relationships and human contact between young girls. This is at least a part of the answer, but the atomisation of communities had been taking place long before the invention of the iPhone and similar smartphones. They may well have accelerated the process, but they didn’t start it. I have written previously on the issues which face people like Generation Z. These young people, a great deal of whom are now adults, are amongst the most medicalised, medicated and traumatised in our society. It should surprise nobody that they are unable to form relationships with people. It should also be of no surprise that Gen Z people are amongst the most anxious in face-to-face social settings.
We have all become different people because of the proliferation of smartphones – people staring into their phone screens rather than socially interacting with each other in the same place and the same time is not exclusively the domain of Gen Z.
The bonds which have bound us all together have been weakening and breaking for decades. Our opportunities and places to meet and greet other people like pubs, clubs and the like are slowly disappearing. Working from home exploded during the Covid period as western governments cack-handedly responded to the pandemic by shutting down workplaces and scattering workers to the four corners of the country, all fully supported by the trade union movement. Dating agencies, which would match prospective partners by their common interests and compatibility, have been replaced by apps on mobile phones where a prospective partner can be dismissed with the swipe of a thumb if they aren’t instantly appealing.
Commentators like Matt Walsh, with their conservative outlook, will point to the declining influence of the church and the institution of marriage as being chief reasons as to why we have a growing and increasingly lonely cross-generation cohort of people. But the ongoing atomisation of our society is the effect that capitalism has on all of us: It calls on us only to do our jobs, go home (if we weren’t working there already) and stay indoors resting until we’re required to go to work again. A walk in any urban area will give us an opportunity to see a pub that has been converted to flats, a closed down nightclub, or a community centre boarded up and abandoned.
With the fibres of our communities largely broken, heading home and watching television is one of the few options still available to us when our work day is over. Until we change the system into one which values human contact, the building of friendships and relationships both through our home and our work lives, then the number of people who are lonely and desperately unhappy will only grow.
The Middle Aged Revolutionary 
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