When you look at modern life, it is easy to see loneliness as a purely personal issue. We tend to view it as a matter of individual bad luck, changing social habits, or the breakdown of the traditional family.
For many people, those changes are very real. You might see a neighbourhood where people no longer talk to each other, local clubs closing down, people live in giant apartment blocks without ever talking to people in the next apartment, or people glued to their screens.
Recently, researchers started calling Millennials and Gen Z the “lonely generations” — even more so than elderly people — with some surveys showing a third or more of 28-38 year olds are often or always lonely compared to a quarter of over 65 year olds. Being lonely has real, material impacts on your health, both mental health and physical health. Doctors groups are calling loneliness a public health issue that leads to “higher risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, anxiety, depression, memory issues and even death”.
Naturally, when political parties like One Nation or Reform UK point to cultural decay, rapid social change, or distant elites, that explanation feels like it matches what you see every day.
Understanding how economic systems shape your daily life and creates loneliness reveals that the way our economy is structured actively drives people apart. This happens not because of a grand conspiracy, but because of how market incentives work.
The modern capitalist economy requires that an isolated individual must buy what a community used to share. People are exhausted by the constant, grinding struggle for basic dignity, paying the rent, managing the cost of living. This exhaustion leads to a personal crisis of powerlessness, loneliness, anger and especially fear — fear of falling into the underclass where the safety-net is utterly broken.
Fifty years ago, social life revolved around free or low-cost shared spaces: local community halls, active workingmen’s clubs, suburban sports grounds, public parks, and neighbourhood centres. Even when I was a kid in the 1980s and 90s, there were scores of places for people to gather together without needing to buy something — parks and ovals, public swimming pools, libraries, club-rooms. These were places, facilities, streets that allowed social interaction, community building and mutual support — simple unassuming places where people “hung out”. Friends and society provided a safety net, and this collective interaction created civic pride, mutual trust and a sense of togetherness within a place.
Over recent decades however, governments of all stripes and at all levels have cut public spending and sold off public assets. They did this partly because of neoliberal ideology and partly because of the coercion of the markets (e.g. the bond vigilantes).
As a result of this austerity, the free or low-cost gathering places disappeared or were commercialised. New housing developments and apartments are designed around the extraction of wealth rather than human interaction. When a local community or church hall is sold to a private developer or a local pub becomes an expensive boutique gastro-pub, the place where you used to be able to sit, meet friends and talk without spending money is taken away. Social infrastructure is privatised.
If you want to spend time with others today, you almost always have to pay for it. Museums, churches, art galleries, cafes and pubs, social clubs and sports grounds have all closed or installed high cost paywalls. For anyone living on a fixed income, a pension, or tight wages, those costs add up quickly, forcing people to stay home. This has been called a “third places desert“.
Lack of social infrastructure exacerbates the wide range of social ills that are widely reported today — crime, drug and alcohol addiction, destructive gambling, misogyny and family violence, political polarisation.
How housing is treated also worsens loneliness. Housing was once primarily shelter and a foundation for local community — especially through communally designed public housing. But over the past 30 years it has been transformed by the big banks, financial elites and property developers into a financial asset and an investment vehicle.
Rising housing costs and the decline of long-term secure rentals mean people are forced to move more often — often yearly — chasing affordable rent or work. When people and families move every year or two, they cannot build deep, decades-long roots with their neighbours. Neighbourhoods become places where people merely sleep, rather than connected communities where everyone knows the person next door or in the nearby apartment.
To keep up with the rising cost of living, and extreme rents, people are forced to work longer hours, take on second jobs, or manage unpredictable rosters. When you finish a 50-hour workweek or rotate through irregular and unpredictable shifts, you are unlikely to have the physical or mental energy to organise — or even attend — a community event, volunteer, or visit a friend.
Exhaustion is a major driver of social isolation. A 2016 study of truck drivers found that “work strains create a chronic state of transience and social isolation and are consequently linked to weak professional and community support systems, as well as substance misuse”. This sounds obvious for a truck driver, but it applies to medical workers doing long shifts at a hospital, professionals who primarily work from home and only interact via video calls, and labourers whose “hard graft” causes their bodies to physically collapse at the end of a working day.
Work-caused exhaustion and loneliness is not just a product of local, domestic and national economic forces. It comes from globalised competitive austerity, lean production networks, just-in-time logistics chains that is an essential part of neoliberal capitalism. The relentless pressure of globalisation forces states to implement austerity, wage suppression, public service cuts, deregulation, which ratchets up the isolation, exhaustion, anger and fear, and loneliness. The global pressure consumes the physical energy of people that is needed to form and maintain friendships and take part in local civic life.
Healthy relationships require time, trust and the emotional bandwidth to resolve conflict and tough times. The strain caused by the precarious work, long hours doing multiple jobs directly reduces the time necessary to create, foster and navigate relationships.
Meanwhile, the capitalist system and billionaires benefit from your isolation.
This may sound strange, but lonely people are mostly more profitable than connected people.
When there is a social and civic safety net, and institutions and groups of people in a community, there is no profit. If you need a tool, you can borrow one, if you need someone to walk your dog or look after your kids or elderly parent, a friend, family-member or neighbour volunteers to do it. There is no commerce in these relationships.
When mutual aid, real-world community networks and neighbourhood trust are eroded or destroyed, isolated individuals are forced to turn to private contractors, commercial apps, and fee-charging services to get things they previously could have got from their community for free.
You cannot borrow a mower or a ladder. You must buy your own. You cannot rely on a neighbour for child care or elder care. You pay a commercial nanny or aged-care worker employed by a multinational corporation.
Millions of consumers are created who must each purchase their own goods and services rather than sharing resources and time within a group. The society and mutual aid that operated outside the market is absorbed into the capitalist system of profit and extraction. It further forces people into dependency on wages and then creates the fear of unemployment.
A really significant and dangerous consequence of this is how transnational digital platforms have captured this isolation and loneliness and created the attention/outrage economy.
Physical community spaces increasingly are gone or privatised, so the 2010s saw the massive rise of online communal spaces. Sites like Reddit, Tumblr and countless forums proliferated, creating and nurturing thousands of sub cultures and communities that no longer needed to meet in physical space.
But the underlying economics of these platforms is ultimately hostile to free, unmonetised communal spaces. Through the 2010s the social media platforms were bought up and enshittified by the massive tech companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok.
These platforms ultimately do not make money through your free community and mutual aid. They make money by selling your attention to advertisers by inventing false needs. AI companies create fake, artificial friends for a monthly subscription. This endless consumerism and consumption temporarily but unsatisfyingly pacifies people, but worsens the underlying problems.
Algorithms were created to stop showing you updates from your friends, family or communities and instead create addictive compulsions through constantly showing you content that provoked fear, outrage, and suspicion. While you’re addicted to the endless scrolling, being fed content that makes you angry at your neighbour or fearful of migrants, your isolation is monetised by the platform. Your attention is fragmented at frightening speed.
The recent upsurge in “neo Luddites” — a movement resisting the intense dominance of technology, smartphones and digital platforms over our lives — is a small spark of hope, albeit still largely isolated and atomised, but organising. To-date, these groups have primarily sprung up in cities with a strong civil society, amongst people who have significant cultural capital — places like New York City, or amongst tertiary educated Gen Z. But there is also a growing, widespread community reaction against the construction of massive data-centres — a related but distinct movement.
Nonetheless, when you are isolated, exhausted, watching your local suburb change for the worse, and stuck in endless doomscrolling you likely feel a deep and justified sense that something has been taken from you.
Right-wing politicians and groups have recognised this anger and are weaponising it. And the evidence is that loneliness “often drives people to find solace in marginal political movements” — for example, “nearly one in ten (9%) of Pauline Hanson’s followers report being lonely ‘always’ compared to around 2% for followers of each of the other parties.”
Rather than pointing to the economic system that has destroyed local communities — the privatisations, cuts to services, corporate deregulation — far-right politicians try to redirect your anger toward marginalised scapegoats. They tell you that your loneliness, exhaustion and loss of community are the fault of migrants, progressive ideas, or other minority groups.
This narrative protects big business, financial institutions and billionaires from being held accountable for strip-mining public assets and driving up the cost-of-living. It turns neighbourhoods, communities and workers against each other. Instead of recognising that everyone is being hurt by the housing crisis or wage stagnation, people blame each other.
This divide-and-rule approach is hardly new.
The economic elites of every era have used the same tactics to entrench their power by trying to convince the majority that they are their own enemies. If you’re angry at your neighbour, you’ll never form mutual bonds and share resources — locking you in as a consumer where wealth can be extracted from you by a massive corporation.
Perhaps a distinct feature of today’s far-right is its relative atomisation, isolation and lack of its own organic communities. In times past, conservative, right-wing forces had their own social institutions: churches, men and women’s associations, small business chambers and churches. But today, these are largely also in decline.
A common sense approach to challenge the loneliness epidemic, as I wrote back in 2019, is bigger, stronger unions.
Historically, unions were at the centre of a network of civic and social institutions. Union members, for example, are less isolated, less precariously employed, less stressed, and are happier and have greater life-satisfaction. They also have higher average wages. Unions allow people to engage in politics and economic decisions through a collective, rather than via temporary, individual, low-commitment social media outrage cycles that leave corporate and billionaire power untouched. Engaged, active members within unions strengthen the institutions themselves from the integration of union structures into state managerial structures.
Anyone concerned about the toxic impact of loneliness, declining trust, eroding civil society and worsening political polarisation should support unions.
Ultimately, loneliness is not a personal failing. It is the manufactured result of capitalism, a system that prioritises extraction of profits over humanness. Rebuilding physical, real-world connections — through collective institutions like unions — is the first step toward tackling loneliness.
As a post-script: when I talked about this issue with a few people, I was asked whether I thought that corporations or executives actually sat down and decided to purposely make people lonely in order to profit.
The answer to that is: yes and no.
In 2025 Mark Zuckerberg said in interviews that he views his Facebook-integrated artificial intelligence chatbot as a solution to the loneliness epidemic. This is the same CEO of the same company that created the loneliness machine of Facebook and Instagram — with company whistle-blowers appearing regularly to reveal that the corporate executives knew that their platforms were linked to “increased loneliness, worse body image, and negative mood or affect”. To create the problem they knew they’d created, executives must have sat down to plan how they could also create the solution — a solution that of course does not involve changing Facebook or Instagram to not cause depression or loneliness.
However, I am not saying that there is a cabal of capitalists with monocles and top-hats planning on how to make us lonely in order to sell us premium subscriptions to Tinder or AI-girlfriends.
My point is that capitalism as an economic and social system, by the way that it seeks to extend market logic into every part of our lives, even the most essential parts required for human life — cooking, socialising, sex, friendship — has the consequence of making us more lonely.