Young and Lonely: The Thriving Economy of Loneliness Aesthetics
This feature is part of a series on third spaces and their evolving role in urban communities
A recent advertisement on Instagram went viral for offering ‘Rent a Garba Partner’, with a tagline that says “This Navratri, don’t dance alone.” The service is three-tiered - namely silver, gold, and platinum - with the variety of services upgrading with each tier. In the Gold tier, your rented garba partner will provide a “cute backstory on how we met” even.
Regardless of whether the Instagram post was a prank or not, a query went live on an Agra subreddit thread soon after, asking if similar services such as the “Post On IG About Dandiya Partner On Rent” are available in Agra too. Another redditor commented that “If you are male sorry forget a partner and if you are girl just put it you will have many “. The women, too, find it hard, regardless of what the redditor claims. They say it is harder to find men who are secure enough to consider them as an equal. “A woman with an opinion absolutely is a big no for most of the men. So even if a woman finds a partner to just go out, she might still continue to feel lonely and conscious about herself,” says Chandana, a millennial residing in Vizag.
These apprehensions are of a reality many acknowledge: India's young population is finding themselves lonely and isolated, and the case is not altogether different in other countries either.
Even with increased social mobility, communication technologies that can make distance and time differences irrelevant, when researchers at Washington University in St. Louis actually measured loneliness across eight countries - India, Brazil, Turkey, Nigeria, the US and others - they found that loneliness fell steadily with age, from nearly one in two adults aged 18–24 to about one in three of those over 55.
It would be a mistake to assume India's generational fault lines run exactly like the West's. Even "Gen Z" or "Millennial" as categories don't map cleanly onto the same social realities across country, class, caste and gender. But a lot of contributing factors to what many call urban loneliness - mental health issues, economic anxieties, post-pandemic realities, unemployment, and increasing instability in regional and global politics - are shared in varying degrees.
In India, researchers who've gone looking for hard evidence of exactly how bad it is among young, non-elderly Indians have mostly found silence. A 2025 scoping review in the journal Discover Mental Health could locate only nine usable studies on loneliness and social isolation in the country, and every single one was about the elderly.
Loneliness Economy
As a developing country, Indian youth exist in a paradox of loneliness amid hyper-connectivity. Friendships that once survived disagreements over cricket or films are increasingly not surviving disagreements over harder topics - religion, patriotism, genocide - a pattern familiar enough to anyone who has quietly muted a college WhatsApp group over the last few years.
This isn't unique to India. New research from the Institute for Public Policy Research found that the number of young people in England with no close friends at all has risen fivefold since 2014, now standing at one in 20 - alongside a growing share who say they're simply unhappy with the friends they do have.
Meanwhile, the market adapts quietly around the economy of having a vast number of newly employed demographics who can buy things - if not people. More internet, more services, and more and more consumption to fill the gap. AI agents that market themselves to help you be less lonely.
It's a neat trick, when you notice it: our low-effort informal hangouts - third spaces- are what's disappearing, and increasingly what's being sold back to us instead is pay-per-use. The same economy that rents out companionship for an evening is, elsewhere, renting out people's actual time and bodies to AI systems that need human hands in the physical world. Increasingly, it looks like the loneliness economy and the gig economy are the same economy, just worn by different people.
At the height of the pandemic isolation, precisely when people were cut off from in-person connection and leaning hardest on digital platforms to feel seen, came a trend that aestheticised loneliness: Main Character Energy.
The term took off on TikTok around 2020 and 2021 in Western countries first, when social media content creators began filming ordinary moments like a coffee run, an evening walk or a quiet afternoon at home and it became a trend.
But over the years, the algorithm has been rewarding the performance as a substitute for connection. Search terms like solomaxxing or loneliness influencer or no friends aesthetic today, and hundreds of videos surface - many from teenagers and young adults narrating, sometimes performing, what life looks like without friends.
Another trend worth mentioning is looksmaxxing - the increasingly elaborate, sometimes surgical pursuit of appearance "optimisation", which men - or rather teenage boys - believe will increase their appeal while trying to find a romantic partner.
With its roots in online incel (involuntarily celibate) forums that consider misogynistic influencers such as Andrew Tate as their role model, it provides a space to misdirect their loneliness angst to holding women and feminism accountable for it.
The escalation from loneliness or isolation - whatever be the reason for it - to misogyny or similar regressive moralities is not unpredictable - because both are fuelled by similar social realities. It is also what makes our youth susceptible to populist politics.
“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience …,” writes author Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
Cut off from the third spaces that might once have absorbed our young people into friendships and camaraderie, they are instead being absorbed into something with a much angrier story to tell about why they're alone.
What do Irani cafes have to do with keeping democracy alive?
A 2021 study of British pub closures by Diane Bolet found that losing a community's third space doesn't just produce isolation. In the United Kingdom, the closure of community pubs led to a rise in support for the United Kingdom Independence Party, a right-wing to far-right populist political party. One additional pub closure, relative to a district's total, raised an individual's likelihood of supporting the UK's radical-right party by over four percentage points. Bolet traces the lineage further back, too — community pubs, in her account, had themselves stepped in to replace the trade unions and working men's clubs that once did the job of building workers' solidarity. Every time that kind of institution disappears, in other words, the isolation it leaves behind doesn't start from zero. It starts from whatever the last one left.
Kali Siddharth Madepalli, a communication coach in Hyderabad, is careful not to overclaim the link. "Quantitatively, it would be hard for me to make this correlation," she says, "but qualitatively I can sort of see it."
The pattern she notices in conservative thinking isn't any single belief but "a complete dependence on a few sets of axioms and no movement or flexibility in them," whether the subject is abortion, religion, or caste.
Third spaces don't need to convert anyone, in her reading. "We do not have to necessarily turn every conservative person to progressive or vise versa" - just enable spaces where people have to engage with nuance, and "things will not be black and white as it seems to be." Take that friction away, and the axioms go unquestioned. "If you are isolated, you have no one to bounce ideas off, no one to check with," she says.
In the Indian context, chai/coffee is what our imagination will immediately bring up when we think of spaces where we “waste our time” yapping, which were also the spaces that told us to socialise, to have uneasy conversations, and be open to more secular, non-judgemental moralities while meeting people from different walks of life.
Citizens found reasons to share spaces in parks, libraries, and public grounds which led to interactions - sports, food, reading or mere conversations - that play a crucial role in breaking down social barriers and taboos.
Nissim Ezekiel’s poem Irani Restaurant Instructions draws a picture of brisk but welcoming picture of signboards one sees in Irani cafes in different cities in India.
“Our waiter is reporting.
Come again.
All are welcome whatever caste.
If not satisfied tell us.
Otherwise tell others.
GOD IS GREAT. “
One must identify the babu english of it to know the humour, and read it likewise to get the essence of it.
And the loss of our hangout spaces where “all are welcome whatever the caste”, is also a loss of spaces where democracy thrives.
“So the culture to spend time at a tea joint with friends , discussing every topic under the sun is now replaced by countless apps and groups where people could still do the same sans the Irani chai,” a redditor commented on Hyderabad subreddit.
And the isolation that follows carries consequences well beyond loneliness alone.
This feature is part of a series on third spaces and their evolving role in urban communities.
