💀 Everybody is lonely and nobody wants to admit it

There is an epidemic happening right now and everybody is too busy pointing fingers to notice they are standing in the middle of it.

Men are lonely. Women are lonely. Old people are lonely. Young people are lonely. People in marriages are lonely. People in crowds are lonely. People with three thousand followers and four hundred unread messages are lonely.

We built a world that connects everybody and touches nobody. And then we turn around and blame each other for it.

The Great Gender Blame Game🎭

Here is how the conversation usually goes.

Somebody writes a post about lonely men. The comments fill up with women saying, "Well maybe if men opened up emotionally." Somebody writes a post about lonely women. The comments fill up with men saying, "Well maybe if women weren't so impossible."

And everybody feels a little better. Because if it is their fault, then it is not our fault. If they are the problem, then we are the victims. And being a victim is more comfortable than being confused.

But here is what nobody wants to say. We are not lonely because of each other. We are lonely because we were taught to be.

What We Were Actually Taught 📚

Boys are taught to be strong. Which means do not cry. Which means do not need anybody. Which means figure it out alone. And then we wonder why grown men would rather sit in silence for twenty years than tell one person they are struggling.

Girls are taught to be everything. Be soft but be strong. Be ambitious but be available. Be independent but do not intimidate. Be beautiful but do not be vain. Be everything to everybody and then somehow also be at peace. And then we wonder why women are exhausted.

We were both handed impossible instructions. And then we were put in a room together and told to build a life.

No wonder it is going badly.

The Marketplace Problem🛒

And then there is the other thing. The apps.

We took the most profound human experience, finding somebody to walk through life with, and we turned it into a shopping experience. Swipe. Compare. Rank. Discard. Optimise.

You are no longer a person looking for a person. You are a product in a catalogue, competing with a thousand other products, being judged in half a second by a stranger holding a phone on the toilet.

And the worst part is that it works. People do find each other. But they find each other in a system that trains them to always wonder if there is something better one more swipe away.

Commitment became a trap. Independence became a prison. And everybody is sitting in an apartment staring at a screen, wondering why nobody calls.

The Real Reason Nobody Partners Up 🤔

Here is a theory. And you can take it or leave it.

People are not refusing to partner because they are selfish. People are refusing to partner because they have seen what bad partnership looks like, and they would rather be alone than repeat it.

They watched their parents fight. They watched their mothers shrink. They watched their fathers disappear into work or into silence or into another family. They watched marriages that were really just two people enduring each other for the sake of appearances.

And they decided, somewhere deep down, that they would rather be lonely alone than lonely in a house with somebody.

That is not selfishness. That is self preservation. And it is a tragedy, because the thing they are running from was never partnership itself. It was a broken version of it that we keep handing down like an heirloom.

The Antinatalism Thing👶

And yes, birth rates are falling. Everywhere. Not just here. Not just among one group. Everywhere.

And people keep asking why women are not having children, as if women are the only variable in this equation.

Nobody asks whether a woman can afford to have a child in a country with 30 per cent unemployment. Nobody asks whether she has a partner who will actually show up. Nobody asks whether the man she is with would carry half the load or whether she would end up doing everything and calling it love.

Nobody asks whether she watched her own mother do it alone and decided she was not signing up for that.

It is easier to say women have become selfish. It is harder to admit that we built a society where having a child is a financial risk, an emotional gamble, and a career penalty, and then we are surprised that people are opting out.

And the Men👊

And while we are being honest. Men are not okay either.

Men are killing themselves at rates that should be a national emergency. Men are dropping out of work, out of school, out of relationships, out of life. Men are being told to open up and then punished when they do. Men are being sold a fantasy by people online who tell them the answer is to blame women, and that fantasy is free, which is why so many are buying it.

The manosphere is not a movement. It is a business. It sells lonely men a story where their loneliness is somebody else's fault, and then it charges them for the next video, the next course, the next supplement.

And lonely men keep buying, because at least somebody is talking to them.

What Nobody Wants to Hear🗣️

Here is the part that will upset everybody equally.

Men, you have to learn to be soft with somebody. Not weak. Soft. You have to learn that needing people is not a flaw, and that being known is worth the risk of being hurt.

Women, you have to let somebody in. Not because you need saving. Because partnership is not surrender, and a life with somebody who sees you is not a smaller life. It is a bigger one.

Both of you, you have to stop treating each other as the enemy. Because the enemy is not men. The enemy is not women. The enemy is a culture that made connection expensive, vulnerability dangerous, and commitment terrifying, and then sold you a phone so you could be lonely together.

The Juice 🧃 

I am not going to sit here and tell you that the answer is to go back to some imagined golden age where everybody submitted and everything worked.

That age did not exist. It was not golden. People were just quieter about their pain.

The answer is not to go back. The answer is to build something new. Something where men are allowed to be whole and women are allowed to be free and both of them are allowed to be scared and neither of them has to pretend.

That is harder than blaming each other. But it is the only thing that actually works.

So stop pointing. Start building. And maybe, just maybe, call somebody today. Not to argue. Just to say you were thinking about them.

You would be surprised how far that goes.

Comment below. Do you think we are lonelier now than we have ever been? And who do you blame? Be honest. 🙌