There is currently a genre of TikTok content where people film themselves backing a frozen pizza and staring out a window, alone, on a Friday night, and the audience response is not pity but envy. This is where we are as a civilization. And honestly, after enough bad breakups, the pitch starts to make a disturbing amount of sense.
What Exactly Is a Loneliness Influencer
The Atlantic recently profiled the phenomenon, and the premise is exactly what it sounds like. People post videos of themselves doing nothing, by themselves, and framing it as aspirational content. Walks alone. Windows stared out of. Diet Cokes cracked open in empty apartments on weekend nights. The appeal, apparently, is the guilt-free celebration of radical solitude.
The trend has its own vocabulary now. 'Lonelinessmaxxing' is a thing people say out loud, apparently without irony. The videos rack up views because they push back against the cultural assumption that choosing to be alone means something is broken in you, that you are one bad week away from disappearing into the Montana wilderness with a manifesto and a grudge.
What the videos conspicuously leave out, as Guardian writer Dave Schilling points out in his recent personal essay on the trend, is the less cinematic side of solitude. Nobody is going viral for footage of themselves drooling through a nap at 8:30pm or doing something unspeakable to their toenails. The product being sold is curated aloneness, which is to say, not actually aloneness at all. It's performance.
A 41-Year-Old Divorcee Walks Into a TikTok Trend
Schilling's essay is the rare piece of first-person internet writing that earns its naval-gazing. He is 41, recently dumped a month before his birthday, fresh off two serious relationships in the last year, and the father of an eight-year-old from a failed marriage. He describes himself as 'the king of serial monogamy, a sensitive nerve ending that sincerely tries to make it work even if it definitely isn't.'
His diagnosis of his own romantic problem is both funny and genuinely uncomfortable to read: he dates reserved, self-contained women and then cries in front of them about sporting events and career setbacks. He knows this. He spends thousands of dollars a year on therapy asking why. He does not yet have the answer.
What makes the essay land, though, is that Schilling takes the loneliness influencer trend seriously as a symptom before he dismisses it as a solution. He gets it. He understands why someone who has been burned enough times looks at a TikTok of a person eating pasta alone in comfortable silence and thinks: that, actually. I want that.
The Pitch for Solitude Is Getting Easier to Make
Here is the uncomfortable cultural argument lurking underneath the frozen pizza videos. Schilling makes it plainly: 'How many more times can you open yourself up to another person before the inevitable crash, the painful separation, and the necessity of starting over again becomes too overwhelming?'
That is not a rhetorical question for a lot of people. It is a real calculation they are running. The loneliness influencer trend is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening after years of pandemic isolation that, for some people, turned out to be weirdly manageable. It is happening alongside dating apps that have made the process of finding a partner feel more like an Amazon return than a human experience. It is happening in a culture that, as Schilling writes, 'prioritizes aesthetics over honesty.'
The digital-only interaction model the trend implicitly endorses has a core design flaw that Schilling flags without being preachy about it. Posting a video of your enviable solitude to collect validation from strangers is still needing other people. It just structures the need so that it only flows one direction, which is considerably less scary and considerably less real.
He's Not Buying It, and the Reason Actually Matters
The essay does not end with Schilling converting to lonelinessmaxxing. He rejects the premise, but not from a position of breezy optimism. He rejects it because the alternative, shutting off, would require him to stop being himself. 'I could force myself not to cry,' he writes. 'But then I'm not me anymore. I'm someone I think I'm supposed to be.'
That is a more honest accounting of what choosing radical solitude actually costs than most think pieces on the subject bother to offer. The loneliness influencer sells the product as liberation. What Schilling is pointing at is the price tag: you have to sand down the parts of yourself that make you difficult to be around, and you have to call that growth.
His requested tombstone inscription, 'Here Lies Dave Schilling. He Had Unreasonable Expectations About Life,' is doing more rhetorical work than it lets on. The joke is self-deprecating. The argument underneath it is not.
The Dingo Take
The loneliness influencer trend is a fascinating piece of cultural evidence because of what it reveals about collective exhaustion. When 'sitting alone watching a bad movie' becomes content that people actively aspire to, something has gone wrong with the deal that society was supposed to be offering. The deal was: vulnerability is worth the risk. Connection justifies the cost. For a lot of people right now, that math is not checking out, and they are looking for an aesthetic that validates opting out.
Schilling's piece works because he is not smug about staying in the game. He is battered, self-aware, and still bleeding a little from a breakup he did not see coming. His argument for continuing to try is not that it will go well. It is that retreating into performed contentment requires becoming someone he does not recognize. That is a genuinely harder case to make than the frozen pizza video, and it deserves more than a TikTok comment section.
The real story here is not that lonely people are posting videos online. People have always found ways to make isolation look like a choice. The real story is that the audience for those videos is enormous, growing, and not composed of people who are actually fine. It is composed of people who are tired, who have been hurt enough times to find the math on human connection genuinely questionable, and who are looking for permission to stop trying. Whether that permission is something we should be handing out freely, at scale, via algorithm, is a question worth sitting with. Preferably not alone.
