The 'No Friends' TikTokers With 7M Views Who Are Winning

Friday Night, No Apologies

Lana Isa is a software sales manager in her twenties living in Toronto. According to BBC News, her TikTok routine is strikingly ordinary: she comes home from work, heats a frozen pizza, tosses a premade salad, lights a candle, and watches TV alone. The caption she put on it was almost daring in its honesty: "POV you're a childfree and single girl that has no friends and lives alone so this is how you spend your Friday night."

Seven million views. Nearly 400,000 combined followers across TikTok and Instagram. This is not a cautionary tale. This is a hit.

Isa's path to friendlessness was not a lifestyle choice she made on a vision board. She switched high schools multiple times, got isolated during Covid, moved across the country after her first serious heartbreak, and eventually found herself alone with no close social circle. "People don't talk about having no friends a lot," she told BBC News. "I think it's still what people would consider embarrassing or a little taboo."

So she talked about it. Her following went from 2,000 to 175,000 in eight months. Turns out a lot of people were quietly living the same life and had been waiting for someone to say it first.

The Backlash Arrived on Schedule

The internet, being the internet, decided these women needed a diagnosis. Isa and creators like her were quickly labeled "loneliness influencers" by critics who framed them as a generation of sad, childless women in quiet crisis. Others accused them of romanticising isolation and spreading what one particularly memorable phrase called "an air of cosy defeatism."

Devon Noehring, a full-time content creator in Phoenix, Arizona, who films her solo weekends cooking at home with her dog, told BBC News she found the criticism "frustrating." Her videos are not a cry for help. They are a documentation of how she actually prefers to spend her time. "I just hate the stigma of alone equalling lonely," she said.

Noehring grew up feeling ashamed of being the quiet girl with social anxiety. When she started being honest about it online, she found a community of people who felt exactly the same way. That is not loneliness content. That is connection content that happens to feature fewer brunch tables and more dogs on couches.

What the Science Actually Says

Researchers do not want you to take a sledgehammer to either side of this argument. Professor Melody Ding, an epidemiologist studying social connection and loneliness at the University of Sydney, told BBC News that there is a meaningful difference between chronic loneliness forced by circumstance and the deliberate, agentic choice to spend time alone.

"Everybody's lonely at some point, but some people are not OK admitting that," Ding said. "That can create this false expectation that you have to be socially happy and connected all the time." She is not wrong. The performance of constant togetherness on social media is its own kind of fiction, and these creators are at least being honest about the alternative.

That said, Ding is careful not to give chronic isolation a full endorsement. Humans are a social species. Prolonged, involuntary isolation does real damage to mental and physical health. Her hope, BBC News reports, is that people who have lost their social networks can eventually build new ones, rather than fully rebranding friendlessness as a permanent personal identity. The goal is to destigmatise loneliness, not to make it aspirational in a way that leaves people stuck.

They Are Not Trying to Stay This Way Forever

Here is what the critics consistently get wrong about these creators: almost none of them are celebrating permanent isolation. SJ Hoadley, who works as a cleaner in the UK and began documenting her solo life after finding Isa's videos, told BBC News something that cuts right through the hand-wringing. "We never describe ourselves as lonely," she said. "I think sometimes my lack of friends tends to bother the people around me more than it bothers me."

Hoadley left a seven-year abusive relationship and moved somewhere she knew nobody. The friendlessness was not the plan. It was the aftermath. Over time, she started enjoying the independence, getting comfortable with her own company, and building something new from scratch. That is not defeatism. That is survival with a decent attitude about it.

What these women are actually doing, whether critics can see it or not, is refusing to perform distress on command. Society expects a woman alone on a Friday night to be miserable about it, to frame her pizza and her candle as evidence of failure. They are declining to do that. And seven million people watched one of them do it.