Loneliness is as ancient as humanity itself, woven into the fabric of existence. It stalks the edges of human life, both a shadow and a mirror. Before the internet, loneliness lived differently. It inhabited the spaces between conversations, the gaps in handwritten letters, the long silences of distant friends. It flourished in the moments where connection was unreachable, not by lack of willingness, but by the tyranny of time and space. In a world bound by physicality, to be lonely meant to confront the limitations of human connection; to sit in the hollowness of one’s room, hearing nothing but the clock’s slow beat. Yet, paradoxically, this void often bore hope, the unspoken promise that tomorrow might bring a letter, a knock on the door, or an unexpected moment of grace. Before the internet, loneliness was a palpable thing, tied to the rhythms of life in a way that was both brutal and oddly reassuring. So what is causing our epidemic of loneliness and how can we fix it?

The connections people did forge, though harder won, were deeply rooted. Communities revolved around shared labour, shared geography, and shared rituals. A person might live their entire life in one village or neighbourhood, their identity intertwined with the people they saw daily. And yet, even amidst this closeness, loneliness persisted. It was the farmer who watched the sun set over his fields with no one to share the beauty. It was the widow whose house fell silent after the children moved away. It was the unspoken ache of the outsider, the one who belonged to no tribe. But there was, despite it all, a texture to pre-internet loneliness. It demanded resilience, a quiet fortitude to sit with the ache, to endure the empty hours. It was finite, defined by the boundaries of circumstance.

Hope, while often faint, lingered in the form of human contact; the church gathering, the market day, the arrival of a letter written by hands that cared. The absence of hope was a wound that seldom lingered long. Even in the bleakest loneliness, there was the understanding that the possibility of connection existed, though it required effort and patience. The internet has altered loneliness in ways both profound and insidious. It is no longer defined by physical distance or time; connection is now instantaneous and ever-present. We are tethered to one another by invisible threads of data, and yet, these threads do not hold us the way we once held each other.

The internet offers a peculiar kind of solace, a digital mimicry of human closeness. We can reach out, we can send messages, we can post our thoughts into the void and watch as strangers or acquaintances respond. But this connection is thin, weightless. It does not carry the heft of a hand held in silence or a shared glance across a room. Loneliness after the internet is a paradox. We are more connected than ever before, but the connection is shallow, like rain that never soaks the earth. Social media, forums, and instant messaging platforms have created an illusion of togetherness. We scroll through curated images of lives that seem brighter, fuller than our own. We comment, we like, we share, but beneath these acts lies a gnawing emptiness, a realisation that our interactions lack depth.

The digital world amplifies our voices but mutes our souls. We cry out into the ether and are met with echoes, not understanding. The absence of readily available hope is the quiet undertow of this new loneliness. In the digital age, hope is commodified, packaged as content. We seek it in motivational posts, in viral videos, in carefully crafted self-help guides. But these offerings are fleeting, and they dissipate like smoke. The hope they provide is performative, designed to soothe rather than sustain. In this constant pursuit of reassurance, we lose the ability to sit with our loneliness, to let it shape us. Instead, we distract ourselves, numbing the ache with endless streams of content.

The internet, for all its promises of connection, leaves us perpetually hungry, our souls malnourished. The digital world also intensifies human angst, though it does so subtly. In the quiet hours of the night, the glow of a screen replaces the stars, and the infinite scroll becomes a mirror reflecting our inadequacies. We see the lives of others, curated and polished, and we compare them to our own messy realities. This comparison breeds a new kind of despair, one born not of solitude, but of perceived failure. The internet tells us that we are never enough.

We crave the validation of accolades and becoming what we perceive individualistically as being more worthy; more interesting, more successful, more visible. In this relentless pursuit of online validation, we lose sight of what it means to truly connect. And yet, there is no escape from this new loneliness. To disconnect from the internet is to exile oneself from the modern world. It is to risk irrelevance, to sever the threads that tie us to others, however fragile those threads may be. The choice is not between loneliness and connection; it is between different shades of loneliness. One is the quiet isolation of the pre-internet world, where hope is a whisper carried on the wind. The other is the restless emptiness of the digital age, where hope is a fleeting notification that fades as quickly as it appears.

There is a peculiar kind of suffering in this new loneliness, one that is difficult to articulate. It is the ache of being surrounded by voices but hearing no one. It is the pain of reaching out and finding only surfaces, reflections of reflections. It is the human soul, yearning for depth, drowning in shallows. This suffering is quiet, almost imperceptible, but it gnaws at the edges of existence. It is the knowledge that, for all our connections, we are still alone, and that the tools we have created to bridge the gap have instead widened it. Perhaps the most profound difference between loneliness before and after the internet lies in the role of hope. In the pre-internet world, hope was tied to human effort and presence. It required patience, the willingness to wait, the courage to reach out.

Now, hope is a button, a message sent, a post shared. It is immediate, but it is hollow. It does not sustain; it merely distracts. The absence of true hope is the defining feature of digital loneliness. It is a void that cannot be filled by algorithms or artificial connections. So, we drift through this unfamiliar landscape, like every tomorrow, hoping that we are less timid and afraid than all of our yesterdays, hoping that maybe we feel deep in our hearts where laughter and screams merge to form our indescribable human condition, there we have hope for a more connected world, a world where we feel less alone.

Like dreams, we all have the craziest dreams, and no one talks about them, we wake and work and have our morning coffee like everything is normal, when life is more fantastical than we are ready to embrace, our dreams teach us, the stupid children gifted with dreams, that life is more than what we have been conditioned to observe it as, yet no one talks about their dreams, is that not absurd and inherently crazy? Could we not better understand our own humanity and what unites us all by sharing our dreams with one another? Every human being from every creed and from every corner of our vast planet has dreams, every single one of us, but it’s considered uncouth to mention what you dreamed about before you clock in at your bullshit job that isn’t trying to build a utopia in our lifetime. So instead of giving a damn about what makes you human, and what unites all of us, you what? Increase shareholder value?

We scavenge for the dregs of hope we are afforded in the moments in between moments we have to spare for dreams. We are aware of our liberties, and our soul’s right to breathe is being snatched out from under us, yet here we are, confused, alone, uber connected, totally isolated from purpose outside of monetary gain and material possession. Would anyone have listened to the Unabomber if he didn’t send bombs in the mail? Did anyone really listen to the guy? His manifesto was called ‘The Industrial Revolution and its Consequences’, and I know we are all so distracted, entertained, and massaged into our routines that no one really takes the time to think if this life that’s been constructed is utopic or not, but hey, can we maybe one day talk about if life was better before or after the internet, and if loneliness persists, can we ask why? Can we talk about our dreams and not worry about an arbitrary performance review at some bogus job that doesn’t contribute one iota to forming a utopia in our lifetime? Is that too much to ask?

I wish I didn’t have such bad acne, I wish when I talked my jaw didn’t move so funny so that people really listened to the words and didn’t just see some kind of freakshow, I wish that being an amputee was easier, I wish I felt embraced in a new country and people understood I was seeking a place which didn’t get chlorine bombed every other day, I wish… I wish. Why are these wishes not commonalities we can expect from everyday life, why has hope been commodified, monetised, repackaged and sold back to us? Not as a bible or some god-given testament but as a product? We witness over 30,000 hours of advertisements in our life, that is four years of your life that no one asked your permission to take from you. Someone you’ve never met paid someone you’ve never met and four years of your life you’re being soft-launched with all these products you never would have even looked twice at, that do not fulfill your deeper, more base human needs.

The internet has given us the ability to reach across the world, but in doing so, it has untethered us from ourselves and each other. Loneliness before the internet was a quiet ache, a reminder of our humanity. Loneliness after the internet is a constant hum, a background noise that we cannot escape. It is the price we pay for our digital lives, a cost we did not fully understand when we embraced this new way of being. The question, then, is not whether loneliness can be eradicated. It is a fundamental part of the human condition, an inescapable shadow. The question is whether we can learn to live with it, to sit with the emptiness and let it teach us. Before the internet, this was a skill born of necessity. Now, it is one we must reclaim, not for nostalgia’s sake, but for our survival. In the quiet spaces of true connection, in the courage to face our loneliness without distraction, there lies a glimmer of hope. Not the fleeting kind, but the kind that sustains, the kind that reminds us what it means to be human.