The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer

Lana Isa has 195,000 followers on Instagram, for videos that mostly consist of her shuffling around her quiet, tidy apartment. She slides a premade pizza into the oven, pours herself a wineglass full of Diet Coke, and settles in on the couch. Or she plays a crackling fake fireplace on her TV screen, dims the lights, and watches the rain fall outside her window. Sometimes she takes walks, tries new cafés, goes shopping. No one else ever shows up in her videos, though she occasionally mentions FaceTiming her mother. A typical subtitle reads: “POV you’re single, have no friends, live alone and won’t be having kids so this is your Friday night.”Isa, a 24-year-old in Toronto, is what you might call a solitude influencer: someone who gives followers a peek into mundane solo moments. Not all of these creators claim to have zero friends, but they generally take pride in the peaceful existence they’ve constructed. They use tags like #cozyathome, #introvertdiaries, and #alonenotlonely. One proclaims in her bio: “nyc with no friends and no complaints.” Another posts about being happily single in her mid-30s, living with her parents, and interacting only with them; taglines include “It’s ok to live a life others don’t understand” and “it’s only embarrassing if you’re embarrassed.”These videos are popular enough that, much of the time I’ve mentioned them in conversation, people know exactly what I’m talking about. Some relay their bafflement. No friends at all? Not even a couple? Others, with a tone of knowing cynicism, declare the genre depressing but unsurprising: a dark corner of the internet, symbolic of rampant loneliness and the emptiness of modern life.I can understand those reactions. Yet the clips keep pulling me in—keep pulling a lot of people in, judging by follower counts. They seem to serve, paradoxically, as watering holes for a community of commenters, who arrive in droves to chat about their anxieties, their beloved pets, their food preferences, their favorite no