Looking for love in all the wrong places

Our consumer culture has us looking to corporations to supply us with relationships.

SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA (JUNE 5, 2026) — What’s causing the global loneliness epidemic?

We appear to live in a hyperconnected world. For the first time in human history, just about everyone has access to just about everyone else.

We have social networks, dating apps, messaging platforms, community and interest forums, voice and spatial chat platforms, AI companions and chatbots, friendship and platonic connection apps, peer support and support group platforms, gaming and virtual worlds, video conferencing and virtual co-presence tools, and shared activity and co-experience platforms.

Yet one in six people worldwide experiences persistent loneliness, with rates highest among young adults and in low-income countries, worsening across all demographics.

How can this be?

A recent survey, which appears indict remote work, is actually pointing to something deeper and more fundamental.

Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York surveyed 500,000 Americans. They found that the rise in remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic increased time spent alone and worsened workers’ mental health. They measured drops in mental well-being, greater use of mental health services, and increased prescriptions.

Remote work = bad, right? Or, at least, we’re meant to take away from this result that the remote work trend contributes to the loneliness epidemic.

But turn this around and look at it from the other direction. The public was getting some of its social life from the office, including romantic connections.

As one data point (from a Stanford study published in 2019), roughly 20 percent of married heterosexual couples met at work between 1970–1995. (It was actually during this time when I met my wife. At work.)

In the 2020s, that dropped in half to roughly 10%.

And then COVID-driven remote work dropped that down closer to zero.

So, yes, one can see how remote work might impact loneliness.

But let’s back up for a second. Why are people relying on their company to provide a social life?

You’re not going to like the answer.

Check out my latest column, Why Waymo settled for the wrong car.

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The total commercialization of American culture

In a now-quaint expression of American isolationism, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge said: “The chief business of the American people is business.”

But the ugly truth is that the chief culture of the American people is also business.

Over the past 125 years, American culture (myth, tradition, belonging, etc.) has been systematically colonized by commerce, which replaced shared narratives with branded ones and recast all aspects of life as consumption. We no longer inhabit a culture that includes shopping. We inhabit a shopping that defines culture, where the deepest expressions of personal identity are purchase decisions.

American commercial totalitarianism has re-wired our instincts and expectations. We know now that whatever we need, including our deepest human needs like friends and partners, is something we shop for and buy — or, at least is something that will be provided to us by corporations and businesses.

What is a dating app other than Amazon.com for relationships? We eliminate prospective mates based on a feature list as if we’re buying a car, potentially swiping away our soulmate in an instant because they’re an inch too short or a pound too heavy.

Americans used to be well known as joiners. But membership in civic organizations, churches, clubs, and fraternal orders has plummeted from a peak in the mid-20th century, when roughly half of Americans belonged to at least one voluntary association. Church membership has fallen from 70% in the 1950s to 45% today. Fraternal orders (The Masons, the Elks, the Moose, where men gathered and wore funny hats) have lost up to 90% of their membership. The average number of very close friends has fallen from an average of three to an average of less than one, with millions having zero.

That made the workplace one of the last surviving opportunities for social interaction. Then many lost that, too.

We’ve all felt the erosion of meaningful, in-person social bonds under the pressures of digital substitution. We gather online, which only makes us lonelier.

And while social networks used attention algorithms to choose who we interact with and what we talk about, we’re now faced with an even darker prospect.

With AI, algorithms don’t influence which people we talk to. Instead, we talk to the AI itself.

The more we sit there by ourselves seeking connection through a phone or laptop, the lonelier we get.

We are looking for love in all the wrong places. In other words, we look to corporations to provide human connection, including the corporation we work for.

And that’s what’s causing the loneliness epidemic.

The solution: Ditch commerce, embrace chemistry

I’m very happily married (and hopeful that my wife is, too) and have an extremely active social life and a great many friends, including very close friends. That makes me an outlier.

Here’s what I’ve learned about making and maintaining relationships: