In August this year, I moved back to the United States from China, leaving behind my wife and young son while I look for work. As someone with many years of experience living abroad, though, one point of friction I didn’t count on was loneliness.

Why do I feel lonely?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. Returning to the US, I have encountered a lot of the challenges that I first faced when I moved to China in 2017. Part of the reason is that I miss the community of students and colleagues at the school where I worked. Now I face the challenge of finding a new community to fit into. It feels like moving to a new place can take a lot of courage, even if that place is your hometown.

Another thing weighing on me is the fact that my son remains in China while I look for work. It was a difficult decision to stay in the US, knowing that it would be a long time before I would see him again. As the months roll by, I constantly think about the precious moments of his youth that I am missing. This is something that a video call can’t truly replace.

Loneliness is an important issue from a mental and physical health perspective. It has mental and physiological effects like reduced sleep quality, increased cortisol levels, and reduced dopamine response. This means lonely people feel stressed and don’t feel pleasure as easily, leading to a feedback loop of ever increasingly negative feelings and possibly depression. This underscores why it’s so important to understand the issue and search for a reasonable solution.

Social media as a solution to loneliness

I’ve found myself turning to social media in moments of anxiety. I’ve been looking at social media posts on WeChat, the instant messaging app that’s hugely popular in China. In it, I can see posts from all of my connections over nearly a decade of living there. It serves as a connection to the community that I’ve left behind. It doesn’t solve the issue, though, and it reminds me why I stopped using social media for so many years.

Several things prevent it from making me feel less lonely.

First, it is asynchronous. This is true of most social interactions online. Part of the digital world we live in means that we gain greater and greater freedom of our time. But as we gain control over our time, we spend less and less of it with other people. This is what makes a community so valuable. It’s the time that the community shares together.

Indeed, when the Soviet Union implemented continuous production weeks in the 1920s and 30s, workers got more frequent days off (one day off every five days), but it disrupted families and social lives. People were scheduled different days off so that factories would always be running. This disintegration of a shared weekly rhythm is happening today, too, and I believe social media use is a part of that.

Another problem with social media is that it lacks depth as a communication tool. No matter how much information you cram into a single post, how many pictures you share, a social media post is no substitute for the richness of a shared dinner or even a 20-minute conversation. This efficiency is critical, and it also applies to texting and instant messaging.

Third, social media is low cost but also low reward. The majority of posts that I see on social media are from people I barely know or about things that I don’t care much about. Browsing social media is a lot like panning for gold—all you’ll find is fool’s gold, of little real value. But so many people consume it because it’s always available and there’s a certain addictive thrill to swiping down to reload the feed.

This ties into my next point, that at its heart, social media appeals to our selfish sides. Our participation in social media objectifies our friends and family. It reduces them to the role of our entertainers—and indeed, it encourages them to be so, too. There’s a certain pressure to create content that people like, and so we filter what we show to our friends and digital acquaintances, always trying to predict the winning content. But winning the “likes” game doesn’t carry any real reward, if the game can be “won” at all.

Trying to create something that people will like, rather than saying what you want to say, induces anxiety and undermines the very purpose of social media.

To be fair, social media isn’t without its benefits. It can help you keep in touch with others whom you wouldn’t otherwise keep in touch with. Maintaining a broad network of social contacts can be helpful, for example when looking for new work opportunities.

Social media is also a way to see what others are up to. Often, your contacts might be too busy to tell you about everything that’s going on in their lives. Or maybe you’re not that close, and they feel awkward reaching out. In today’s world, many people also expect the shared context provided by consuming each other’s content, so they may feel less obliged to do the extra work of explicitly contacting each other.

With all this in mind, our use of social media still fails to solve the problem; at its core, it distracts us from the friction of our existing. In his book 4,000 Weeks, Oliver Burkeman writes about Shinzen Young’s arduous training at a Buddhist monastery in Japan. His training involved standing naked on a wintry mountaintop to pour buckets of water over his head. Eventually, after trying in vain to ignore the discomfort, he realized that the problem wasn’t “the activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it.” Indeed, distractions of any kind represent an attempt to avoid something “painful” in our present lives.

How often do we welcome distractions to avoid uncomfortable feelings and tasks? For me, writing is one such activity. I must will my thoughts into existence in a rage against the tyranny of the blank page. How many times have I checked my phone for messages or looked out the window at the clouds and passing cars?

Questions and opportunities

I don’t claim to be an expert in loneliness, or of anything. I have more questions than answers for what to do about it. Here are some of my questions

Does other technology help or hurt?

Social media seems detrimental, but what about other technologically mediated communication? SMS and instant messaging aren’t ideal because they lack non-linguistic information such as eye contact, tone of voice, and facial expression. Video calling retains a lot of that, but it still can’t solve the problem of touch. A hand shake, hug, or kiss, the clink of glasses around a dinner table—technology can’t (yet) replace these social gestures. They certainly can’t replace being away from one’s child.

While video calls can’t stand in for parent-child bonds, they may be more than enough for many other activities. As I’ll mention below, many community events can be held online, like role-playing games or book clubs, for example. At the very least, a video or phone call is better than nothing.

How much effort would it take to join or build a community?

If the cause of so much loneliness is how disintegrated our schedules have become, how much time would we have to “give up” to see a positive difference in our lives? What rituals could we build into our lives that would make ourselves—and each other—happier? Could it be something so small that I didn’t have to leave my home? Something like a monthly or biweekly D&D session, like my father does as a way to keep in touch with a friend who moved away? That amounts to only a few hours a month, and with video chat and online game management services available, very little extra equipment is required.

While D&D isn’t for everyone (I’ve never actually played it, though I’ve sat in on a few sessions), I do see promise in technologically mediated get-togethers. For many community-building activities like role-playing games or book clubs, being able to see and hear each other is sufficient to share in the activity, which is the whole point of community.

Offline, there are also community groups and classes for things like cooking, art, and sport in most cities. Author and photographer Craig Mod apparently created a community out of walking around Japan. In an article about his battles with loneliness, he also mentions one significant strategy: therapy.

How can therapy help?

There’s a social stigma in many places about therapy. However, Hawkley & Cacioppo (2013) found that several techniques in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help combat the problem. In particular, their research supported their hypothesis that correcting automatic negative thoughts about social interactions worked the best of several different strategies for decreasing feelings of loneliness. This suggests that changing the way we think about social interactions may help break the feedback loop of increasing loneliness.

The problem with therapy is the stigma and the lack of access many people face. Even Craig Mod wonders how many great therapists are out there in his article on loneliness. I am cautiously optimistic, though, that generative AI may be helpful. While it doesn’t always give meaningful answers and has been accused of sycophantic behaviors, the technology is improving rapidly, and even now may be better than nothing for those who can’t access in-person therapy.

Early research is promising. Farzan et al. (2025) found large reductions in patient depression and anxiety via AI CBT. Of the three services it mentions, Youper appears to be the only one available for download in mobile app stores, though I haven’t used them and can’t say for sure. Jiang et al., (2024) also found significant improvements in screening and treatment, though they note that the technology is still new and doesn’t yet represent a complete replacement for in-person therapy. Still, the technology is extremely promising.

It’s worth noting that I’m suggesting technology as a solution to loneliness after criticizing digital connection. AI therapy deals with a different problem: the cognitive issues that cause and reinforce loneliness, not loneliness itself.

Final thoughts

Loneliness is a common condition, but it can have serious health consequences, so it’s important to understand what it means and how to deal with it. For me, my first step is to just accept the limits of my control and to stop resisting experience, as Shinzen Young discovered. While my son is still abroad, I have to accept that video calls are the best I’ve got. I need to find the patience, knowing that he’ll be here in due time. Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about reaching out to the photographer’s community in Boise to learn more and share my work with others.

As for social media, it isn’t a likely solution to loneliness. A more likely solution is to embrace the friction of daily life. When you hear “There’s an app for that,” remember the limits of your time and weigh the potential for distraction. Maybe even the friction and inconvenience of daily tasks present an opportunity to bring us out of the dark and closer to communities we value.