When I was twenty-six, working the loading docks in a warehouse in Melbourne, I used to eat lunch alone on a stack of TV boxes in the back corner. I had a phone full of contacts. I had group chats pinging constantly. I had a social media feed that told me, multiple times a day, that people were out there thinking of me — tagging me, reacting to something I’d posted, sending me things that “reminded them of me.”
I was also the loneliest I’d ever been in my life.
Not lonely in the way people usually picture it — not sitting in a dark room with no one calling. Lonely in a way that felt more confusing than that, because technically I was connected to hundreds of people. I had proof. Notifications. Timestamps. Evidence of being known.
And yet something in my chest knew — with that quiet animal certainty the body has before the mind catches up — that none of it was reaching the part of me that actually needed reaching.
I didn’t understand the difference then. I thought connection was connection. I thought if people were responding to me, I was being seen. It took years, some formal study in psychology, and a long stretch of anxiety I told no one about to realise the distinction isn’t subtle at all. It’s the difference between hearing someone’s voice through a wall and having them sit next to you and say nothing.
The screen gives you contact without co-regulation
There’s a term in psychology that most people never hear outside a clinical setting: co-regulation. It refers to the process by which one person’s nervous system helps calm and stabilise another’s. It happens through physical proximity, through tone of voice, through eye contact and touch and the micro-adjustments two bodies make when they’re sharing space.
It doesn’t happen through text. It doesn’t happen through emoji reactions. It doesn’t happen through a perfectly timed meme sent at midnight.
Research by James Coan and colleagues at the University of Virginia — particularly their work on what they call Social Baseline Theory — found that the human brain literally expects the presence of other people as a baseline condition. Not as a luxury. Not as a reward for being social enough. As a default setting. When that presence is absent, the brain has to work harder to regulate threat, emotion, and even basic metabolic function. The world becomes, in a measurable neurological sense, heavier.
What screens do is offer the appearance of that baseline being met while the nervous system keeps waiting for the real thing.
You get the signal — someone replied, someone liked it, someone’s there — without the somatic experience that actually down-regulates stress. It’s like eating food that looks real but has no caloric value. You chew. You swallow. You stay hungry.
When needing a person starts to feel like weakness
Here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough: it’s not just that screens fail to meet the need. It’s that over time, they train you to forget the need exists.
I noticed this in myself during my late twenties. I was battling anxiety that I’d told absolutely no one about — not a friend, not my brother, not my mum. And part of the reason I could keep that going for so long was that I had a phone. I could text someone something vaguely funny at 11pm and feel, for thirty seconds, like I wasn’t alone. I could scroll through other people’s curated lives and confuse proximity to information with proximity to people.
The more I did that, the more the idea of actually sitting across from someone and saying I’m not okay felt not just scary but unnecessary. Like a dramatic overreaction. Like needing too much.
This is what I mean when I say it isn’t a paradox. It’s a rerouting. Every human need — to be witnessed, to be held, to be heard without performing — gets redirected through a medium that can mimic the form of those things but not the substance. And after enough time, you start to believe the substance was never necessary in the first place.
Psychologist Jean Twenge at San Diego State University has been studying this shift for over a decade. Her research, drawing on data from over 11 million respondents, found that rates of loneliness, depression, and emotional distress among young adults surged precisely as smartphone adoption became universal — not because screens cause depression in some simple mechanistic way, but because they restructure how people relate, replacing high-cost, high-reward interactions with low-cost, low-reward ones. The effort drops. And so does the depth.
The loneliness isn’t a bug. It’s the system working exactly as designed.
The body keeps asking for what the mind has learned to dismiss
I think about my grandmother sometimes when I think about this. She lived to eighty-nine in suburban Melbourne, and she didn’t have a smartphone. She had a landline and a back porch and the same three neighbours she’d known for forty years. She drank tea and watched the birds and never once told anyone she was aging gracefully. But she was in contact with actual bodies in shared space almost every day. Not because she was more virtuous or wise. Because there was no alternative infrastructure that let her simulate it.
We have that infrastructure now. And it’s efficient. And it’s comfortable. And it slowly teaches the nervous system that vulnerability is optional, that physical presence is a luxury, and that if you still feel lonely after receiving fourteen notifications before breakfast, the problem is probably you.
It isn’t you.
Research by John Cacioppo and Stephanie Cacioppo, who spent decades studying the neuroscience of loneliness at the University of Chicago, found that loneliness operates like a biological alarm system — a signal, not a failure. It’s the social equivalent of hunger or thirst. It tells you something essential is missing. The problem isn’t that you feel it. The problem is that we’ve built an environment that makes the signal feel like a malfunction.
You’re surrounded by connection. Why are you still hungry?
Because the thing that’s being offered isn’t food.
Real connection requires what screens are designed to eliminate
I want to be careful here, because I’m not writing this from some tech-free mountain monastery. I live in Vietnam with my wife and baby daughter, and screens are part of how I stay close to my brother Justin back in Australia, how my wife’s mum checks in, how I do my work. I’m not anti-technology. I’m suspicious of what happens when technology quietly replaces the thing it was only ever supposed to supplement.
Real connection — the kind that actually settles the nervous system — requires a few things that digital communication is structurally designed to remove:
- Unedited presence. You can’t curate yourself in real time across a table. Your face does things you didn’t approve. Your voice cracks. Your body tells the truth.
- Risk. When you text someone something vulnerable, you can delete it. You can add “lol” to soften it. You can disappear for three hours and come back with something casual. In person, the words are out and you’re still sitting there.
- Awkwardness. There’s a reason older people talk to cashiers and strangers — they’ve stopped needing the interaction to be smooth. They’ve learned that the clumsy, unscripted quality of a face-to-face exchange is where the realness lives.
- Silence. Two people sitting together not speaking is one of the most regulating experiences a nervous system can have. Screens have no tolerance for silence. Silence on a screen is absence.
Every one of these things involves discomfort. And the entire economic model of digital communication is built on eliminating discomfort. Making connection frictionless. Which sounds like a gift until you realise that the friction was the point.
The shame underneath the loneliness
What I see — in myself, in the emails I get, in the research I keep returning to — is that for a lot of people, the loneliness isn’t even the hardest part. The hardest part is the shame of feeling lonely when you’re technically connected to more people than any generation in human history.
That shame is real, and it does real damage. It convinces people that their need for physical presence, for unmediated eye contact, for someone who will sit with them in their mess without a screen between them — that this need is excessive. Childish. Clingy.
It isn’t. It’s the most basic thing your body knows how to ask for.
People who learned early that showing emotion got them punished already carry a version of this — the belief that needing is dangerous. Screens didn’t invent that wound. But they offer the perfect environment for it to calcify. You can stay connected without ever being seen. You can maintain relationships without ever being vulnerable. You can go years without anyone touching your actual life, and the notifications will keep telling you everything’s fine.
Until you’re sitting on a stack of TV boxes at lunchtime, phone in hand, fourteen unread messages, and something in your chest is asking for a thing you can’t even name anymore.
What coming back looks like
I don’t have a neat formula for this. I’ll admit that. What I have is what happened when I finally told one person — one actual, breathing person — that I’d been anxious for years and had been hiding it. It was a Thursday. We were in a pub in Melbourne. I said it badly. There was no eloquence, no perfectly crafted confession. I kind of mumbled it into my drink.
And my nervous system — the one that had been running a low-grade alarm for the better part of a decade — did something it hadn’t done in years. It settled.
Not because the person said something brilliant. Not because they fixed it. Because they were there. Physically present. Not through a screen. Not through a carefully typed response they’d had time to edit. Just a person, in a chair, hearing me.
That’s all co-regulation is. That’s all it’s ever been.
The people who build lives worth staying in aren’t the ones with the most followers or the busiest group chats. They’re the ones who kept at least one channel open that doesn’t route through a screen. One person they can sit with in silence. One relationship where the friction hasn’t been optimised away.
If that sounds small, I understand. Everything real does, at first.
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