Highlights
Many young women don’t have friends anymore; we have followers. We don’t care about each other’s lives; we consume them as content. We don’t have people we can be vulnerable with; we have people who view our Stories. It’s hard to tell if friends are loyal, or hoping we like their posts back. Meeting someone new now means swapping socials, then scrolling through and skipping past each other’s lives, forever
And now the very companies that hollowed out our friendships have the nerve to sell us their substitutes. Girls and young women are sold simulations of human connection like never before, each perfectly customized to our wants and desires. We eat dinner with YouTubers. We pretend to FaceTime influencers. We play video games alone in our rooms, or watch strangers play instead. And where has this left us? We are terrified to talk to our neighbors but can open up on TikTok. We have access to billions of people but feel lonelier than senior citizens. We have been left with thousands of likes and comments, all these followers and friends, hundreds of notifications a day, and a fear of looking another human being in the eye.
Social media platforms feel like the final blow to genuine connection. For decades, the institutions, communities, and customs that once bound people together have been falling away. Religion has more or less disappeared, marriage and family have been mocked, neighborhoods have been uprooted, communities have collapsed. Our parents were told to do what made them happy, to walk away if they wanted, forgetting that family structures are not just limits on adult freedom but foundations for children to stand on, to step off from, on which they depend. Those foundations were shattered, and now a generation is falling apart.
We were lied to. Not only by platforms promising connection but also by a culture insisting that family breakdown was normal, and responsibility optional. But we are not products; we are people. Our relationships are more than accessories to be displayed, our commitments more than contracts to be negotiated. Now this retreat from each other looks less like empowerment or progress and more like surrender to tech companies, allowing them to sell us simulations of community, of friendship, even of love.
Billion-dollar industries depend on us being lonely, detached consumers. Liberation is the marketing pitch, and we are the products.
Girls’ natural instincts—to explore, to connect, to take risks—have been numbed. Teenage girls who once stayed up all night chatting on the phone have become teenagers whose hearts race at the sound of a ringtone. Girls once desperate to sneak out with friends have become girls who dread making plans with each other. Girls who in the past would have been giddy about love and dating have become terrified of relationships, of ending up like their parents. This is not normal teenage angst; this is a tragedy.
The Relationship Struggle is Real
Every generation of girls has also felt insecure in relationships, been confused by new sexual feelings, and craved safety and security. But we were the first generation of girls to cope with all of this in a world where flirting meant Instagram DMs and Snapchat nudes. For us, dating was swiping through people like they were items in a catalog; the only way to be loved was to become a better object; and the most romantic gesture we could hope for was a Super Like on Tinder. Many of us watched violent porn before we even had a first kiss, before even holding hands with a boy. We saw intimacy not as something to be clumsily stumbled through but a performance to be delivered, “content” to be copied. And for every flicker of fear, insecurity, or distrust we felt, there were always apps, algorithms, and influencers to amplify it.
To the girls struggling with dating and relationships today, take it from my generation: You are not broken for feeling this way. Yes, girls have always had to deal with hurt and heartbreak, but not d**k pics, deepfakes, read receipts, Snapchat scores, or a sex education from Pornhub. Of course, girls growing up with all of this are struggling to trust, to feel confident and secure, to even believe that love still exists.
Many young women my age are now realizing how hard this all was. How hard it was to be twelve and insecure and feel like the choice was between objectifying ourselves online and being invisible. How hard it was to keep comparing ourselves to the influencers followed by the boys we liked, feeling as if we had to compete somehow. How hard it was to measure our developing bodies against those of porn stars. How unfair it was that we punished ourselves for wanting commitment, for feeling insecure, for being needy. And that instead of asking our friends and families for advice, we listened to influencers and strangers on forums who taught us to be more detached, uncaring, unfazed, until we believed that the more we felt, the more broken we were.
It is a tragedy—an outrage, actually—that we have been convinced that human connection is an inconvenience, that other people are obstacles.
But now we are starting to see the truth. That these platforms promising to make falling in love easier are turning us into insatiable consumers, shopping for the perfect person, seeing other people as disposable, advertising ourselves like objects, too. And behind the push to objectify ourselves, to be more sexually open, to hook up and move on from each other, were powerful profit motives. Billion-dollar industries depend on us being lonely, detached consumers. Liberation is the marketing pitch, and we are the products.
Resist the Urge to Run
An important thing to do, I think, is to defy this cultural message to emotionally detach, this lie that it is liberating to be alone. Not because every young woman should follow the same traditional path, but because it is a tragedy—an outrage, actually—that we have been convinced that human connection is an inconvenience, that other people are obstacles. Some of us declare that we don’t want romance or families, that this is freedom, a revolt.
But to me, it feels less like liberation and more like resignation. No point in having kids. No point in committing. No point in building any sort of foundation with anyone. Nobody can be trusted; nothing ever lasts. We have been taught that putting other people first is a weakness, that depending on someone is a deficiency rather than the beautiful thing it is. You are not needy for having human needs. So invest in other people. See your family as much as you can.
Plan things in person as often as possible. Knock on your neighbors’ doors and invite them for dinner. Host your friends, make the first move, even if it feels awkward, even when nobody else is trying. And remember, sometimes the best way to reconnect is to disconnect. Delete any platforms that make you want to watch other people live their lives while letting yours pass by. Quit any app that drains your human drives and convinces you it is about connection.
And treasure people who care the least about your social media. The ones who want the whole you and who know an Instagram grid could never capture it. The ones who are with you in your vulnerable moments, not viewing them on TikTok. The ones who ground you when you get caught up in all this, who could not care less about what’s on your Instagram Story. Such people are real, and rare. And don’t forget: If anyone in your life expects you to be perfect all the time, to never have any negative feelings or flaws or insecurities, they want a product, not a person.
The answer cannot be to retreat from relationships; it has to be to take them more seriously. To kill that urge to run and avoid.
I know this is hard, really hard. So much of what I have written about in [my] book can make us want to give up on other people. But we have to resist this urge to run away. The answer cannot be to retreat from relationships; it has to be to take them more seriously. To kill that urge to run and avoid. Because we have two choices here. We can continue to detach and numb ourselves, or we can go all in, against the odds. I think we have to stop pretending that love and family aren’t important, that they are a burden, that loving ourselves is enough. And we have to try even harder.
Otherwise, what’s the alternative? Some safe but soulless life of consumption? Sitting inside watching strangers live their lives instead of living our own? Staying anxious and alone and never seeing that as the ultimate risk? Never seeing the most dangerous life as the one that demands nothing of us? We have been duped into thinking we can create a life without danger, free from risk and discomfort and vulnerability, and that such a life is desirable. But we can’t, and it’s not. If you connect with someone and this comes with the risk of losing something, good. You are alive!
And if you grew up feeling alone and abandoned, now is your chance to prove that something better is possible. Become an example. Find someone and commit fully. Be the partner who shows that loyalty is not too much to ask for, the parent who shows that love can last.
If I have a daughter someday, I don’t want to model for her a “strong independent woman” who doesn’t need anybody; I want to model a strong woman who shows it’s okay to depend on someone. It’s okay to take a risk to be with someone, to give up some of yourself to belong to something bigger. And that is genuine independence—feeling loved and backed, and becoming resilient because of it.
It is not a weakness to want to feel at home. We were not designed to do this alone.
Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything by Freya India. Copyright (c) 2026 by Freya India. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
