Loneliness goes viral as social media users embrace life alone

By Hankookilbo

• Published Oct 12, 2026 3:29 PM KST

"If you feel empty whenever you don't have plans, I want to tell you that you need time to develop the ability to deal with loneliness instead."

For years, social media has been a showcase for picture-perfect lives — luxury hotels, fine dining, designer goods, exotic vacations and bustling social circles. Now, a very different kind of lifestyle is drawing millions of views: staying home alone on a Friday night.

Kim Yu-rye, a 38-year-old office worker in Seoul, documents her solitary routines on Instagram. Her account, "kimuyeah," is filled with everyday activities she enjoys by herself, from watching animation after work and reading to practicing yoga. She shares tips with followers on how to spend time comfortably by themselves.

It was not always something she was comfortable showing publicly.

As someone without a spouse, romantic partner or children, Kim gradually found herself spending more time alone. She eventually stopped treating that reality as something that needed to be hidden behind carefully curated social media posts.

"I used to think I should only post special and beautiful moments on social media," Kim said in messages exchanged with the Hankook Ilbo on Oct. 6. "But as I spent more of my life alone, I came to acknowledge for myself that this is my everyday life."

She said she was surprised that content depicting her solitary routines resonated with so many people.

"People who spend time alone show each other their daily lives, and we find reassurance in that," she said. "I think it's important to acknowledge loneliness when we feel lonely, while not treating the time we spend alone itself as a failure or deficiency."

From picture-perfect lives to ‘#Nofriends’

Kim is part of a broader shift taking place on social media, where loneliness and solitude are increasingly appearing alongside — and sometimes replacing — aspirational displays of wealth, relationships and social success.

The trend has even spawned terms such as "loneliness influencer" and "solitude influencer."

Rather than merely identifying themselves as people who live alone, some creators openly use hashtags such as "#Nofriends," "#Alone" and "#Loneliness," including posts about having no friends available to spend time with.

Vogue described the phenomenon in July by saying that loneliness influencers were taking over social media. While conventional influencers built aspirational identities around exotic travel, luxury clothes, immaculate homes, successful relationships and large groups of friends, the emerging creators were building compelling visions of life around precisely what they did not have.

The seemingly mundane content can attract extraordinary audiences.

Lana Issa, a woman in her 20s living in Canada, drew more than 8 million views for a video showing herself spending a Friday evening after work eating frozen pizza alone while watching television.

Issa described it as what a single woman living alone, without children or friends, does on a Friday night. The enormous response to an otherwise uneventful evening suggested that many viewers recognized something of their own lives in hers.

British cleaner Sarah Jane Hoadley, a single woman in her 40s, has similarly built a following by sharing what she portrays as an unremarkable life.

A video showing her cleaning and taking care of her home alone after work surpassed 10 million views. Another, in which she shared her experience of gathering the courage to attend an in-person social event, reached 8 million views.

Hoadley has about 360,000 followers.

Hoadley said in an August interview with the BBC that she had become an influencer by accident, adding that she never expected to get that many followers. The rise of such content comes as single-person households account for a growing share of society, including in Korea.

More people are living alone — and feeling lonely

According to Statistics Korea's "Single-person households in statistics 2025," released last December, one-person households accounted for 36.1 percent of all Korean households in 2024, up from 27.2 percent in 2015 — an increase of 8.9 percentage points.

But the data also points to a less comfortable side of living alone.

In a survey last year, 48.9 percent of people in single-person households said they often or sometimes felt lonely, compared with 38.2 percent of the overall population.

Shin Aromi, author of the essay "What Can I Do If I'm Good at Living Alone?" said the growing visibility of single-person lifestyles on social media is a natural consequence of demographic and social change.

"Social media content ultimately seems to follow the way people actually live," Shin said in an email interview with the Hankook Ilbo on Wednesday. "As the number of single-person households has increased over the past few years and more people no longer consider marriage a necessity, people's actual lives have also changed considerably."

Digital solidarity or deeper isolation?

The loneliness influencer phenomenon may offer something social media was not previously known for: reassurance that an ordinary, solitary life does not necessarily represent personal failure.

Experts say such content can create a form of "digital solidarity," emotionally connecting people who experience loneliness or isolation in their offline lives.

"At a time when single-person households account for more than one-third of all households, I believe solidarity through social media can help people living alone overcome loneliness," said Lim Myung-ho, a psychology professor at Dankook University.

"In the past, people shared only successful aspects of their lives on social media, intensifying social comparison," Lim said. "By contrast, openly expressing feelings of loneliness through social media can also be seen as a change in the function of social media itself."

But embracing solitude comes with a potential risk.

Voluntary solitude — choosing to focus on oneself rather than maintaining unnecessary relationships out of obligation — can have positive effects. Experts caution, however, that prolonged disconnection can turn solitude into social isolation.

"If disconnection from human relationships continues for a long time, people can gradually become comfortable with it, and eventually they may find it difficult to form relationships," said Kwak Keum-joo, professor emeritus of psychology at Seoul National University. "It is necessary to find an appropriate balance between voluntary solitude and maintaining interpersonal relationships."

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, was translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.