The rise of synthetic relationships

Much has been said about the immediate effects of the pandemic - on mental health, digital consumption, and the reinvention of work. But a few years later, we're still uncovering deeper impacts of that period. One of them seems particularly transformative: the erosion of our relational skills and, perhaps more alarming, our very willingness to engage in “organic” human interaction.

The pandemic didn’t create loneliness, but it seems to have accelerated a trend of social withdrawal that was already gaining traction around the world. What we’re seeing now goes beyond a preference for remote work or binge-watching instead of meeting up with friends. It’s a reorganization of bonds: with less physical presence, less tolerance for ambiguity and frustration. And more mediated, transactional, substitutive, and more recently, synthetic relationships - are they a cause, a consequence, or neither?

What's the current state of social isolation and loneliness around the world?

It seems to be a global phenomenon, albeit with highly distinct expressions in different cultures.

Asia

• In Japan, extreme social withdrawal is a long-standing issue. The hikikomori, defined as people who don’t leave home for at least six months without a diagnosed psychiatric condition, number around 1.46 million aged 15-64 - nearly 2% of the total population. There's even research exploring hikikomori as a global phenomenon, not just a Japanese issue. Nightlife, traditionally tied to work culture, is also declining, due to economic and cultural shifts.

• In South Korea, the numbers are also striking. A 2023 Ministry of Health report revealed that over 5% of young people aged 19–39 live in social isolation, many not leaving their homes for weeks or months at a time.

• In India, there’s been a notable drop in multigenerational households (from 34% to a projected 27%, according to census data), long a cultural staple. Academic literature links this shift to increased loneliness among the elderly. But other studies also point to rising loneliness among young people and teenagers.

• In China, population aging and a large gender imbalance are significant factors. 28% of older adults report being affected by loneliness. Meanwhile, among younger people, paid companionship services - for shopping, chatting, gaming, etc. - are gaining popularity.

Europe

• A survey by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre found that 13% of adults in the EU reported feeling lonely “most or all of the time” in the past four weeks, though there's major variation between countries and regions.

• In Paris and Barcelona, studies suggest that weekend pedestrian traffic is still below pre-pandemic levels, possibly indicating a shift in public social engagement.

United States

• One major study shows Americans are increasingly homebound, with activities that used to be done outside - like eating out, attending religious services, and education - now happening more frequently at home.

• A Gallup poll shows a gender gap: 25% of men aged 15-34 said they felt “very lonely” the previous day, compared to 18% of women in the same age group - well above the 15% average in other wealthy countries.

• The latest World Happiness Report noted that 25% of young people in the U.S. eat every meal alone, a 53% increase since 2003.

• Despite media focus on youth, loneliness actually peaks in midlife there.

• As dating apps enter a crisis, we’re seeing the rise of agentic dating apps, and even demos like Cluely - an AI sales assistant repurposed as a “dating co-pilot”. Some of those things make Black Mirror seem more like a trend report than social critique. And we’re only beginning to see the second-order effects emerge.

What about Brazil?

• During the pandemic, a global survey ranked Brazil highest for perceived loneliness: 50% of Brazilians reported feeling lonely, compared to a global average of 33%, and 43% said it negatively affected their mental health.

• Later, a robust study by PoderData found that, by a small margin, young people are the least likely of all age groups to see friends in person daily or weekly. Another study by the same institute shows that the number of people with no friends is rising, a trend that also shows up among underage teenagers in IBGE’s national youth survey (PeNSE).

Our social muscles are atrophying - but is this just a digital side effect?

Esther Perel, a psychotherapist specializing in intimacy, has been talking about social atrophy for a while now. For her, it’s the loss of basic relational skills - listening attentively, tolerating ambiguity, coping with frustration - driven by a context where human relationships are increasingly rare, mediated, or avoided altogether. She argues that while the pandemic accelerated this erosion, it didn’t cause it. The roots lie in digital hyperconnectivity, our obsession with efficiency, and the medicalization of emotional discomfort - creating a culture of low tolerance for otherness. Perel says we’re less exposed to everyday interpersonal conflict and, therefore, less prepared for the inherent friction of real, unfiltered relationships.

To avoid scapegoating a single culprit - culture, social media, the pandemic, or whatever - let’s zoom out!

It’s a multifactorial phenomenon - but time and money are always in the picture

We can’t take the economy out of the equation. The post-pandemic cost-of-living crisis - driven by inflation, wage stagnation, and labor precarity - has fueled social withdrawal, even in wealthy countries. In Australia, for example, one-third of the population is looking for a second job just to make ends meet. Around the world, seeing friends, going out, or simply moving through a city is bumping up against tighter budgets. If socializing requires planning and spontaneity disappears, public life withers.

A recent UN study shows that finances are one of the biggest barriers to having children in many countries. A brand-new academic paper even links the changing role of dogs in society to falling birth rates, especially in the West and wealthy Asia - a sign of substitutive bonds, perhaps. I’ve also already written about the growing importance of DINKs in Brazil in shorter content.

Time is a key factor here too - philosophically (what we prioritize) and behaviorally (how we actually spend it).

Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-born philosopher, describes our modern relationship with time as oscillating between self-exploitation and burnout - leading to a constant, generalized exhaustion. Another, lesser-known philosopher, Will Davies, writes about how competition has become a core trait of individuals, not just markets, and how the logic of economic efficiency is now applied to everything - including ourselves. That makes time a resource to be exploited to the limit, with chronic stress and anxiety as byproducts.

Looking at actual time use, some patterns are obvious. That “quick scroll” on Instagram that turns into 20 minutes sounds more appealing than calling a friend who might be busy or wants to vent instead of listening to you vent. As well as canceled hangouts, difficulty making plans, shrinking friend circles... Meanwhile, your Android Digital Wellbeing or iOS Screen Time data tells on you - how do we lack time for some things but have too much for others? If we’re always tired and overwhelmed, constantly performing and delivering (often self-imposed), it’s easier to justify small indulgences or distractions. Especially because how we perceive time is context-dependent and entirely subjective. The problem is, the cumulative effect of these convenient choices may be weakening our bonds - and, by extension, ourselves. I’ve written about this before too.

Often, it’s humans who frustrate us - the boss, the client, the coworker, the partner, the family member, the child. So maybe avoiding rejection, silence, hostility, or disappointment from others is a strong motivator behind our turn to mediated alternatives - ones where we retain the illusion of control. That would suggest we’re becoming more avoidant, and therefore lonelier. If we want to look beyond the symptoms and self-reporting, we have to ask: what markets are being reshaped by these behaviors? What else are they connected to?

The normalization of transactional intimate relationships - is it happening?

The hype around sugar relationships has cooled down in the media - it even made it into a Brazilian soap opera plotline back in 2019 - but that doesn’t mean the market has disappeared or stagnated. A quick look at the numbers in Brazil:

• The top 3 sugar dating platforms by user base in Brazil are MeuPatrocínio (15.7 million), Universo Sugar (2.5 million), and SugarDaddyMeet (1 million), the only international one. Depending on user overlap, we’re talking about 7 to 9% of the entire Brazilian population!

• The first thing that stands out is the oversupply of sugar babies (a term that applies to both men and women) compared to daddies and mommies - that is, far more people are willing to offer companionship and potentially sex for money than to pay for it, with different ratios depending on the platform.

• The stereotype would have us imagine middle-aged men with much younger women, but that’s not quite what the data says. On MeuPatrocínio, the average age of sugar babies is 27, and of daddies, 37. The latter report an average monthly income of R$141,000 and personal wealth over R$13 million - putting them in 0,1% earning levels.

• 83% of sugar daddies registered on the platform in Brasília are married.

So, what are we seeing here? A digital transformation of the traditional “mistress” setup with a better-defined service level agreement? A looser form of sex work? An attempt to eliminate ambiguity? A utilitarian or even nihilistic take on intimacy? Yet another break from the ideal of romantic love? Elsewhere, scholars are already digging into the nuances…

Parasocial relationships - from paid access to simulated intimacy

A parasocial relationship is a one-sided emotional bond with someone who does not reciprocate or even acknowledge it. I’ve written before about parasocial ties with public figures on social media, and how these people - and the behaviors they inspire - should not be treated as representative of society at large. I also touched on the idea of collective illusions - how our perception of reality shifts based on what we believe to be consensus, exposing just how impressionable we really are. It helps explain the massive online buzz around reborn babies (another parasocial bond!), despite the market being rather small.

That chart showing OnlyFans as the company with the highest revenue per employee in the world made the rounds in tech media recently. But beyond replacing the now-irrelevant glamour magazines for which the appeal was nude public figures, content creators - including subcelebrities and athletes, just like in the old days - and the classic Instagram/TikTok thirst traps, have struck gold. But it’s the intermediaries that are making huge money.

In Brazil, the market is so hot we have a local player, Privacy, with over 16 million users, which may have already surpassed OnlyFans in traffic volume - and it has already expanded to other Latin American countries.

What the numbers don’t show is what users are actually looking for - it goes beyond sexual images or paying to own a piece of an idealized figure, like Belle Delphine’s bathwater or, more recently, Sydney Sweeney’s. The top-earning creators say they’re doing emotional labor, above all. So much so that these simulated interactions have made intimacy at scale an industry of its own, complete with call centers - sitting right at the border between parasocial and transactional. Naturally, the model has already been localized and adapted to the Brazilian market, sometimes using entirely AI-generated models. Which brings us to…

The rise of 100% synthetic relationships

At a recent event, Sam Altman remarked that younger users are already relying on his tool to make major life decisions. Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is hoping to solve loneliness with “AI friends.”

A growing number of scholars are now analyzing our “relationships” with AI as parasocial, examining the asymmetry and its troubling effects: habit formation, emotional investment, attachment, dependency, even delusions.

It’s easy to dismiss all this as nostalgic hand-wringing from older folks trying to convince the young that “things used to be better.” But the techno-optimist comparison to calculators or GPS misses the mark. Our spatial awareness and mental math skills are infinitely less critical to our current survival - and to our humanity - than our capacity for building meaningful relationships.

Could we be repeating that early “crush” phase we had with social media? The honeymoon period where everything felt revolutionary, exciting, and free - until we collectively woke up, sometimes painfully, to the realization that we were the product all along? We’ve seen what happens when it’s finally time to monetize the user base…

More knowledge jobs and the widespread adoption of cars and appliances have reduced our daily physical effort, making sedentary lives the norm. The scale and convenience of processed food turned poverty’s physical form from malnutrition to obesity, and led to the emergence of food deserts even in urban areas. Expanded access is a win, yes - but we can’t overlook how much cost and convenience shape our choices.

What if the combination of economic incentive, scalability, and ease pushes synthetic (or semi-synthetic) bonds so far into the mainstream that forming real, organic, unmediated human intimacy becomes a conscious effort - like exercising or cutting junk food - something we must deliberately choose, because too little friction comes at a huge long-term cost?

What if this is already happening, to some extent? If the sea of AI slop that has already flooded LinkedIn and Instagram - both with narrative crutches like “This isn’t a simple change — it’s a real revolution!” talking about things like Labubus, and with endless parroting of clichés - is a sign of our near future as a society, in this wacky race where we ask a machine for help to be socially validated by another? The threat is not the use itself, but killing the market for alternatives.

AI girlfriends are not real girlfriends, AI therapists are not real therapy, synthetic personas are not real human beings who live or buy real products. Our willingness to replace real relationships with crude simulacra - whether because we can’t handle the frustrations that dealing with others imposes or just for convenience - suggests that what we really should fear is not the dystopian fantasy of machine domination, but that we become more and more mechanical, robotic, obsessed with efficiencies that drain the meaning of things, and less and less capable of reading context with the naked eye.

If this is the context, what if more brands were true enablers of unfiltered human connection instead of just attention grabbers? Wouldn’t it be better to prepare for this future now, instead of denying it until the last moment and ending up as the villains? It can be as big as Vivo’s campaign, or as small and sensitive as the Dutch supermarket that created a separate checkout line for people who want to chat with cashiers - mostly older, lonely customers.

To finish, this month’s recommendation is a really interesting analysis by Derek Thompson on the subject, which frames loneliness more as a lower social predisposition and partly voluntary - matching what I said earlier about avoidant tendencies. But keep in mind he’s talking about the American context!

Thanks for reading all the way through, see you next month!