This is a guest post by Richard Armstrong who is an early stage investor in many startups in both SE Asia and globally. Plus Richard has cofounded several companies.
Guest Author: Richard Armstrong
I’m a very deep believer in the threat of loneliness to society. We spend more and more time on our computers rather than outside meeting our friends.
Not just among adults but among kids too.
Have a look at this chart below, which is based on some data that was gathered in the US. It compares 1990 to 2021.
The number of men that no close friends went from like 3% to 15%. I mean that is 5x!
The other telling sign is the number of men reporting 10+ close friends decreased from 40% to just 15%. A decline of almost 3x.
This is a massive societal change in just 31 years. And we would be naive to think it is only happening in the US. It is happening here in SE Asia as well. I see it all around me.
People want friends, but they just don’t have them
I was having this discussion with a friend of mine not too long ago. And my friend was arguing that perhaps people today are happier spending time online, and thus they don’t want to have friends as much as they did in the past.
I don’t think this is the case at all. I have a number of friends that consider themselves fairly lonely and they ALL want more good friends.
I think it is just part of human nature.
The question is.. how do you go about solving this problem of loneliness?
You would think that the Internet should be terrific at solving it. Because we can join online communities that help us meeting like-minded people and then we can meet and befriend them in real life.
But the reality is that this happens far less than it should.
And even when people are still in school and are surrounded by people all day… they are still spending less time with friends.
Here is some interesting data taken from teens in the US.
See how the number of teens meeting with their friends regularly is on a sharp decline?
These are teens who probably sit in class surrounded by others all day… but still go home after school and probably just stay there alone.
Why is this happening?
I think the answer to loneliness is going to be a complex one
As in I don’t completely buy the argument that we should blame it all on our phones and our computers.
Some of the loneliest people I have met do not spend a lot of time on their phones.
In part because they don’t have nearly as much to do on their phones. They don’t have that many friends on social networks, and oftentimes they remove themselves from the popular social networks altogether.
Rather I think there are also physical elements to why loneliness is blowing up. We as humans are not nearly as healthy as we were thirty years ago.
Just look at obesity rates and the skyrocketing of things like neurological diseases. There is something that is physically changing in us that is contributing to the problem.
And we need to figure out how to reverse it.
I do also think AI can be ‘part’ of the solution
There are a lot of interesting initiatives in the AI space that I think will be interesting to track how they evolve.
For example, Marjorie is a 23-year-old Snapchat influencer with 1.8 million subscribers, and she created her own chatbot, CarynAI.
As she says she is “the first influencer transformed into AI.” Fans can talk to the AI version of her and in just the first week she earned $71,610 from only ~1,000 beta testers, meaning that the average user spent over an hour chatting with CarynAI at $1 / minute.
There’s another one i’ve heard about a few times called Replika with many users falling in love with their chatbots.
While I do see such technologies playing a large in the future… I do not see them removing the need for human companionship. Mainly because they do not have real emotions, they can only mimic them.
Wrapping up
There was a story a friend told me not long ago of a woman who was devastated because of the hundred or so people who had RSVP’d “yes” to her wedding, fewer than 40 showed up.
She ended up shortening her ceremony and cancelling her reception.
And honestly.. she’s probably in a much better situation that most folks. Most people these days probably would not even have close to 100 friends that they could invite to their wedding.
This is the reality of the world we’re in now. We as humans are in pain. On the inside.
And we need to figure out what are the true causes so that we can address them.
The technology advances that enable this in the coming years… will be massive in my view.
