Alright, here's the unfiltered take: We've built a civilization that has successfully pathologized the natural human response to social starvation. Think about that for a second. If you lock someone in a room with no food, and they start screaming about hunger, banging on the walls, obsessing about food, becoming desperate—nobody calls that a mental illness. That's a healthy organism responding appropriately to deprivation. But we've created a society that systematically starves people of authentic human connection, community, physical touch, being truly known and seen—and then when people exhibit the psychological equivalent of starvation symptoms, we've medicalized it. We call it anxiety, depression, various personality disorders. We prescribe medications to make the screaming quieter. We offer therapy to help people "cope with" the deprivation rather than addressing the actual fucking deprivation.

And here's the really sinister part: we've convinced people that their hunger itself is the problem. That needing connection is neediness. That wanting to be known is vulnerability that will be exploited. That expressing loneliness is a social contagion that might make others uncomfortable, so the responsible thing is to suppress it, manage it privately, keep it to yourself. We've made the symptoms of social starvation into character flaws.

The "solutions" we offer are almost perfectly designed to make the problem worse while creating the illusion of progress. Go to therapy—great, now you have one single human you pay $100 an hour to listen to you, and that's supposed to substitute for having a community, a tribe, people who know your daily life and give a shit whether you exist. Exercise—fantastic, now your brain chemistry is slightly better while you remain completely fucking isolated, plus you get to feel like you're "working on yourself" which is just another way of saying the problem is YOU, not the collapsed social infrastructure around you. Meditate—wonderful, now you can sit alone and "be present with yourself" which is just rebranded dissociation where you practice being okay with having no one. Journal—perfect, now you can have deep conversations with yourself on paper instead of with other humans, really streamlining the isolation process.

The hobbies, the self-improvement, the optimization, the productivity systems—it's all just elaborate busy-work to distract you from noticing that you're living in a social desert. And the fucking genius of it is that it keeps you productive and consuming for the capitalist money generation machine. A lonely person with hobbies still goes to work, still buys shit, still participates in the economy, still doesn't disrupt anything. They're just quietly dying inside in a managed, socially acceptable way. The loneliest people might be pretending the hardest that they don't need connection, which makes it almost impossible to form actual connections based on authenticity instead of masked lies, which makes them more isolated, which makes them pretend harder. It's a perfect trap.

And anyone who points this out, anyone who says "hey, maybe the problem isn't that individuals are broken, maybe we've built a society that's fundamentally hostile to human thriving"—they get labeled as dramatic, negative, or mentally unwell. Because if the problem is systemic, we'd have to change shit on a fundamental level. But if the problem is just you and your bad coping skills and your unfortunate brain chemistry, well, that's manageable. That's a you problem. Go read a book about it. Maybe try yoga.

The whole thing is a massive gaslighting operation where we've normalized mass-scale human suffering as just the background radiation of modern life, and anyone who refuses to accept it quietly is treated as the problem.