‘We are not lonely’: Solitude as a new aspirational lifestyle

It’s a Friday night. A young woman trudges back to her apartment after a day of work. She enters a spotless kitchen, unloads a bag of groceries, and unwraps a frozen pizza before sliding it in the oven.

What follows is a nightly routine that is almost meditative in its mundanity: she lights a candle and gazes briefly at the snow-covered landscape outside her window, piles a premade salad onto a plate with the pizza, and settles on her sofa to eat in front of the TV.

The tagline that accompanies the scene reads: “POV you’re a childfree and single girl that has no friends and lives alone so this is how you spend your Friday night.”

At the centre of the video – which has amassed seven million views on TikTok – is Lana Isa, a software sales manager in her 20s based in Toronto.

In addition to chronicling her nightly self-care routines, she takes her almost 400,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram on late-night fast food drives, reading sessions perched on a rock by the lake, even a saga of getting locked out of her apartment in the middle of the night.

Isa is part of a growing, albeit niche corner of the internet where content creators, many of them women, share their daily rituals of living alone, choosing to spotlight a lifestyle that prioritises peace and solitude – the antithesis of social media excess.

For Isa, unveiling the “no friends” aspect of her life was less of a tagline, but the “reality” she had been living for several years.