In early 2025, an app was created, several variations of which have since been released. The premise is that you can cancel plans with a friend without awkwardness. If you secretly want to cancel, you can go to the app and press a button. If the other person decides the same, the plans are cancelled. And if the choice is just yours, then the other person will never know that you didn’t want their company.
While this app does not seem to have gained much traction, it is a symptom of a concerning phenomenon.
The Intended Purpose of Loneliness
Loneliness is meant to feel uncomfortable. By design, it pushes us to step out into the possibility of rejection, with the understanding that social discomfort is preferable to the discomfort of solitude. And yet, for the first time in history, many young adults are willingly choosing social isolation.
Statistically, my generation, Gen Z, is the loneliest generation in history. The arrival of the pandemic in formative years as well as the ubiquity of personal technology have enabled a seamless shift away from raw human connection. Relationships, like all good things, are difficult to maintain. But they are necessary to human flourishing, as evidenced by the way that humans naturally crave the companionship of others. Or as we read in the first pages of the Bible, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18).
Among Gen Z, dating has plummeted in frequency, and both mental and physical health is worse than in any other living generation.1 Technology has enabled a new state of affairs: instead of reinforcing relationships within existing social circles, as has been the norm for all of human history, young people can now access relationships with far more people than ever before. And these relationships can be started or ended at a moment’s notice without any social repercussions.2
This is to make no mention of the “relationship” that one develops with the device itself. Phones have now been shown to cater to core human psychological attachment needs. Hence why some people sneak off to the bathroom to watch videos or type away in the presence of others, instead of venturing to make conversation.
What Socializing Demands of Us
Social interaction is not frictionless. Relationships of all kinds demand something, whether it is time, the possibility of rejection, sacrifice, or the gradual building of trust and intimacy. This is true, of course, of all human relationships. But in the case of digital ones, the same rules do not apply.
A relationship with technology is one that is sustained and nurtured by convenience at the cost of meaningful human connection. Its constant availability as a reliable source of dopamine softens the edge of loneliness, and it caters to our own individual interests and pleasures—whatever our attention span. Examined alongside the price of gas, the prospect of awkward silence, and the potential that conversation might focus on something besides our own vanity, a night in with one’s phone becomes the natural choice.
Christ Demands All
If Gen Z becomes accustomed to relationships that demand nothing, they will not learn the skill of relational sacrifice, with direct spiritual implications. After all, a relationship with Christ Jesus demands everything from us. A half-hearted relationship with God is the kind that he detests (see Rev. 3:15–16).
While salvation in Christ is a free gift of grace through the gospel, an ongoing, life-sustaining relationship with Christ requires that we be willing to leave behind every earthly comfort, every material source of joy, and every fleeting hope that is grounded in our own sense of what is good for us. To pick up our cross daily and follow Christ, as we have been called, comes into conflict with our own sinful desires (see Luke 9:23).
Developing a relationship with Christ involves discomfort of almost every kind. Our self-esteem is not coddled, as we are reminded constantly of our own weakness and subsequent dependence on him. As is mirrored in a small way by our relationships with others, a relationship with Jesus requires that we disengage from material comforts long enough to experience his presence. In these small ways, the demands of genuine human relationships train us for the demands of a relationship with Christ.
God’s voice carries authority within itself, and does not compete for our attention alongside a glowing blue screen. Technology has its place, but we should never allow it to draw us away from real, “frictioned” relationships through false digital companionship.
The discomfort of loneliness is meant to push us to genuine human connection, though it may demand something of us. If we find ourselves feeling lonely, let us use it as a catalyst for relationships with those around us—and ultimately with our Maker.
The Christian life is not easy, but knowing Christ gives us a hope and a joy that we can never get from a phone.
1 Bruce, Liana DesHarnais, Joshua S. Wu, Stuart L. Lustig, Daniel W. Russell, and Douglas A. Nemecek. “Loneliness in the United States: A 2018 National Panel Survey of Demographic, Structural, Cognitive, and Behavioral Characteristics,” American Journal of Health Promotion 33, no. 8 (2019): 1123–1133.
2 Michael J. Rosenfeld, Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen, “Disintermediating Your Friends: How Online Dating in the United States Displaces Other Ways of Meeting,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 36 (2019): 17753–17758.
