FEW paradoxes in our time are stranger than feeling lonely in an increasingly connected world. This is not only an Indian condition — it is universal. Global health studies show chronic loneliness and isolation climbing since 2010, driven by digital displacement and societal shifts — a trend which has become more worrisome since Covid-19.
The irony is that we have never been more reachable. Family WhatsApp groups stretch across continents. School and college groups resurrect friendships half a century old. Instagram keeps us in the lives of people we barely know. Video calls collapse distance, and we can reach almost anyone, almost instantly.
And yet it does not feel the same as two decades ago, when cousins turned up unannounced, and neighbours knew about your fever or your quarrel with your mother before you had finished having it. There were weddings, funerals, cricket on the radio, and the long, purposeless evenings of adda — [a Bengali term for socialisation]. Loneliness existed even then — but it struggled to take root in a life built on genuine interaction. Perhaps it is necessary to examine this beyond the distinction between virtual and physical communication. Being connected is not the same as belonging. Social psychologist John Cacioppo’s work on loneliness established an important point: loneliness is not simply the physical absence of people.
It is the subjective gap between the relationships we have and the relationships we need. People can therefore surround a person and still experience profound loneliness. Going back to Indian philosophy may provide some answers. The question of the self has occupied Indian thought for centuries. Aham — the “I” — is both indispensable and troublesome. It gives us identity, agency and individuality; but the philosophical traditions of India have repeatedly questioned whether this isolated “I” is the whole of who we are.
They could be oppressive, intrusive and hierarchical. They could deny privacy and individual choice. But they also meant that identity was not something one had to manufacture alone. You belonged before you began to define yourself. Modernity dismantled much of that, for good reasons — mobility, privacy, the freedom to choose a profession and a partner. But it also handed the individual a new job: build yourself, and keep building. Into that vacancy walked the mobile phone. It did not invent the self-made self; it gave it better tools. We decide, image by image, how we wish to be seen, narrating our lives to an audience never satisfied. Sherry Turkle called this being “alone together” — endlessly in touch, while remotely controlling our virtual closeness. That control is the trap. Intimacy needs the unedited person; what travels furthest online is the edited one.
A society organised around being seen produces a particular solitude: everyone knows what we are doing, almost nobody knows how we actually are. The promotion gets posted, the anniversary gets posted. Boredom, debt, a stale marriage, the fear of growing oldernone of it photographs well. This is not a simple story about smartphones as villains.
Researchers suggest that the damage depends on whether a call supplements real closeness or replaces it. But the psychologist Jean Twenge, tracking American teenagers, found something harder to dismiss. As face-to-face hours with friends fell and hours on a screen rose, loneliness rose in close proportion, across groups with little else in common. Correlation is not proof, but it suggests a poor substitute.
The psychologist Susan Pinker explains it in physiological terms. Physical presence does what a call cannot: the oxytocin of a hug, the micro-adjustments of tone that steady a nervous system, the fact of being seen when you falter. Proximity is mechanism, not sentiment — quietly withdrawn from millions of lives without anyone voting on it. What is disappearing, then, is not conversation so much as unstructured presence — the condition the adda supplied so effortlessly. The adda is almost useless by contemporary standards. It has no objective, no agenda and no productivity metric. People sat around and talked. About politics. Cricket. Cinema. Someone’s new job. Someone else’s failed marriage. Poetry. Philosophy. Nothing and everything.
The genius of the adda was that relationships could deepen without anybody trying to deepen them. Much of modern life has lost this kind of accidental intimacy. We schedule Zoom calls and social occasions. Even friendship is increasingly organised around events. Strong relationships require ‘wasted’ time. Robust ties connect through patience, friction, the willingness to shoot the breeze and enjoy the experience. The researcher Brené Brown argues connection of this kind has an entry fee — vulnerability, being seen unedited. Curated communication cannot supply that. Unregulated conversations can. Tagore made a version of this argument long before anyone decided to blame a screen.
For him the self was not diminished by relationship but made more fully itself through it — with another person, nature, the wider world. Those organic relationships are worth retrieving — not nostalgia for a joint family that could exclude as easily as embrace, but what it represented which we have forgotten: a self needs an unguarded room to arrange itself, without an audience keeping score. We have built an infrastructure of reach. The harder task now is one of belonging — rooms where nothing has to be achieved and the ‘aham’ can comfortably loosen its grip. Loneliness was never the absence of people. It is the absence of a relationship in which the self no longer has to perform. The most connected Indians in the decades ahead may be those who can put the phone face-down and find that, for a while, nothing more needs to be said. Silence can do the talking.—The Statesman (India)/ANN
Published in Dawn, October 5th, 2026
