Lonely fans
6/26/202626 min
No friends, no kids, no partner. You might think their lives are sad, but loneliness influencers are attracting huge followings.
This episode was produced by Kelli Wessinger, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King.
Screenshot from Lana Isa's Instagram account in which she charts her life as a single girl with no friends, no partner and no kids.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsNoel King· Host0:00
[gentle music] A new type of online influencer just dropped, or so we're told, loneliness influencers. These young women don't brag about their vacations or their possessions. They've gained big followings just from posting videos about being alone.
Lana Eissa· Guest0:13
Being a content creator is so fucking lonely.
Noel King· Host0:18
Are you lonely? I'm lonely sometimes. Not quite like that, no. These videos are often much quieter, and they're captioned with things like...
Lana Eissa· Guest0:26
POV: You're a single and child-free girl that has no friends and lives alone, and it's a Saturday night. POV: You live alone in NYC and have no friends, so this is how you spend your night after work.
Noel King· Host0:40
They say they aren't unhappy.
Lana Eissa· Guest0:41
It's been two years since I last had a friend or any romantic feelings for anyone, and I've never been happier.
Noel King· Host0:46
Hmm. Coming up on Today Explained, we're gonna ask her some questions.
Speaker 30:49
[gentle music] Support for this show today comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. With deep research, Claude's research capabilities go way deeper than basic web search. Comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into