Every morning I wake up and check in on my friends.
One’s in New York making a protein smoothie. Another's in LA getting her biweekly spray tan. A third is in London telling me how their ex traumatized them. None of these people know who I am.
I’m spending my time watching them rather than hanging out with my actual friends. Honestly, I probably spend more time “catching up” with my favourite influencers than I do with my own sister. If I disappeared tomorrow, though, my digital “friends” would continue uploading two-part GRWMs everyday.
The funny thing is, this isn’t just me – I hope. It’s part of a much wider shift in how Gen Z relates to people online. It's not just that we’ve become obsessed with celebrities like our mothers were with John from the Beatles. Instead, we’ve become accustomed to building one-sided relationships with people we see everyday.
This isn’t necessarily anyone's fault. Smart phones and social media have saturated our lives with other people’s faces, voices, problems, and morning routines. But what does that actually do to us? Should we copy the Critic Editor, buy flip phones and disappear into the bushes? Probably not.
To be clear, this isn’t another “Gen Z’s fucked” or “all we do is scroll” lecture. What interests me is how the internet has changed what friendship feels like – not by replacing our real relationships, but by surrounding us with hundreds of one-sided ones.
The Friend in Your Pocket
The National Library of Medicine defines parasocial relationships as “nonreciprocal socio-emotional connections with media figures such as celebrities or influencers.”
This phenomenon was coined by researchers Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956 to describe people's perceived relationships with media personalities. Back then, this largely meant viewers feeling like they “knew” the person talking to them through the television.
Today, though, social media doesn't just let us watch people. It deliberately creates the feeling that we’re participating in their lives.
There used to be a very obvious line between us and the screen. Taylor Swift wasn’t talking to you personally; she was talking to reporters. Angelina Jolie wasn’t your friend; she was a hot woman on a cinema screen. Becoming deeply certain that a celebrity personally knew or cared about you was, generally speaking, considered a bit cooked.
Influencers are different. They're not presenting themselves as some celebrity out of our reach but rather as everyday people like you and me. They talk directly to their cameras from their bedrooms and bathrooms. They ask: “What should I name my new puppy?” “What outfit should I wear to this wedding?” “What would you do in my position?” Comment sections have become less of an audience and more of a group chat. They reply, they like and they pin. We are no longer simply consuming content. We’re being invited to actively participate in their life – and we eat it up.
That’s part of what makes influencer culture so different from the old-school celebrity culture that inspired the OG idea of parasocial relationships. It’s not so much one person becoming widely obsessed with one celebrity. It can be dozens – even hundred – of tiny one sided connections accumulated during one scroll session before bed. Most of them only last the length of the video. If you saw half these people walking down George Street, would you even recognise them?
And yet, for 40 seconds, you've listened to their break-up story, decided whether their ex sucks, chosen which dress they should wear and emotionally invested yourself in whether their cousin’s wedding will have vegetarian options. The relationship is still one-sided, but social media makes that one side feel surprisingly intimate.
The Loneliness Economy
Okay, so we’re all emotionally invested in the little people inside our phones. Why?
Well, the science is simple: we’re lonely.
Gen Z consistently reports high levels of loneliness. One survey by GWI found that only 15% of Gen Z said they had never felt lonely in the previous year, compared with 54% of Baby Boomers. Okay Boomers! Friendmog us!
Great news, obviously. And I hate to say it, but it gets worse. When the science says we’re lonely, companies hear another thing to capitalise. The loneliness economy is basically the market that has sprung up around people having fewer meaningful social connections and more money to spend trying to feel less weird about it. We’re sad, socially fucked, and apparently exteremly susceptable to monetisation. The intimacy influencers cultivate isn't just good for our lonely little hearts – it’s good for business, too.
A 2024 study analysing 7,285 Instagram posts from 215 fashion and beauty influencers found that stronger interactions between influencers and followers were associated with stronger parasocial relationships. Which makes sense. If a random skincare ad tells you to buy a $70 moisturiser, you scroll past. If your Internet bestie tells you it “literally saved her skin” while sitting cross-legged on her bathroom floor in pyjamas, suddenly your Afterpay account is in danger.
The most obvious place to observe the loneliness economy is, of course, in the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Chatbots are no longer things you use when you need to figure out how to cancel a subscription. They’re advisers, therapists, and sometimes the only one who will reply to you at ridiculous-o'clock in the morning when everyone else in your flat is asleep — or loudly having sex and reminding you that you are, in fact, alone. Using ChatGPT as your friend or therapist is already embarrassingly mainstream, so we naturally have AI made specifically for emotional companionship. Replika markets itself as an AI companion, while Character.AI lets you become emotionally intimate with basically anyone your Internet-poisoned heart desires. Fictional characters, celebrities, anime waifus, morally questionable daddies – you freaks know who you are. Millions of people are using these things, which probably says less about us being uniquely deranged and more about how appealing it is to talk to something that is always available, always interesting, and never says “Sorry!!! just saw this” three days later.
The less obvious version is online body doubling. Your favourite “Study with me” YouTuber, Lofi Girl, or random person livestreaming themselves doing readings in a library all give you the feeling that someone else is there suffering alongside you. A 2026 study about “study with me” videos found that features designed to increase the sense of another person's presence were associated with greater concentration, lower loneliness and stronger persistence with studying. So yes – watching a stranger highlight articles for three hours might actually help you finish your own readings. Central Library could probably just project a giant Lofi Girl onto the wall and save us all.
It gets weirder when the apps themselves start acting like your friends. I woke up this morning, checked my phone and had no messages from family or friends. Duolingo, however, was proud of me. Some animated owl is telling me I'm doing amazing. My fitness app is telling me not to break my streak, and some cartoon creature would be disappointed in me if I didn't take my vitamins. These products are selling us companionship without the inconvenience of another human being. Companies didn't create our loneliness, but they’ve become very good at profiting off of filling in the gaps.
Go Outside, Loser
On a less grim note, parasocial relationships aren't inherently bad. There's nothing wrong with having a favourite YouTuber, using a study buddy app, or even getting weirdly emotionally invested in an influencer's break-up. Research has found parasocial relationships can provide feelings of connection and community, help people cope and even support identity exploration. The issue is when the fake-easy friendships start becoming more appealing than the real-hard ones.
Real friendships are less convenient. You can’t pause your flatmate because they're telling you the same story for the fourth time, double-tap your sister’s breakdown and move on, or fast forward on your overly chatty friend. Real people require admin. Showing up, listening, engaging, compromise, and occasionally leaving your room and having a shower. That’s also why they’re better.
None of this is revolutionary. A How To Make Friends guide has existed on WikiHow for over a decade. The way to make friends hasn't fundamentally changed – we've just got infinitely more convenient alternatives now. Parasocial relationships haven't exploded because Gen Z is uniquely obsessed with celebrities or particularly socially useless. They've exploded because the internet has turned ordinary people, apps, and even AI into a constant, reliable, easy source of companionship. Real friendship, unfortunately, still requires leaving your room and risking being perceived. But don’t stress too much – half of the friendships in Dunedin are just repeatedly seeing the same person in different contexts until eventually you both give up and become mates. Get out there!
Anyways. I’m going to go ask my sister to get lunch with me now.
