Despair and loneliness in the digital age

An essay on the creeping feeling of hopelessness in a world more connected than ever before.

This is a personal essay I cobbled together and wanted to share, in a quick break away from sports this week. Don’t worry — we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week.

---

I think I’ve finally managed to give up Twitter for good.

I refuse to call it by its new name, the letter that marks the spot of the disaster it has become. As a violently addicted doomscroller, this was embarrassingly harder than it should have been. I had the guts of 15 years of thoughts and (bad) takes, a reasonably large following of people I did and didn’t know, active digital friends I loved conversing with and stranger voyeurs.

I remember when it was a burgeoning bastion of hope for the social age. When people shared life news, Twitpics of their days and reveled in hope and optimism for each other, connecting worlds and hobbies and interests that otherwise never would have integrated.

I shared thoughts on sport and news and whatever tickled my fancy, usually with a dash of humour and lightheartedness. But that version of social media struggles to shine as brightly as it used to anymore. Now, even in the chaos of the feed, I feel an overarching sense of loneliness. A hollowing. A helplessness in what the algorithm serves up daily on a platter.

What finally broke me was a clip from Gaza. It was grainy, indistinguishable — but the pain within was unmistakable. I made the grievous decision to scroll down towards the replies. The first comment came from a blue-ticked account with 11 followers, an AI-generated profile photo, and a soulless prompt to Grok — Twitter’s compromised built-in AI — asking if the video was real. Grok didn’t respond

Every day there was something new. If it wasn’t a video from Gaza, it was another hate-fueled headline. Racism. Transphobia. Suffering, compounding in an unending feed of despair. Our timelines, now algorithmically tuned to amplify outrage and pain, have become pipelines of human misery — curated, gamified, and weaponised by avatars with no consequence. Not the public square Elon purported it to be.

Recently, two young men seeking international protection drowned whilst playing in the waters of Donegal. Emmanuel Familola, 16, and Matt Sibanda, 18. A devastating story for the small community of Buncrana. News publications would report the news, they’d share their pictures. Straight away I knew what the comment sections would attract. Everybody knew. Blue-ticked accounts. AI-generated avatars. Irish flags in their bios. Likely seeded with American-borne bigotry. And yet — I looked. I had to. I needed to enrage myself, to confirm the rot. That empathy is evaporating. That the worst people can speak the loudest and face no repercussion. That social media has let it all fester. I needed to confirm to myself for probably the fifth time that week that the world has lot all empathy, all detachment from reality.

The erosion of society can be directly linked back to the advent of social media. For what began as a novel way of staying in touch with old friends and making new ones, it has turned into platforms driven on despair and misinformation, ran on algorithmic cruelty and a detachment from real life suffering, incentivizing even more rage in one, continuous hateful loop. We are fed by algorithms designed for engagement, and nothing engages like outrage, fear, and hatred. The more numb we become, the deeper the platforms dig, the more emboldened the power players that orchestrate it all.

---

At the weekend, I had an interaction that felt like those comment sections coming to life.

It was early. I was enjoying a morning coffee in the sunshine when a passing “lovely morning, isn’t it” to the gentleman next to me turned into a lecture about chemtrails, about how every morning they are geo-seeding our airs in an effort to brainwash the population. He told me to wipe the dust off my car and check for its magnetism properties, that its full of harmful chemicals that are killing us. As I wiped the sleep from my eyes, this was guy was alert, focused, booming with information. He was sharp and continued down rants about fiat currency scams, that vaccines are killing the population.

I nodded despairingly at his notions in an effort to get the interaction over and done with, as he opened the Telegram app on his phone and showed me the dozens and dozens of groups he’s in with people around the world sharing this information. I don’t know if he sensed the skepticism off me, but I found it notable that amidst his tirade of information he paused to show me that he’s not alone, that he’s found community and place with others in this vocation.

I don’t know what this man’s story was but twenty years ago, he’d be a crank lurking in the extreme confines of fringe message boards. Today, his worldview is nurtured, validated and amplified. He wasn't trying to convert me. He just wanted to be heard. A normal looking guy also enjoying his morning caffeine, but living in a world so completely alien to mine.

He wasn’t really trying to convince me. He just wanted someone to listen. We’re all shouting into the void in different ways, hoping an echo bounces back with a like or a heart or a share. Hoping someone, or something, sees us and listens to us.

The loneliness epidemic is the ongoing trend of loneliness and social isolation experienced by people across the globe. Surveys have found one in four adults feel a sense of loneliness, in a world more connected than ever. When Mark Zuckerberg says that the future will see the rise of AI friends that “know” and “understand” us better than anyone, he wasn’t lying. Because he has the power to make it so. People will connect with artificial intelligent friends because it is comforting to them and profitable to Zuckerberg.

Just like that man found belonging in Telegram groups.

Just like others find unity in shared hatred.

And others, like me, who found community in Twitter, swapping sports takes and jokes and everyday life. And yet, it had become more lonely than ever. Even as I was surrounded by timelines full of people, my sense of empathy had been eroded. Everything was becoming noise.

Because there’s only so much suffering you can scroll past before it impacts you. Only so much sense of hopelessness one can expel, another sigh at yet another example of our world eating itself alive. A like, a share, momentary blast of dopamine helping stem the tide of loneliness and despair. Children dying in videos that autoplay before I can even process. Me, completely powerless yet witness to so much pain. My relationship with empathy dulled, depleted — hijacked by the digital world we’ve created.