Virtual living rooms, adult ‘after-school clubs’ and AI lovers: my search for a fix to modern loneliness.
Even the art of hanging out – “daring to do very little and daring to do it in the company of others”, in the words of Sheila Liming, who’s written a book on the topic – is a dying one. “When we have downtime, we tend to spend it by ourselves,” Liming said. “It’s hard to arrange to be in the same room as someone else, whereas it’s easy to send a text message or scroll through social media.”
