Millennial micro-aggression policing & the cult of ghosting. We are a very lonely specious with the illusion of 24/7 social media connection

How every family has a Prince Harry: the rise of adult family estrangement

A US survey of 1,340 Americans aged over 18 found that 27% of them were currently estranged from a parent or sibling. Sibling estrangement was the most common, with rifts between parents and adult children close behind. Meanwhile, as a knock-on effect of parental alienation, estrangement between children and grandparents is also on the rise, with aunt, uncle and cousin relationships obviously impacted too.

In other words, it’s not just Harry. Although his situation does run the gamut.

The craze of policing micro aggressions is driven my Millennials.

I suspect it is easier to fight micro aggressions than challenge the neoliberal economic hegemony.

The cult of the subjective rage that now dominates the cultural landscape makes any connection toxic and impossible to navigate.

The cult of ghosting is upon us.

Rational objective logic is now a heteronormative white cis male privilege so subjective feelings are the new brittle reality.

I think there is an enormous connection between our falling trust in Democratic Institutions, social media hate algorithms and the pandemic of loneliness.

Loneliness spike

Nowhere in the world are young men as lonely in comparison to other people in their country as in the U.S., Axios’ Carly Mallenbaum writes from a new Gallup poll.

One in four U.S. men ages 15 to 34 said they felt lonely a lot of the previous day. That’s a higher proportion than young American women (18%).

We hate each other thanks to social media.

While we hate each other more than ever before, we are more lonely than we have ever been before.

We are lonelier, more depressed and sicker.

Teen loneliness machine

The tech ecosystem that surrounds today’s teens is fuelling loneliness.

• Why it matters: It’s a dangerous environment for a generation that’s already sad and stressed. And it’s more difficult than ever for their parents, teachers and coaches to understand and help them, Axios’ Erica Pandey writes.

The big picture: Data shows that teens are spending less time hanging out with friends in person, and more time on their devices.

• America’s 15- to 24-year-olds spend 35% less time socialising face-to-face than they did 20 years ago, The Atlantic reports.
• Instead, American kids and teenagers spend nearly six hours a day looking at screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative.

The Psychological Mechanism

When people become chronically lonely, several measurable cognitive and emotional shifts occur:

• Heightened social vigilance: Lonely individuals become more sensitive to threats and less likely to interpret others’ actions as benign. (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2010)

• Reduced empathy and perspective-taking: Prolonged loneliness increases self-focus and reduces trust in others’ intentions.

• Confirmation and conspiracy bias: When social bonds weaken, people are more susceptible to narratives that explain their alienation (e.g., “the system is rigged,” “the media lies,” “politicians don’t care”).

• Identity reinforcement: Loneliness can drive people to seek belonging through ideological or conspiratorial communities online — which often position themselves against mainstream institutions.

So loneliness doesn’t just make you feel bad; it changes how you interpret social information. The lonely brain literally becomes more defensive and suspicious — which translates, at scale, into a collective drop in institutional trust.

Our loneliness, our depression, our sickness are all fomenting the spin of social media hate algorithms which only further polarise our debate into All Tribe and No Village politics.

The Societal / Media-Trust Connection

Social scientists have found consistent overlaps between low social capital (few trusted relationships, weak community ties) and low institutional trust:

• Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” (2000) argued that declining civic participation (e.g. church groups, unions, sports clubs) eroded trust in government and media.

• The Edelman Trust Barometer (2024) shows that countries with weaker social cohesion (high polarization, loneliness, economic precarity) have the lowest trust in media and government.

• Studies in Europe and the U.S. (e.g. Foa & Mounk 2019) show that individuals who feel socially disconnected are more likely to endorse anti-democratic views, distrust journalism, and embrace populist or conspiratorial narratives.

Essentially: if people feel no one in their personal life listens to them, they also assume institutions aren’t listening either.

I think we are a clever ape who has evolved over 300 000 years. Because we have to compete against other sentient and self conscious clever apes and work with them as groups so our intelligence and ability to use tools could change our environment, we have had to bond and understand each other over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

When we meet in person, our bodies and brains and taking in millions of different details subconsciously and we are working each other out through facial cues, pheromones, gait, stance, smiles, eye contact, etc etc etc: we have taken those 300 000  years of evolution and replaced that  with flat screen interaction where we lose all that unseen evolutionary advantage and instead become brainwashed and trapped in rabbit holes of demented reality.

Feedback Loop: Loneliness → Distrust → More Loneliness

Here’s the cycle that seems to be emerging:

1. Loneliness increases.
   Less social contact → less interpersonal trust.

2. Interpersonal distrust spills upward.
   “If I can’t trust people around me, I can’t trust politicians, journalists, or experts.”

3. Institutional distrust grows.
   People withdraw from civic life, stop voting, or seek “outsider” movements.

4. Polarization deepens.
   Online echo chambers replace physical communities — which amplifies isolation, creating more loneliness.

This loop can become self-sustaining unless deliberately interrupted through rebuilding social capital — face-to-face community engagement, media literacy, and participatory democracy.

Flat screen interaction is warping our human capacity to tell what is true and what isn’t because we don’t have that sense of the person in front of us and all the million ways we asses each other in our evolved brain.

We have become an ocean of spite and resentment in an All Tribe No Village politics distorted by social media hate algorithms because 300 000 years of evolution can’t work in a flat screen interaction loneliness.

I watch the next generation replace thinking with feelings.

Their pronouns are ‘I’ and ‘me’.

Mine are ‘us’ and ‘we’.

The navel gazing self awareness all self help books promote seem to put your feelings above all else…

Is Today’s Self-Help Teaching Everyone to Be a Jerk?

…thanks to social media hate algorithms, men hate women and women hate men…

‘Men seem to make life for women worse’: single US women share the woes of dating in 2025

Why men + women + apps = bad romance

…the Older I get, the more certain I am our role is to serve one another.

Forgiving the ‘toxic’ and the abusive, spending emotional energy into smiling at the lonely and offering help without any desire for a return other than being a decent human being.

We have replaced thought and cognitive rationalisation for emotions.

In today’s world you can win an argument simply by ‘feeling’ it more.

Because objective truth, logic and rational debate are all heteronormative white cis male privileges, ‘FEELINGS’ are all that matter now and once the middle class woke activists triggered that new threshold for truth, the feral anti vaxxers and Incels and redneck racists and Groundswell astroturf protests have done exactly the same!

This is the new politics of the neoliberal subjective!

Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.

Rather than celebrate the human experience, we will vomit the worst of us into an existential gravity of likes for hate.

Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.