In 2023, roughly one in four Americans ate every meal of the previous day alone. According to the World Happiness Report 2025, the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds doing so had increased by more than 180 per cent since 2003. An impressive achievement for a generation that can communicate instantly with virtually anyone on the planet. We have thousands of online friends, hundreds of followers, dozens of messaging groups and nobody to have lunch with. Still, why worry? The food delivery app knows our favourite meal, Spotify understands our mood, and Netflix never argues about what to watch. Human companionship is beginning to look like an unnecessarily complicated technology.
Welcome to hyperindividualism, the fashionable belief that the world should revolve around the most important person in it: oneself. Traditional individualism celebrates independence, freedom and responsibility. Hyperindividualism takes these respectable principles, sends them on a mindfulness retreat and brings them back convinced that other people are the principal obstacle to happiness. Everyone must establish boundaries, prioritise personal needs and pursue individual growth. The perfect modern human requires no approval, no validation and preferably no other humans. Except, naturally, for the occasional 500 likes.
The French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville saw something like this coming nearly two centuries ago. In Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, he warned that individualism could persuade people to withdraw from wider society into their private circles. His citizens would retreat into families and small groups of friends. Today’s enthusiasts have improved on his prediction by eliminating most of those people as well. Tocqueville would probably be astonished to learn that isolation can now be marketed as personal empowerment.
Individual freedom, of course, has accomplished genuinely valuable things. People can choose careers, leave unhappy marriages and escape relatives who believe every personal decision requires a family committee. Women have gained economic independence, traditional hierarchies have weakened, and unconventional lifestyles no longer automatically require an explanation to the neighbours. The trouble begins when the reasonable right to live one’s own life becomes the expectation that everyone else should arrange their lives around it. Independence becomes a virtue, compromise becomes a defeat, and selfishness acquires a more flattering name: self-care.
Modern relationships provide particularly fertile ground for this philosophy. Apparently, the traditional vocabulary of love, friendship and ordinary disagreement is no longer adequate. We now have boundaries, triggers, emotional labour and an impressive collection of psychological terms that can transform a minor irritation into a therapeutic emergency. A friend who cancels dinner is protecting their peace. A partner who disagrees is invalidating one’s feelings. A relative who asks for help moving furniture is displaying a troubling disregard for personal boundaries. These concepts have legitimate uses, particularly in genuinely harmful relationships. Their more creative application, however, allows people to avoid almost any inconvenience while retaining a satisfying sense of moral superiority.
Dating has become especially sophisticated. Two prospective partners arrive carrying carefully curated identities, lists of non-negotiable requirements and personal development objectives. Both want unconditional love, provided the conditions are met. Both seek intimacy without dependence, commitment without sacrifice and companionship without inconvenience. Previous generations made marriage difficult by involving families, property and religion. We have simplified matters by turning it into a merger negotiation between two exceptionally demanding start-ups.
The commercial world has embraced hyperindividualism with touching enthusiasm. Advertising no longer merely sells products; it celebrates the individual magnificence of the customer. Coffee becomes an expression of identity. Trainers represent a personal philosophy. A sofa tells one’s life story, usually in beige. Consumers are encouraged to be different, authentic and uncompromisingly themselves, preferably by purchasing the same products as several million other people following identical advice from the same algorithm. Nothing demonstrates fierce independence quite like following a trend that tells everyone to stop following trends.
Personal branding deserves special recognition. Once associated with corporations and celebrities, it now appears to be a responsibility of ordinary existence. Even hobbies risk becoming content strategies. A person cannot simply enjoy pottery; the activity needs an aesthetic, a philosophy and possibly a subscription-based newsletter. Holidays must demonstrate authenticity. Breakfast should reflect wellness priorities. The exhausting task of being oneself now requires planning, audience analysis and occasional professional photography.
Technology makes this wonderfully efficient. Algorithms identify our preferences and create comfortable environments in which we rarely encounter anything that challenges them. Music matches our taste, news reflects our interests, and entertainment platforms recommend programmes remarkably similar to those we have already watched. Even households can become collections of separate digital kingdoms. The old-fashioned family argument over the television remote has been solved. Nobody needs to agree on anything because nobody needs to watch anything together.
The workplace, unfortunately, has not entirely adapted. Businesses still require cooperation, shared responsibility and employees willing to perform tasks that do not advance their personal development. Flexibility and autonomy are valuable, but a company cannot function indefinitely as a collection of personal brands pursuing individual fulfilment. Someone must eventually deal with the difficult customer or finish the tedious project. Such activities are regrettably absent from most inspirational career advice.
There is money to be made from all this independence. As people rely less on personal relationships, businesses can sell them replacements for activities previously organised through families and communities. Meals arrive by courier, domestic chores are outsourced, and professional coaches offer guidance on managing life’s difficulties. Many services provide genuine convenience. Still, the business model has a certain elegance: first persuade people that they need nobody, then charge them to replace everybody.
Unfortunately, the happiness statistics are refusing to cooperate with the marketing department. The World Happiness Report 2025 found that sharing meals was strongly associated with greater life satisfaction. It also reported that 19 per cent of young adults worldwide said in 2023 that they had nobody they could count on for social support, up 39 per cent compared with 2006. These findings do not establish that hyperindividualism caused the problem. Nevertheless, the contrast is awkward. We have turned personal happiness into an industry while apparently becoming less proficient at one of its basic ingredients: spending time with other people.
In 2023, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory entitled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, identifying insufficient social connection as a serious public health concern. Apparently, joining a local club, helping a neighbour or regularly eating with friends might improve wellbeing without requiring expensive programmes or a personal transformation coach. It is difficult to imagine a less commercially satisfactory solution.
Of course, living alone is not necessarily unhealthy, and nobody should tolerate miserable relationships for the sake of community spirit. Solitude can be valuable, while traditional communities could be extraordinarily enthusiastic about interfering in private affairs. The problem is not choosing one’s own life. It is treating every obligation to another human being as an intolerable restriction on personal freedom.
Perhaps the greatest comedy of hyperindividualism is its illusion of self-sufficiency. The fiercely independent modern citizen depends on thousands of strangers for electricity, food, transport, healthcare and practically every convenience of daily life. They may refuse to rely emotionally on another person while depending entirely on an international logistics network to deliver oat milk. Even their carefully cultivated personal brand is meaningless without an audience.
And so, having eliminated every demanding friend, inconvenient relative, incompatible partner and emotionally exhausting acquaintance, the modern individual can finally enjoy complete freedom. No arguments, no obligations, no compromises and nobody asking stupid questions about what to have for dinner.
Perfect happiness, presumably. Although, rather inconveniently, there is nobody left to tell.
