AI Summary
5 min readLonely fans
Lana Issa is 24, lives alone in Canada, works in software sales, and posts videos of herself spending Friday nights in pajamas, eating ice cream for dinner, and baking cakes. Her videos are captioned with phrases like "life with no friends, no kids, no marriage" and "POV: you're a single and child free girl that has no friends and lives alone and it's a Saturday night." She has roughly 200,000 followers. The press has called her a "loneliness influencer," but the story of why people watch her is more complicated than it first appears.
The appeal isn't what you'd expect
Issa started making these videos with a specific intention: to show a normal life without a big social life, and to challenge the assumption that being alone means being miserable. "I really wanted the title of the video to kind of be like wham bam bam of a bunch of things that I don't have," she says. "So people think that they're about to watch this very sad routine of somebody that is not enjoying their life." Then throughout the video, she highlights the peace she finds in solitude.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:44) **Lana Issa: The "Loneliness Influencer"** - A 24-year-old in Canada who posts videos about her solitary life, gaining 200,000 followers by showing a quiet, single, friendless existence as peaceful rather than sad.
- 2 (06:24) **Why Her Audience Grows** - Lana explains that her viewers include both women living similar solitary lives and married women with families who find her content nostalgic and relaxing.
- 3 (10:38) **The Limits of Solitude** - The host presses Lana on whether she ever truly wishes she had a friend, using the example of her watching the horror movie *Obsession* alone in a theater.
- 4 (16:51) **Faith Hill's Broader Perspective** - The host introduces Atlantic staff writer Faith Hill, who has written about the "loneliness influencer" trend and the broader crisis facing young women.
- 5 (18:48) **The Complicated Relationship with Solitude** - Hill explains that many viewers are not isolated but exhausted, and they watch these videos as a "needed break from the chaos" of their own lives.
- 6 (20:08) **The Overlooked Crisis Among Young Women** - Hill pivots to her reporting on how young women are struggling, even as the public narrative focuses on a "male loneliness crisis."
- 7 (23:48) **Why Men's Crisis Got the Spotlight** - Hill explains that women's distress is often expected and therefore less newsworthy, while men struggling is seen as a novel story.
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Show Notes
No friends, no kids, no partner. You might think their lives are sad, but loneliness influencers are attracting huge followings.
This episode was produced by Kelli Wessinger, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King.
Screenshot from Lana Isa's Instagram account in which she charts her life as a single girl with no friends, no partner and no kids.
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