The Bad Badge of Honor
These days, it has almost become a thing of pride to open your mouth and say, “I don’t have friends.” People wear the statement like a badge of honor, as if declaring their complete isolation is the ultimate proof of how self-sufficient and mentally tough they are.
Eight out of every ten people you ask on the streets of Lagos or online will confidently tell you, “Me, I don’t have friends. I’m always on my own, I don’t like to show myself”. But if you look closely past the tough exterior, this trending lifestyle of “just me, myself, and I” is quietly driving us into a massive epidemic of deep loneliness.
Why exactly has isolation become the cool new trend? It stems from a growing, collective paranoia. We have become deeply suspicious of basic human nature. People have been burned, or they’ve watched others get burned, so they decide it is safer to live like an island than to risk assembling themselves with a circle of peers.
The entertainment industry isn’t helping at all. In fact, it is making the psyche of the society worse. Every time you turn on the radio or listen to a hit Afrobeats track, the lyrics are inoculating the human mind with heavy distrust. You constantly hear lines screaming about “fake friends,” “jealous friends,” and enemies in disguise. The songs tell you, “Fuck the jealous friends, they want to pull me down, they envy my success, they want to destroy me.”
When you feed your mind a steady diet of music that paints everyone around you as a secret enemy waiting to stab you in the back, you naturally build a wall. You become hyper-vigilant, looking at every potential friend as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
The Screen Illusion vs. Real Danger
This paranoia is peaking at the exact moment we need human connection the most. Our smartphones have completely hijacked the raw companionship that used to belong to real, breathing friends. It has become incredibly hard to hold a basic conversation with the next person because the moment there is a second of silence, we instinctively bury our eyes into a glowing screen.
Social media creates a comforting but dangerous illusion. You might have three hundred “friends” online, or thousands of followers engaging with your content. But hundreds of digital avatars can never be compared to a single, physical friend sitting face-to-face with you, sharing a meal, and looking you in the eye.
Furthermore, the internet feeds our fear of humanity daily because bad news travels at lightning speed. You open your timeline and it’s a relentless flood of betrayal stories. When a friend poisoned another friend over a job opportunity. A friend borrowed life savings and vanished. A friend slept with someone’s spouse.
When you scroll through the comment sections of these tragic posts, the chorus is always the same: “This is exactly why I choose to be alone. This is why I don’t do friends.”
But let’s talk reality. If you completely isolate yourself because you are terrified of the evil that humans are capable of, how exactly do we function as a collective?
At our very core, human beings are social creatures. We blossom when we socialise. We thrive when we are deeply tethered to other people. If we completely lock ourselves away, what kind of bitter, cold society are we growing into?
The Emergency Truth
The truth is, human nature is fundamentally good and kind, and you will see this clearly the moment the system breaks down into an emergency.
I remember walking away from a bus stop along a busy, chaotic express road. Suddenly, a car driving at high speed completely lost control, tumbled, and somersaulted across the asphalt in a horrific crash. There were no police or ambulances in sight. Do you know what happened? Total strangers, everyday people who were probably rushing to their own destinations, stopped dead in their tracks. They ran toward the smoking wreckage, risking their own safety to pull the trapped driver out of the vehicle.
Nobody asked the driver for his identity, tribe, or history before saving him. In moments of real crisis, our natural human instinct is to rally around each other and help.
If we choose to focus entirely on the few instances of betrayal and evil, we will never trust a soul, and we will never build a community.
Social media do not bring stories like these to us, the internet does not tell us how a friend risked her life to save another, or how a dying man had the companion of his friend by his sick bed or how a man helped his friend start up a new business with interest free capital, how another woman gave a homeless friend the keys to her house, or how a new mother had the help of her friend who came to help her clean the house and cook while she laid in bed nursing her new born, they do not bring to us these good news because good news does not sell.
This brings us to the darkest consequence of the “no friends” era. More and more people are moving away from the safety net of extended family to live completely on their own in isolated apartments. And as the rate of people choosing total isolation rises, the number of people dying completely alone in their homes is skyrocketing globally.
It is a terrifying reality. People are recorded dead in their rooms for days or weeks before anyone notices. If they had just one genuine friend, that tragedy wouldn’t happen. They would have someone to notice their absence, someone to call their phone when they don’t show up, someone to rush them to the hospital before their health completely deteriorates, or someone to check in on them.
Conclusion:
Isolation isn’t strength. It is a trap. We need to stop glorifying our loneliness and start risking the vulnerability it takes to build real, physical community again.
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