Even being alone has become a performative act Everything you need to know about solo-maxxing

In the era of over-sharing, of influencers staging polished lives made of ultra-expensive vacations, friendships with successful people, and privileged access to perks that seem anything but real work, in the age of hypersensitization and the spectacularization of the self, an apparently opposite trend is making its way through social media algorithms: solo-maxxing. Its leading figures are the so-called solitude influencers: creators who offer followers a glimpse into ordinary moments lived in complete solitude. Not all of them explicitly claim to have no friends, but almost all proudly embrace the quiet and isolated existence they have built for themselves. They use hashtags such as #cozyathome, #introvertdiaries and #alonenotlonely.

Among them, one figure stands out in particular: Lana Isa, known online as @lanasololife, a twenty-four-year-old influencer who has become a sort of ambassador of social solitude and beyond. Isa posts vlogs with titles such as “you’re a single girl who lives alone and has no friends so you go grocery shopping at 10:04 PM” for her nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram. Her portrayal of solitude has attracted the attention of publications such as The Cut and The Atlantic, intrigued by the fact that an influencer openly speaking about being alone has managed to build such a large audience precisely around this theme.

A phenomenon that is gradually turning into a real trend: solo-maxxing, a narrative macro-area encompassing every shade of contemporary solitude, from the absence of friendships to romantic loneliness, all the way to the celebration of minimal gestures, such as leaving the house, transformed into personal achievements. Apparently, it took TikTok to normalize being alone. Or maybe not.

What is solo-maxxing?

Lana Isa introduces a very specific perspective. Her videos carry titles such as “you live alone in NYC and have no friends so your nights look like this” or “you’re single, have no friends, live alone and won’t be having kids so this is your Friday night”. A typical piece of content features a young woman, often introverted, living in a metropolis and independent, returning home after a long workday. She enters an impeccable, almost sterile apartment, takes off her shoes, prepares a simple dinner and sits on the couch. She watches television while drinking a sugar-free beverage from a wine glass to make the moment feel “more special”.

Depending on the viewer’s perspective, the tone may appear either intimate and comforting or deeply melancholic. These creators seem to turn their solitude into aspiration. Isa’s story begins during the early years of Covid. After graduating, she immediately entered the workforce and, following a breakup, moved across the country. Friendships gradually dissolved and, by the following summer, she found herself almost completely isolated, with very few social interactions outside of work video calls. Isa then began filming her own domestic everyday life after being inspired by creator Noe Murillo, a Los Angeles bus driver documenting his solo dates. But while Murillo tells the story of going out alone, Isa chooses to portray the opposite: staying at home.

Are we really this lonely?

According to a 2025 survey conducted by the American Psychological Association, about half of American adults report feeling isolated “often” or “sometimes”. Furthermore, a study published in 2021 in Psychological Bulletin shows that the rate of loneliness among young adults steadily increased between 1976 and 2019. Yet the phenomenon remains ambiguous, since this trend develops on TikTok and Instagram Reels, making it inevitable to wonder how much the solitude displayed online is amplified or performed in order to attract views and monetize content.

The concept itself appears paradoxical: how truly introverted can someone be if they turn their private life into public content? Speaking to The Cut, Isa explained that she is often questioned about the authenticity of her solitude and whether she exaggerates when claiming to “have no friends”. She insists she does not, also clarifying that she earns very little from her content, since the TikTok Creator Rewards Program is not available in Canada.

Is solitude really a choice?

Obviously, in order to legitimize solitude, as though an individual truly had to justify being alone, even testify to it and normalize it as if it were something strange, it is not necessary to be an influencer or have a large online following. However, it is worth questioning whether people who have access to certain privileges, such as living alone in their own apartment, no matter how sterile, minimal or “cozy” it may be, truly represent the entire experience of contemporary solitude.

Once again, social media creates a dual narrative: one that romanticizes solitude and another belonging to those who actually experience it, not as an “aesthetic choice” but as the direct consequence of an adult life in which building meaningful relationships requires increasingly greater effort. Thus discomfort turns into independence. Or at least into its staging.

But when does solitude stop being authentic and become performative? When does it become content? And above all: are we truly alone once we build an online community around our own solitude? Paradoxically, social media seems to romanticize isolation through a community that almost ends up erasing it. The comments section becomes a space where people read others’ experiences, feel understood, pitied and recognized.

In this sense, perhaps, Gen Z has never been so lonely, but neither has it ever been so collectively aware of its loneliness. Yet one question remains open: for those who do not possess those privileges, what does it truly mean to be alone? The value and meaning of solitude continue to take shape through formulas such as solo-maxxing, solo date and countless other linguistic variations of contemporary self-isolation.

Between reality and fiction

Making this web of questions even denser is the tendency of solo-maxxing to reflect itself in romantic relationships. Increasingly, solitude is being portrayed as the direct consequence of contemporary dating, turning once again into a performative act. According to the 2026 Real Financial Progress Index published by the Bank of Montreal, a date for a Gen Z member in the United States, considering food, transportation, drinks and grooming, costs an average of 205 dollars.

If it took twenty dates to find “the right person”, this would mean spending more than 4,000 dollars before even entering a stable relationship. And disposable income, especially for a generation affected by economic instability and fears of AI-driven job replacement, is certainly not guaranteed.

In this context, solo-maxxing seems to stop being a radical choice and instead become a strategy of adaptation. In some cases, being alone appears not as an absolute desire, but as a form of economic, emotional and social survival. In the case of solitude influencers, what happens when these people stop being alone? Do they lose their community? Do they lose the language through which they have narrated themselves? Or does solitude become the ultimate and binding term of a fictional life transformed into identity? Ultimately, what emerges is that solo-maxxing may be closer to a realistic lie than to a concrete reality: an aesthetic of isolation capable of appearing authentic precisely because it stems from a real, shared and profoundly contemporary discomfort.