Perhaps loneliness is not the most evident sign of our time, but rather the inability to inhabit relationships. We live surrounded by screens, profiles, and connections, yet we are increasingly distant. It is not contacts that are missing — it is bonds. It is as if the invisible fabric that once held together people, families, and communities had slowly dissolved. Sociology calls this disaffiliation: a silent yet profound process of the unravelling of human relationships.
The numbers leave no room for doubt. According to the OECD, one in ten people has no significant relationships. A figure that is rising among the elderly but also affects the young and adults alike. The internet promised connection, but it has produced isolation. Artificial intelligence, moreover, is taking loneliness to a new level: no longer the absence of relationships, but their replacement.
There are even applications that offer “customised virtual friends.” They are a caricature of proximity — one that costs nothing and never hurts. The other is no longer a face, but a mirror without depth.
Thus, relationship loses its original nature as an encounter — the kind Martin Buber spoke of when he wrote that “all real living is meeting.” Today, by contrast, the other is perceived as a function: useful as long as it serves a purpose, then dismissed. In the I–It paradigm, everything is reduced to object, consumption, algorithm. Yet only the I–Thou relationship — the one that recognises the other as an irreducible presence — generates life and meaning.
Here too echoes the intuition of Emmanuel Lévinas: “The face of the other imposes a duty upon me.” To truly look at someone is to allow oneself to be called, unsettled, even wounded. Authentic relationship is the opposite of safety: it is risk, exposure, gift. And it is precisely this risk that modern man no longer wishes to take. He prefers control to communion, image to body, immediate response to the patience of dialogue. But a bond without vulnerability is a sterile bond.
On a social level, the consequences are visible: smaller families, weakened neighbourhood networks, urban loneliness. In many European cities, over half of households consist of a single individual. The family, which for centuries was the first school of sociality, now fragments under incompatible work schedules and misaligned lifestyles. And when the domestic fabric breaks, the communal one unravels as well: less time, less listening, less shared memory.
Yet, even in this scenario, a possibility opens: to rebuild the culture of connection. Not through technical solutions, but through a renewed vision of the human person. The Social Doctrine of the Church has long reminded us that the person exists only in relation. Pope Francis, in Fratelli tutti, recalled that no one is saved alone, but only together. Individualism, disguised as freedom, reveals itself as a subtle form of slavery: the man closed in on himself ends up lost.
We need a conversion of our gaze, a new understanding of freedom — not as self-sufficiency, but as reciprocity. To be free means being able to count on someone, and knowing that someone can count on us. It is relationship, not independence, that generates freedom. For it is in the encounter with the other that we discover who we truly are. There, the I becomes face, word, presence.
Disaffiliation, then, is not an inevitable fate. It is an alarm bell urging us to become human again. To reweave the fabric of relationships — emotional, friendly, communal — is not an act of nostalgia, but a political and spiritual task. For without trust, there is no democracy; without relationships, no society; and without the other, no human being. To rediscover relationship is to rediscover ourselves.
G.T.
Silere non possum