Loneliness Is the New Oil – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Jackie Jantos, now doubling as chief marketer and president of Hinge, wants to make Gen Z “less lonely.”A noble mission, if not for the fact that her company helped engineer the conditions making young people lonelier in the first place. Swipe-based apps have gutted romance, trained users to treat human connection like an inventory system, and replaced organic chemistry with algorithmic compatibility. We’ve gone from “Do you believe in love at first sight?” to “Do you meet my filter preferences and pass the vibe check of my dopamine-starved brain at 2 AM?” 

Hinge’s solution — if it can be called that — is to cap the number of chats you’re allowed. Roll out “Warm Introductions.” Add coaching features. Slip in AI-generated tips to optimize your profile. In other words, the standard Silicon Valley maneuver: create the problem, then monetize the illusion of a fix. (RELATED: Mom, Meet My New AI Girlfriend)

Jantos insists they’re making “authenticity” the centerpiece — alongside “inclusion” and “transparency.” Words like these have become the gospel of our age: vague, overused, and drained of meaning through constant repetition. 

Authenticity? You’re peddling profile optimization software and sorting human connections through opaque, behavioral heuristics. Inclusion? You’re gatekeeping emotional access behind subscription models, premium boosts, and algorithmic bias. Transparency? There’s nothing clear about a system that decides who’s “dateable” based on engagement metrics and predictive data points.

These aren’t values. They’re veneers — slick, focus-grouped soundbites glued onto a business model built to extract. What passes for ethics in this world is just another A/B test. And the target audience — Gen Z — is already fraying under the weight of it all: curated selves that must be both marketable and “authentic,” performative vulnerability passed off as intimacy, digital fatigue dressed up as choice. (RELATED: Why Gen Z Is Giving Up on Sex, Love, and Each Other)

Beneath the flowery language and pastel interfaces, the machinery keeps humming. These apps aren’t built to help you find love. They’re engineered to keep you looking for it — not when you’re content, but when you’re restless. When your brain is fried from a day of screens, yet you still feel unseen. These apps thrive in that in-between space — late at night, when the world goes quiet and the algorithm gets louder. Phone in hand. Thumb twitching. Just anxious enough to swipe. Just lonely enough to believe the next match might finally close the gap. (RELATED: Gen Z is Replacing Valentine’s With Palentine’s Day)

But they’re not built to satisfy that hunger. They’re built to sustain it. To keep you reaching, scrolling, hoping. Because the second you actually feel known — really known — you stop playing the game. And for them, that’s the nightmare. Not rejection. Not heartbreak. Disinterest. A user with nothing left to want.

Let’s be very clear here: Gen Z is not just lonely. They’re pathologically disconnected, the first generation to grow up without a meaningful baseline of in-person interaction. It’s not their fault. It’s the result of a culture that outsourced intimacy to interfaces. And now, Hinge wants to rehabilitate them, one AI-recommended date at a time. It’s like Big Tobacco running a wellness retreat.

Hinge doesn’t want to end loneliness. It wants to monopolize it. It wants to own the terrain of heartbreak and hope and then charge rent for every passing emotion. The tragedy isn’t that people are still lonely. It’s that they’ve been taught to believe this is what trying looks like.

But to blame Hinge alone is to miss the forest for the swipes. This is bigger than one app.

A generation ago, loneliness was considered a side effect — of aging, of heartbreak, of displacement. Today, it’s infrastructure. A design choice. A gold mine. We have built a world where connection is simulated, intimacy is rationed, and real human presence is almost quaint.

Loneliness Fueling Tech Economy

And now, in that desert, Silicon Valley has arrived with water bottles for sale. Everywhere you look, there’s a service, a product, an app, a platform promising to ease your loneliness — if you just log in, subscribe, and surrender a little more of your selfhood. This is the Loneliness Industrial Complex: a system that feeds on isolation while pretending to solve it. It doesn’t want you to connect. It wants you to crave connection — just enough to keep paying for it. (RELATED: Christianity, Inc.: The Rise of Silicon Valley’s False Prophets)

And make no mistake: loneliness is the new oil. It’s the raw material driving the modern tech economy. The more isolated you are, the more you scroll. The more you scroll, the more data you shed — tiny droplets of behavioral crude. Your heartbreak produces metrics. Your fits of desperation become engagement. Your endless swipes, your aimless likes, your hunger for validation — it all becomes fuel. Not for you. For them.People talk about data being the new oil. But they forget the first part of that equation: pain. The real oil is your solitude. The data is just the byproduct of your numb, compulsive reaction to it.

And they want you running on empty — forever.

This makes Gen Z the perfect target. They’ve been raised on screens, trained to perform, and conditioned to fear discomfort, spontaneity, and silence. They’ve been robbed of unstructured play, community rituals, and even the awkward beauty of face-to-face flirtation. In its place, they’ve been handed apps that promise love but deliver metrics. The saddest part isn’t that these tools exist. It’s that they’ve become necessary. In a world designed to isolate, to atomize, to distract, you need digital scaffolding just to ask someone on a date. Love itself has been reduced to interface design.

But make no mistake: this isn’t a glitch. It’s the design. Loneliness is measurable. Predictable. Profitable. It drives engagement, boosts retention, fuels spending. Best of all — for them — it’s self-renewing. Because no matter how much you scroll, swipe, match, or meditate, real connection still requires vulnerability, and that doesn’t trend well.

So no, Hinge is not making Gen Z less lonely. It’s professionalizing their alienation, rebranding it with bold promises and soothing fonts. It’s not a product. It’s a prescription — refilled endlessly.

If we’re serious about healing this epidemic, we must confront the full machine, not just one app but an entire economy built on the decay of real relationships. We must stop letting tech companies medicate what they’ve metastasized, stop mistaking convenience for intimacy, and stop letting algorithms play therapist, priest, and matchmaker.

In other words, we have to disconnect to reconnect.

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