Why 'Living Alone' Is Becoming the New Aspirational Lifestyle

At the centre of it is Lana Isa, a software sales manager in her 20s based in Toronto, who takes almost 400,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram through her nightly self-care routines, late-night fast-food drives, lakeside reading sessions and even a saga about getting locked out of her flat in the middle of the night. She is part of a growing, if niche, corner of the internet — many of its creators women — that spotlights a life prioritising peace and solitude, the antithesis of social media excess. Where the platform once rewarded packed group holidays and party reels, these accounts trade on stillness.

From taboo to trend

Isa's story is not a gimmick. After switching several high schools, enduring Covid isolation during her college years and moving across the country following her first heartbreak, she found herself adjusting to a life with no close friends. "People don't talk about having no friends a lot... I think it's still what people would consider embarrassing or a little taboo," she says. When she began sharing that reality online, an audience connected: an initial following of around 2,000 on TikTok swelled past 175,000.

Alone, but not lonely

The distinction is the whole point. Creators in this space are at pains to stress that solitude is not the same as loneliness — that a quiet flat and a party of one can be a choice rather than a consolation prize. For Isa, admitting the "no friends" part of her life was not a marketing hook but the reality she had been living for several years, one she initially assumed would be too "embarrassing" to share. Isa says her videos were never intended to "romanticise having no friends" but to show her real life, and it is precisely that honesty, speaking to the BBC, that seems to resonate.

Why living alone resonates now

The appeal lands at a moment when a generation raised online is rethinking what a full life looks like — and the Gen Z audiences driving it are increasingly sceptical of the pressure to be permanently sociable. Against a feed built on curated excess, the sight of someone content with a candle, a pizza and their own company reads as almost radical.

Which brings us back to that Friday-night frozen pizza. What once might have been framed as an admission of loneliness is now a flex — proof, its millions of viewers seem to agree, that living alone can be less about missing out and more about finally having the place to yourself.