We Live In Imaginary Worlds

This is all one big hallucination

Photo by Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash

We are all aware by now that this is a lonely age. Friendships feel shallow and superficial. Local communities have deteriorated. The promise of constant connection turned out to be a cruel trap. A generation with access to billions of people say they feel lonelier than pensioners.

Since I was teenager, it seems like everyone has been selling a solution to Gen Z’s loneliness problem. One app after another to find new friends! Constant hashtags and campaigns to bring us together. For years I’ve been promised that some new invention will finally solve the problem (Does anyone really believe that an app will be “the antidote to America’s loneliness epidemic”?)

But I’ve noticed that, recently, the latest “solutions” have nothing to do with meeting in real life. They aren’t encouraging face-to-face friendships or trying to create new communities. They don’t even pretend anymore. At least friendship apps had the pretence of meeting up in person, even if it was always one more swipe or premium package away. Now these solutions have nothing to do with the real world. Now we are being invited into imaginary worlds.

There are the imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends, of course. There are imaginary therapists, a “mental health ally” or “happiness buddy” we can chat with about our problems. And imaginary friends, like that AI necklace who is “always listening”, announced with the tagline: “introducing friend. not imaginary.”

There are even entirely imaginary worlds now. Metaverse platforms might “solve the loneliness epidemic”, apparently. VR headsets could end loneliness for seniors. But by far the most depressing invention I’ve seen lately is a new app called SocialAI, a “private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make.” In other words, your own imaginary ‘X’, with infinite “simulated fictional characters”. You, alone, in a vast social network of AI bots.

Screenshot: @michaelsayman, ‘X’

Of course, all children fantasize and imagine. There have always been shy children who retreat into their own imaginary worlds. I drew and cut out paper figurines, I wrote stories, bound them together and illustrated the covers, I created fantasy worlds in my head and sketched out the maps. Sure, I was reserved and withdrawn, but I channelled it into something creative. 

Now we are raising children in imaginary worlds and at the same time killing their imagination. That’s the real cruelty about this. Kids today have their imaginary worlds generated for them. Instead of writing their own stories, they can put prompts into ChatGPT. Instead of creating their own fantasy worlds, they can generate them with a few clicks. I remember me and my friends spending hours after school writing our own songs, coming up with lyrics and drawing album covers—now we would just generate it all with an AI song maker. Children are playing together less, replacing free play with screen time, and creativity scores among American children have been dropping since the 1990s. Part of that may be because children now depend on companies to be creative for them. Their imaginary worlds are designed by software engineers. Their imaginary friends are trying to sell them something. My imaginary world wasn’t trying to drag me anywhere, while algorithms now transport kids to darker and ever more extreme places.

This is why I’m skeptical of headlines I’ve seen over the years declaring that children have lost their imaginary friends. “Children have fewer invisible playmates than before,” we are warned. “Children too busy with their iPads to have an imaginary friend,” nursery workers say. I understand what they mean. But they haven’t really lost them. They just replaced them. What do we think children are doing when they’re laughing along with YouTubers, alone in their rooms? Eating dinner with influencers? Simulating FaceTime with strangers? Watching gamers play with their friends? Listening to girls gossip on podcasts? Kids haven’t lost their imaginary friends; they have more than ever before. They replaced play-based imaginary friends with phone-based imaginary friends. And for some, those “friends” are all they have left. 

Because, when we think about it, all of this is imaginary. Not only AI boyfriends and girlfriends, but all of social media. Instagram influencers are imaginary friends. We’ve never met them. Soon, we won’t even know if they exist. There is nothing solid or tangible about an online “community”; they are more like imaginary worlds, held together by nothing but pixels on a screen. There are completely computer-generated influencers on Instagram now and everybody thinks it’s weird and dystopian, but what is the difference between that and a real influencer? It’s all a hallucination in my head anyway. And now our feeds show fewer and fewer posts from our friends and family, now they are places we go to see our imagination, thoughts and fears projected back at us. Our TikTok For You feeds and our Instagram Explore pages are so personalized, so predictive, they have become mirrors, reflecting what we want and what we think and what we feel and what we are afraid of. Our inner worlds, which we can now scroll through. Where we can now live. This is all one big hallucination.

I’m not just talking about Gen Z. Adults also live in imaginary worlds. We now have adults who invest more time into their imaginary worlds and reputations than their real ones. Adults imagining they are “socializing” all day when they haven’t left the house. Adults editing their pictures, creating imaginary versions of the selves they pretend to be. Adults arguing with versions of people they have imagined in their heads. Adults ignoring their children to have fun with hallucinations. 

It’s only going to get more addictive, more customized, more controllable. Already we can customize AI girlfriends with traits like “hot, funny, bold”, “shy, modest, considerate” or “smart, strict, rational”, making sure she is “judgement-free” and laughs at all our jokes. “Control it all the way you want to,” promises Eva AI. Design a girl who is “always on your side”, says Replika. Meanwhile we can fill our fake social media feed with “fans”, “cheerleaders” and “charmers” who never ignore or challenge us. We can wear Friend necklaces that slowly become more like us, trained to “develop a personality” that complements our own. It’s easy to laugh at all this, to think it’s ridiculous, to roll our eyes at AI companions and dystopian AI boyfriend ads. But sometimes it hits me—those shy children. The ones who struggle to make friends. Who aren’t naturally outgoing. Who might have hard lives and crave some escapism. Who are growing up with promise after promise of connection and belonging, but forever coaxed into a fake world.

So, yes, we live in a lonely age. We know that by now. The time for talking about it is over. Time to start building. We can’t keep waiting around for a company to come up with the right solution, because they won’t. Loneliness is too lucrative.

So this week, today, right now, reach out and organize something. Try Phone-Free Friday with your family. Host a block party to bring your neighbors together. Start your own play club. And as well as organizing activities and creating communities, allow kids to get bored. Bored enough to play, to build dens and forts, to act out adventures with friends, to invent their own fantasy worlds. I understand why it might be comforting that your shy, reserved child has an online community to talk to, or influencers to watch and laugh with, but we have to be careful here. Careful they aren’t being hooked to imaginary worlds designed to be as inviting and addictive as possible, so much so that they hide from the real one. Because which would we rather have? Children who live in the real world and get hurt and rejected and maybe even injured, but also feel loved and alive and connected—or children who sit and hallucinate alone? We have to bring children back into the real world. We have to bring childhood back to Earth.

But first we have to let them, and ourselves, feel that loneliness. Feel it enough that we are forced to do something, to build something. To get up and get out. Because when we are venting to AI therapy bots, flirting with AI boyfriends, staying inside watching influencers, playing with our imaginary friends, we are pushing that loneliness down. Dulling it for a moment. Sedating it so companies can continue colluding and conspiring on what to sell us next. We are distracted from doing anything about it. The problem here is not just the imaginary friends or imaginary communities. It’s that more and more of us don’t have the real thing.

As Jon put it in The Anxious Generation, there was Act I of the Tragedy: the disappearance of the play-based childhood. Then came Act II: the rise of the phone-based childhood. But as he and Zach began to realize, there was actually an Act before both of these—the loss of local community. Around the mid-1960s, local relationships began to deteriorate. New technologies and cultural changes, from television to the shopping mall, atomized us. Religious faith declined, church attendance along with it. Bonds between us disintegrated. We stopped trusting and socializing with our neighbors. The reason these imaginary worlds are so powerful is that many young people have never known the real thing. They have never known real community. Some have never known true friendship. They may never have the chance to know deep love. They can only imagine.

But it doesn’t have to stay this way. If someone is selling you a cure to loneliness that comes on a screen, is downloaded from an App Store, or invites you into an imaginary world, I suggest you decline. Keep your money. The only solution to loneliness is in each other. Reaching out to each other, approaching one another, and having the guts to say, God, I feel so lonely, do you? We can’t buy belonging. We can only build it, together. 

The real world is waiting.