modern life Archives | Neel Burton

How We Stopped Needing One Another

Three people at a café, looking at their phones

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We have never been more connected, yet many of our interactions feel strangely empty. Modern life has left us with abundant contact but thinner encounters, as we have become less dependent on—and less attentive to—one another.

We are more connected than any generation in history. We can speak to almost anyone, at almost any time, across almost any distance. Yet all this connection feels strangely empty. We sit in conversations, meetings, and relationships—surrounded by words and faces—and have the quiet sense that nothing is really happening between us.

Not absence.

Presence without encounter.

We have more connection than ever, but less of what makes connection feel alive.

Presence Without Encounter

Loneliness is commonly thought of as “being alone”. But its deeper form has little to do with physical isolation. It is the experience of no longer being met by another mind. That is why loneliness can be at its keenest within relationships, families, and social lives that appear full from the outside. Contact continues, but recognition fades. Conversation carries on, but nothing quite lands.

When this happens, loneliness often does not feel like pain. It feels like flatness. And this is where boredom becomes revealing.

We think of boredom as a lack of stimulation. Yet it often appears in situations where stimulation is plentiful and still nothing meaningful is happening between people. The conversation is pleasant enough. We exchange opinions, anecdotes, updates. Yet nothing surprises us, challenges us, or changes us.

Nothing happens.

Attention, finding nowhere to go, folds back upon itself. What we call boredom in these moments is often social contact that has ceased to feel alive.

Abundant Contact, Thin Encounter

Modern life amplifies this condition. We move through dense networks of people—workplaces, cities, cafés, airports, and digital spaces—where interaction is constant but encounter is fleeting. We know more people than ever, but are deeply engaged with very few.

The result is not isolation.

It is something subtler: abundant contact, but thin encounter.

People cease to become discoveries. They lose weight. We mistake familiarity for knowledge, communication for conversation, and proximity for presence. Social life grows smoother, more efficient, more continuous. And strangely empty.

From this perspective, boredom and loneliness begin to look less like separate problems than different expressions of the same condition. When meaningful contact is absent, we experience loneliness. When contact is plentiful but psychologically empty, we experience boredom. In both cases, what is missing is not company but encounter.

The End of Necessity

Why has this happened? Technology has changed our relationships, but it has not fundamentally changed human nature. The deeper change is that we no longer need one another as we once did.

For most of human history, our lives were interwoven by necessity. Families, neighbours, and communities depended upon one another not merely for companionship but for everyday survival. People met repeatedly, over many years and in many different contexts. They quarrelled, reconciled, forgave, relied upon one another, and could not simply disappear whenever things became uncomfortable.

Dependence demanded attention. We pay close attention to those upon whom our lives depend. We notice their moods because they affect our own. We learn their strengths and weaknesses because they matter to us. Necessity sharpens perception.

Today, much of that necessity has quietly disappeared. We can shop without speaking to anyone, work from home, entertain ourselves alone, and replace awkward conversations with easier ones. Our relationships have become lighter, freer, and more voluntary. This is one of the great achievements of modern society. But every achievement carries a hidden cost.

As our dependence upon one another has diminished, so too has the sustained attention that dependence once demanded. We have become remarkably good at communicating while becoming less practised at encountering—and have grown, almost, to fear genuine encounter.

The Loss of Shared Depth

There is another, quieter shift. Not only have we become less dependent on one another—we also inhabit fewer shared worlds.

For much of history, conversation rested on a relatively common symbolic ground: shared stories, shared texts, shared moral and religious reference points. People could assume that others recognised the same narratives and allusions, and so a single phrase could carry layers of meaning. In that sense, conversation carried implicit depth.

Today, that shared cultural background is thinner and more fragmented. We no longer reliably inhabit the same symbolic world. Our references diverge, our media diverge, our intellectual inheritances diverge. Even when we speak the same language, we often do not share the same implicit meanings.

This does not make people less intelligent or less educated. But it does make encounter more literal. Conversation stays closer to surface experience because there is less shared depth for it to fall into. Where there is no common symbolic ground, there is less space for resonance.

We are not only less necessary to one another. We are less interiorly shared with one another. And so even when we meet, we meet more lightly.

From Aristotle to Buber

This idea is older than it may seem. Aristotle distinguished three kinds of friendship: those grounded in usefulness, pleasure, and virtue. He regarded the last as the highest, since friends united in virtue help one another to live and flourish. Practical need may first bring people together, but in depending upon one another, they may discover deeper reasons to remain together.

More than two thousand years later, Hegel carried the thought further. We become fully ourselves only through recognition by another consciousness. The self is not something we discover alone, but something that emerges in being recognised by another self.

Martin Buber distilled the matter to its essence. Human life is built upon encounter. We become fully human not through information or interaction, but by meeting another person as a Thou rather than an It.

Across these thinkers runs a single intuition: we do not merely live alongside one another. We become ourselves, and our best selves, through one another.

What We Have Forgotten About Connection

Perhaps this is what modernity has quietly eroded. We have not become less social. In many ways, we have become more social than any people in history. But we have become less necessary to one another. Less dependent. Less bonded. Less anchored in common worlds of meaning.

Without necessity, we attend less closely. Without shared depth, we encounter one another more lightly. Without attention, recognition begins to fade. Without recognition, encounter becomes rare. Without encounter, other people cease to surprise us or feel fully alive.

Perhaps the deepest paradox of modernity is not that we have become less connected, but that we have forgotten what connection is. We have confused communication with encounter. Proximity with presence. Contact with recognition.

We have become connected to almost everyone.

And truly encountered by almost no one.