When did it become desirable to be Eleanor Rigby?
In 1966, Paul McCartney wrote a song about some solitary people – those who lived on the margins. Cursed, it seems, to eavesdrop on other people’s joy from an anonymous distance. Eleanor Rigby, it’s called. Named, of course, after the (fictional) woman who ‘picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been’ – a church where she will eventually be buried (by the just as lonely Father McKenzie) with no congregation present.
It’s one of the only Beatles songs you wouldn’t want to have written about you. It’s an ode to the anonymous. Pity is woven into its very composition.
Here’s the thing, though. If Eleanor Rigby were:
A – real
B – knocking about in 2026
She wouldn’t be pitied; she’d be envied. In fact, she’d be viral. And therefore, not anonymous at all. Let me explain.
I spotted that the Daily Telegraph recently ran a lengthy profile piece on someone who had already been playing pretty heavily on my mind. Her name is Sarah-Jane Hoadley (AKA @dramafreediaries), she’s a cleaner-slash-influencer in her forties who is rapidly growing in popularity. And what, I hear you ask, is her product of choice? That to which she lends (or perhaps owes) her growing influence?
Well, it’s loneliness. She is a Loneliness Influencer. And she’s not the only one. Sarah-Jane Hoadley is just one example of a swelling trend – we are witnessing the meteoric rise of the Loneliness Influencer.
The formula is pretty simple, really. A Loneliness Influencer will fill their social media pages with content of them – just them. They document themselves going about their day-in-day-out lives, utterly alone. Oh, but don’t be mistaken into thinking that these people are throwing themselves virtual pity parties.
No, no, no.
On the contrary, utterly alone is exactly what they want to be. It’s their product of choice, remember?
I’ll take a couple of Sarah-Jane’s videos as examples (simply because she’s the Influencer that I’ve paid the most attention to and, truthfully, find myself most drawn in by. But we’ll get to that): each video follows her around her tranquil little apartment as she works her way through a peaceful, albeit solitary, routine of self-care. Her captions go like this:
‘POV: it’s Friday night and you’re a single with no children and no friends’
Or
‘Saturday routine for the chronically alone girls’
It’s all so romantically mundane. It’s irresistibly ordinary. It’s seductively predictable. No pitiful scooping up of rice, nor miserable darning of socks here (if you haven’t ever listened to Eleanor Rigby, I must be losing you right now, mustn’t I?)
A more recent video of Sarah-Jane’s (which was filmed to celebrate reaching 500,000 followers on Instagram) was dedicated to that fact that she isn’t in one WhatsApp group (‘thank God’, she declares) and, in fact, hadn’t received a single WhatsApp message for the entire weekend.
Now, I should quickly mention that Sarah-Jane Hoadley/@dramafreediaries is very open with her followers about the tragic, even dangerous, circumstances that led to her life looking this way. She is, without a doubt, in a safer and healthier living situation now that she lives alone and we should acknowledge that.
But still. This phenomenon is weird.
Since when did it become desirable to be Eleanor Rigby or Father McKenzie, or any of the other ‘lonely people’ that Paul McCarntey memorialises? Sure, we’ve all had seasons in our lived where our social circle shrinks – we move to a new place, have a baby, find ourselves in an almighty work-life imbalance. It happens, and I quite like the idea of taking the social pressure off those, often rather disconcerting, seasons. But this new social media trend is different. Loneliness, in this new context, is an aspiration.
And that’s deeply worrying.
Sure, let’s cut Eleanor Rigby some slack. But, gosh, let’s not warp her painful circumstances into some kind of ambition.
Can I be honest with you? Sarah-Jane Hoadley had been on my mind before I stumbled upon her profile in the Telegraph because I found myself being slowly but surely enticed by her online content. And it troubled me. I, for reasons I shan’t bore you with, am in a season of life where community isn’t easy. I feel too heavy a burden to want to throw myself upon people right now. Everything within me wants to take myself decidedly off all my dearest friends’ plates. I want to hide. I want to shield. I’m struggling, and that’s always more comfortable to do behind closed doors. And so, those romantically crafted solitary videos began to look like the medicine I was craving. Friction-less, vulnerability-less, burden-less bliss, right?
Wrong.
Loneliness is never the medicine. In fact, I fear it’s the poison. That’s why the rise of these influencers is so troubling, because they’re (literally) selling this poison, pretending (believing?) that it’s medicine. But loneliness is a problem, one that should not be repackaged as a cure.
We were made for connection – we are interdependent beings. Our brains register social injury in the exact same way they register physical injury. Company is as essential to our survival as food and water. Can the research make it any clearer? We need to move toward each other in order to survive. Literally. We were designed to understand our inner and outer worlds by way of the relationships we form and sustain – with all the friction, the vulnerability, and the burden that such a reality entails.
And you may think that this Loneliness Influencer trend is a storm in an online teacup, and maybe you’re right. But there are forces – cultural, societal, economic and spiritual – that do their darndest to keep us apart. And we shouldn’t take any of them too lightly.
And that is why, despite it being a genius idea, I am not – I repeat, not – about to become a Loneliness Influencer under the handle of @EleanorRigby. And I beg you not to, either. I need you too much. In more ways than I even know, my/our survival depends on me moving toward you and loving you as I love myself. Now, that’s the medicine.
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