We Aren't Materialists. We're Introverts.

On loneliness, longing, and Rom-Coms in 2025.

Aug 17, 2025

Hello friends,

Two small housekeeping items:

I’ve decided to start including a brief list of things I’m reading/watching at the bottom of each newsletter. It’s not related to the topic at hand. It’s just another way to share some interesting stuff, and I’m always curious to hear your thoughts if you’re reading/watching it too.
This essay references two movies from the last few years, Materialists and Past Lives. I promise it will make sense even if you have not seen either of them, so please don’t be discouraged.

As a final note, this essay was by far the most frustrating and difficult to write yet. Like, weirdly hard. I am still not fully satisfied with the ideas I’m conveying nor the way I’m conveying them. But I hope it’s enough to provoke at least some self-reflection and general pondering for you. In that vein, please never hesitate to leave a comment, give it a like, or (most importantly) share it with someone new :)

Be well,

Ollie

The year is 2023. It’s a Tuesday night and I’m sitting alone in my empty studio apartment, sprawled out on my leather loveseat that fits one person much better than two.

My phone lights up. A text from my sister in a groupchat with my Mom. They’ve just seen what will go on to be a sleeper favorite for the Year In Film: Past Lives. I have to watch it, they say. Just wait til the end. You’ll love it.

So with nothing better to do, I shelled out the $3.99 to rent it and watched. One hour and forty-six minutes later, I send another text in the same groupchat:

“Guys, why did you just make me cry on a Tuesday?”

Past Lives was a masterpiece. Precisely written, beautifully shot, and brought to life by a perfect cast, it tells the story of two childhood Korean friends separated by one’s immigration to the United States, who then grow up in two completely different directions. Two decades later, they reconnect, and confront the love they felt as kids in the bodies and circumstances of two very different adults (one of them happily married). It’s steeped in a melancholic longing that resonates with anyone who has known the one-that-got-away, all culminating in a type of happy ending you didn’t know could be happy.

So you can imagine my masochistic excitement when I heard that the writer/director of Past Lives, Celine Song, came out with a new film this year: Materialists.

Materialists was also about love, but a very different kind. Starring the sexy triple threat of Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal (Zaddy, as my family says), Materialists tells the story of an NYC matchmaker (Johnson) caught between her broke ex-boyfriend (Evans) and an older-but-new, suave billionaire (Zaddy). The central premise of the film, which I take as a good-faith commentary on modern dating, is that material obsessions incorrectly set our expectations for love: we think we can find the perfect partner if we find someone who perfectly checks all our boxes (height, job, politics, family upbringing, etc). To our protagonist’s clients, love isn’t spontaneous; it’s lab-grown, as perfectly curated as our exercise schedule or social media algorithm. Of course, the movie concludes that love isn’t so simple: it’s messy, irrational, and passionate—all opposites of the cold and calculating power we desperately try to exert over Romance.

Materialists received mixed reviews. It was marketed as a new Rom-Com at a time when the genre had been largely pronounced dead, but was not received by diehard Rom-Com fans as such. That’s because in practice, it was an odd mix of the Rom-Com formula (love triangle, NYC, will-they-won’t-they, hot people, etc) executed by a former playwright who had just written Past Lives: a bittersweet drama filled with more heavy silences than the upbeat, why-can’t-that-be-me shenanigans of Romantic Comedies. In other words, it lacked a lot of the Comedy. So while the genre purists were lighting the film on fire in reviews, the rest of us were still stuck with a movie that was emotionally confusing, underwhelming, and just mid.

Trailer expectations aside, Materialists wasn’t bad because it was boring. It was two hours of close ups on beautiful people, funny (the few times it tried to be), and most of all topical, illustrating what almost every young urbanite in 2025 agrees on: dating sucks. The problem is that, while it was an apt description of symptoms, it had an incorrect diagnosis.

Song’s characters are correct that “love is easy; dating is hard.” And the movie leads us to believe that dating is especially hard because our material anxieties are all-consuming, and that we are consequently preoccupied with all the wrong things. That’s not unfounded in a world where young people are worse off than their parents for the first time in generations. But as tempting as late-stage capitalism makes that theory, there’s something more insidious undergirding this materialism: our decaying social lives.

Derek Thompson has been writing about what he calls the “Anti-Social Century” for a while now (he’s also one of the Abundance guys, if you follow politics). Most recently, he penned a great piece in which he examines recently released data from the American Time Use Survey, and the results for young people today compared to 20 years ago are alarming:

Americans aged 15-to-24 spent 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties.
Face-to-face socializing has plummeted by about 20 percent across the board. It’s 35 percent for unmarried men and people younger than 25.
The amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.

These are just the top lines. More niche and all the more concerning:

Men who watch television now spend 7 hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home.
The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species.
Last year was the first on record, going back to 1975, that fewer than 50 percent of high school seniors said they’d ever had a drink of alcohol.

Derek Thompson

The Death of Partying in the U.S.A.—and Why It Matters

In January, The Atlantic's Ellen Cushing published an essay with an admirably blunt title: “Americans Need to Party More.” Burrowing into the appendix tables of the American Time Use Survey, she unearthed the fact that just 4.1 percent of Americans said they “attended or hosted” a party or ceremony on a typical weekend or …

5 months ago · 1095 likes · 28 comments · Derek Thompson

None of these facts are actively explored in Materialists. But even still, it doesn’t mean they aren’t lurking in the background. How do I know?

None of the characters have friends.

Dakota Johnson has no friends outside of her coworkers, and she is constantly filling in as a friend for her clients. In one of the opening scenes, she convinces a cold-footed bride to walk down the aisle when the incompetent bridesmaids can’t. Later, when another client is being stalked by her sexual assailant, the client openly admits she has no friends to call except her matchmaker. The same is true at the male vertices of her love triangle: Pedro Pascal lives in a big empty apartment and only ever mentions his brother as a confidante, while Chris Evans lives with roommates he hates. Most of all, no one in the film is seen having fun outside of dating or working—in a movie meant to be a Rom-Com.

This social isolation is pervasive, and it creates an anxiety that undoubtedly affects our romantic lives. Faith Hill writes in The Atlantic that this is leading to the generational loss of a classic rite of passage: fewer people are getting into relationships. For example, in 2023, the Survey Center on American Life found that 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they’d been in a romantic relationship at any point in their teen years, compared with 76 percent of Gen Xers and 78 percent of Baby Boomers. It’s no wonder we are the generation that invented the term “incel”.

She continues that it’s not so simple as “everyone’s single.” The mainstreaming of situationships—emotionally and romantically intimate relationships that aren’t “officially” labeled—is a great example. In a 2024 YouGov poll, half of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they’d been in one. So while kids these days don’t have as many boyfriends/girlfriends/partners, they might still be engaging in emotional intimacy without calling it what their parents called it.

But even if this generational shift is semantic rather than social, the semantic matters. Something within us still fears the vulnerability that comes from openly admitting you are seeing someone or even have feelings for someone. We are terrified of being romantically earnest, lest we commit the ultimate Gen Z sin of being cringe. Without this raw admission, we don’t get the emotional satisfaction we have evolved to crave as fundamentally social creatures. So it might not be that “everyone’s single,” but it sure does feel like everyone’s lonely.

Thinking of your situationship? Send this to them (or maybe just your best friend who knows all about it)

This social anxiety, even if subconscious and collective, is not special. Any anxiety stems from uncertainty and creates a vicious feedback loop of fear. We don’t like what we don’t know, so we avoid it, which brings relief in the short term but reinforces that fear in the long term. Over time, it creates a disconnect between what we do and what we get: we think we’re protecting ourselves through avoidance, yet we do not feel safer. The consequence is a deep sense that we lack control over our own lives.

Lacking control is especially anxiety-inducing in a world where it has never been easier to tailor our exact preferences in all aspects of life. Our phones put every movie and show in the history of the world in our pocket; our social media algorithms learn to feed us increasingly specific content; meal kit services pre-prepare dinners fine-tuned to our diets; Amazon delivers everything from pots and pans to horse-shaped dildos (in two days with Prime!); the DSM-5 now recognizes nearly 160 distinct mental disorders with which to diagnose our personal idiosyncrasies (including a desire for horse-shaped dildos); and, of course, dating apps literally allow us to select the same preferences parodied by Johnson’s bougie clients in Materialists. So it’s only natural that most people expect to select the perfect partner the same way we select the perfect Alexa settings.

We have become conditioned to select people, then meet them; rather than meet people, then select them. It’s a social-emotional defense system that fortifies isolation and avoidance rather than dismantling it.

There is no doubt technology plays a role here. In fact, the information age has formed a nasty love triangle between our social lives, romantic lives, and technology. The first two are a match made in heaven: romance thrives among social abundance, and they play off each other effortlessly. More parties, more connection, more opportunity. But technology is a home wrecker. It seduces us to a warm bed and a cool screen, siphoning energy from our social lives to choke our romance. It’s messy and dark, no more of a classic Rom-Com love triangle than the lurking nihilism of Materialists.

Then again, I hesitate to blame all of this on technology. I don’t think it explains everything, even if it gets close. After all, I’ve written before about Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and the decay of social institutions, a trend that long pre-dates the smartphone. What’s more, the Zoomers in Faith Hill’s Atlantic article don’t pinpoint technology as the bane of their existence. Instead, many of them simply revere independence:

They didn’t like the idea of only one other person being meant for each of us, or the suggestion that they’d be incomplete without such a reunion[...] they wanted to be whole all by themselves—not dependent on a soulmate.

To be “whole all by yourself” doesn’t have anything to do with your phone—if anything, self-sufficient technologies make that easier. But it does mean Gen Z is wary of needing or wanting social interaction. And technology has become a prerequisite to nearly every social interaction we have, increasing the burden of physical connection by adding yet another step at a time when we just might not care enough.

Consider just how many of our interactions are mediated by screens rather than people. We order DoorDash instead of talking to the guy at the register; we do self check out at the grocery store; we Slack and Teams our coworkers, often while working from home, more than we talk to them; we watch recorded lectures at 9pm instead of showing up to class at 9am; we watch porn instead of having sex; we go on dating apps more than we go on dates. As easy as it is to get what we want, it is equally easy to avoid social interaction while doing it.

Perhaps, then, Materialists is not about the materialism of desiring nice cars or clothes. It’s about our desire to treat people as material objects, finitely available yet infinitely customizable, like our iPhone—so long as they make us “whole all by ourselves”. The result is, ironically, a limited capacity to expose ourselves, openly and vulnerably, to the messy, chaotic, material world around us.

We Aren't Materialists. We're Introverts.

On loneliness, longing, and Rom-Coms in 2025.

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