Why We Prefer Screens Over People Now?

They keep saying we’re living through a “loneliness crisis.” I say—I wish. Loneliness would be easier to diagnose, easier to treat, and far less dangerous. Instead, we’re confronting something more complex: a noise-cancellation crisis. A generation of young men who don’t feel lonely not because they are emotionally fulfilled, but because they’ve conditioned themselves to want almost nothing from human intimacy. Their numbness is not a symptom of isolation; it is a by-product of dopamine overstimulation.

Everywhere you look—podcasts, productivity influencers, self-optimisation content, solo fitness gurus—young men are absorbing a glossy ideology of “independence” that quietly amputates the need for connection. Beneath the aspirational language lies a deeper behavioural shift: a rewired reward system where frictionless dopamine substitutes the slow, effortful, and democratically essential work of forming real relationships.

This is the Noise-Cancellation Generation, emerging within the Digital Sedation Economy.

Walk into any urban gym at dawn and you’ll see them. Young men moving with mechanical precision, earbuds sealing off the world like personal soundproofing devices. Eyes forward, engagement minimal. At first glance it looks like discipline. At second glance, self-management. Look closer, and you see something else: a withdrawal from relational unpredictability into highly controlled sensory environments. It is a carefully curated form of risk mitigation.

This is dopamine insulation: a shift away from emotional risk and toward sensory predictability. The aim is stability. And it is already reshaping how young men participate in relationships, workplaces, and civic life. When the broader economy is engineered for sedation—smooth, gamified, predictable—young men optimised for dopamine become its most compliant participants.

Intimacy has always required risk. Ask poets, slow-burn writers, and therapists who have built entire careers on this. Cultures, communities, and democracies rely on individuals developing tolerance for uncertainty, negotiation, and repair. But for the first time, we have technologies that eliminate these tensions almost entirely.

Porn sits at the top of that list. It’s on-demand, infinite, perfectly curated, and absolutely risk-free. No negotiation. No disappointment. No fear of rejection. Earlier, even porn was social—your cable-wale bhaiya, your school friend who “arranged things,” the boys who crowded into a single room to pretend they were men. Today, the practice is solitary, algorithmic, and neurologically precise.

Then there’s trading—adrenaline without relational responsibility. Opening a trading account takes less courage than starting a business. The latter builds a community; the former builds stimulation. Trading apps today feel like casinos disguised as financial literacy.

Add the rise of solo fitness and solo work routines and voila: entire weeks can pass without navigating another human personality.

Emotional Insulation
This is systemic emotional insulation masquerading as optimisation. And it is backfiring—not individually, but institutionally.

One client (shared with consent) proudly called himself “pornosexual”—a self-sufficient man who avoids dating because it’s “too unpredictable.” But the same intolerance for unpredictability seeped into leadership behaviours: impatience with teams, aversion to emotional friction, low delay tolerance. His brain had been accidentally trained to expect frictionless reward, but workplaces run on the opposite logic.

Another client spent hours in trading loops under the illusion of “building wealth.” Psychologically, he resembled a volatility-seeking gambler. Stimulation steadied him; people drained him. His emotional thermostat had become the market’s daily pulse.

These men are not anomalies. They are early indicators of a labour force that finds stimulation soothing and human contact destabilising.

The Cyberball experiment demonstrated that social exclusion triggers neural pathways similar to physical pain. Humans are wired for belonging. But today’s dopamine-insulated young men have muted that circuitry. Longing itself has eroded. And this is dangerous.

Because it mirrors addiction studies where rats pressed dopamine levers endlessly, abandoning grooming, bonding, and mating. The tragedy wasn’t solitude; it was the collapse of desire.

Today, the smartphone is the lever. The Digital Sedation Economy rewards every press with dopamine. And unpractised emotions become unlivable ones.

You see it everywhere—
• A young man unable to make a basic phone call.
• Anxiety before speaking in a meeting.
• Paralysis before asking someone out.

This is not a social-skills deficit. It is an environmental-design problem. We cannot workshop our way out of this. “Just socialise more” is not a solution when the reward architecture has shifted so dramatically toward frictionless stimulation.

The Digital Sedation Economy conditions men to seek sensation without commitment—trading apps, betting platforms, algorithmic self-improvement tools. These are not benign products; they are mood-regulation systems. And when mood regulation relies on digital spikes, emotional maturity stalls.

Indian philosophy anticipated this centuries ago. Pratyāhāra calls for withdrawing the senses for clarity, not sedation. Santosha demands contentment, not craving.

But today’s withdrawal is neither reflective nor disciplined—it is sensory overconsumption framed as stability. The nervous system does not distinguish between retreat for insight and retreat for avoidance; it only registers withdrawal.

This is why I recommend dopamine fasting—not as punishment or moral discipline, but as neurological recalibration. Lowering stimulation allows discomfort to become survivable again. And when discomfort becomes survivable, connection becomes possible.

Yet individual discipline is insufficient. Policy must catch up.

India requires technological environments that reward attention, collaboration, and emotional resilience—not just stimulation. We need workplaces that incentivise interdependence, platforms that prioritise connection over compulsion, and economic structures where long-term stability is accessible, not aspirational.

India is not facing a loneliness epidemic. It is facing a noise-cancellation crisis: a society where young men no longer experience the psychological hunger that builds trust, leadership, and love.

A nation full of emotionally noise-cancelled men won’t collapse through conflict. It will decay quietly through disengagement, one numbed reward circuit at a time.

Unless we intervene now—structurally, not sentimentally—we will inherit a society of men who can regulate dopamine but not discomfort, who can monitor volatility but not build stability, who can optimise their mornings but cannot sustain human closeness.

And that—not loneliness—is the crisis policymakers must confront.