// BBC WORLD NEWS — MONDO
Solitude as a new aspirational lifestyle: 'We are not lonely'
Content creators sharing the peace of solo living is making the rounds on social media
It's a Friday night. A young woman trudges back to her apartment after a day of work. She enters a spotless kitchen, unloads a bag of groceries, and unwraps a frozen pizza before sliding it in the oven.
What follows is a nightly routine that is almost meditative in its mundanity: she lights a candle and gazes briefly at the snow-covered landscape outside her window, piles a premade salad onto a plate with the pizza, and settles on her sofa to eat in front of the TV.
The tagline that accompanies the scene reads: "POV you're a childfree and single girl that has no friends and lives alone so this is how you spend your Friday night."
At the centre of the video – which has amassed seven million views on TikTok – is Lana Isa, a software sales manager in her 20s based in Toronto.
In addition to chronicling her nightly self-care routines, she takes her almost 400,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram on late-night fast food drives, reading sessions perched on a rock by the lake, even a saga of getting locked out of her apartment in the middle of the night.
Isa is part of a growing, albeit niche corner of the internet where content creators, many of them women, share their daily rituals of living alone, choosing to spotlight a lifestyle that prioritises peace and solitude - the antithesis of social media excess.
For Isa, unveiling the "no friends" aspect of her life was less of a tagline, but the "reality" she had been living for several years.
Lana Isa says her videos show her real life and were never intended to "romanticise having no friends"
After switching several high schools, enduring Covid isolation during her college years and moving across the country following her first heartbreak, Isa found herself forced to adjust to living alone with no close friends.