Outside In | As families shrink, our primary relationship is increasingly with ourselves

The swarming sociability of family life is fading as one-person households and lonely deaths rise. Coping with loneliness is now a life skill

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Around the world, more people are growing up as only children; marrying late, if at all; having children late, if at all; and living alone in old age. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 8:30pm, 16 Jan 2026Updated: 9:58pm, 16 Jan 2026

More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle mused in Politics that to live alone, a man must be a god or a beast, or words to that effect. I wonder what he would have thought of the popularity of China’s “Are You Dead?” app.

For Aristotle, we are social animals, thriving in the “polis” in the company of family, friends and fellow citizens. The average mother had at least five children. Many homes housed three, even four, generations. Family life was noisy and crowded, full of companionship, contest and compromise. To live alone was peculiar. Inhuman even.

What would Aristotle make of the entirely novel demographic trend towards loneliness: growing up as only children; marrying late, if at all; having children late, if at all; living alone in old age? These trends are unique in human history, have emerged at astonishing speed and are being aggravated by the social disconnection of social media. It seems our lives as social animals are being transformed within a generation. And not for the better.

The Are You Dead? app, launched in May by three youngsters from Zhengzhou in Henan, went viral in China a week or so ago, and has focused attention not just on loneliness, but on the remarkable nationwide growth of one-person households.

One of the app’s creators, identified only as Lyu, reportedly said the app was aimed at young users in big cities who were likely to experience both “a strong sense of loneliness due to the lack of people to communicate with” and “worries about unforeseen events occurring without anyone knowing”.

“As fertility drops, life expectancy gets longer, marriages decline and divorce rates keep going up … all of these are creating the trend of one-person households,” National University of Singapore social demographer Wei-Jun Jean Yeung told the Financial Times.

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.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}Outside In | As families shrink, our primary relationship is increasingly with ourselves

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The swarming sociability of family life is fading as one-person households and lonely deaths rise. Coping with loneliness is now a life skill

Outside In | As families shrink, our primary relationship is increasingly with ourselves

The swarming sociability of family life is fading as one-person households and lonely deaths rise. Coping with loneliness is now a life skill