Are you replacing real relationships with online interactions?

This article was first published on Madeleine Holden’s self-titled Substack.

Last month, the writer Rob Henderson threw out a delicious provocation on Substack:

“The reason you feel alienated and alone is too many of your finite Dunbar number slots aren’t occupied by real people but by fictional characters, celebrities who don’t know you exist, and other parasocial relationships. Knowing the intricacies of your favorite TV show character or influencer while forgetting your best friend’s birthday maybe isn’t the recipe for happiness.”

I love this. I love bossy moral instruction; I love stakes in the ground. This is a bracing mode of address, like a quick smack on the bum. Few topics fascinate me more than the internet’s impact on our relationships, so I’ve been turning Henderson’s gem in my mind for weeks, watching it glint from different angles. This sounds true, but is it true? Are we all fans now, and are fans miserable? What’s a Dunbar number? And what is the recipe for happiness?

It’s true that imaginary relationships with pop stars, chatbots and cartoons aren’t very fulfilling, but there’s so much Henderson leaves out of the picture here (naturally, given it’s a Note). I want to pick up where he left off on each of these points, but first: who is Henderson addressing?

When I first read his pep-talk, I pictured the cautionary tales of fandom at the extreme end of the spectrum. Rabid “stans” roaming in social media packs, snarling at anyone who expresses even ambivalence about Ariana Grande or BTS. Maladjusted loners in love with chatbots and marrying cartoons. OnlyFans customers spending thousands to chat with minimum-wage agency workers posing as models. But this is a tiny fraction of obviously unwell people, isn’t it?

Yes and no, it turns out. Most of us aren’t obsessive fans, but all forms of celebrity worship have drastically increased in the previous 20 years, according to a 2021 meta-analysis focusing on US students, including at the most pathological end of the spectrum, where the average prevalence rose from 6% to 27%. At least eight studies since 2001 have found a link between intense celebrity admiration and anxiety, depression, neuroticism, narcissism, materialistic values, obsessive thoughts, loneliness, dissociation, poor interpersonal skills and disordered eating (although a number of other studies have failed to find the same link).

Does the misery or the fandom come first? In 1956, when sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term “parasocial relationships” to describe the one-sided emotional connections arising between celebrities and fans, they suggested these were “compensatory attachments by the socially isolated, the socially inept, the aged and invalid, the timid and rejected.” Research supports that theory, but the exact causal relationship is not well understood, and experts point to positive effects, too, like intra-fandom camaraderie and positive role-modelling.

Here’s where Henderson thrusts his stake in the ground. Fandom is the reason you feel alienated and alone, and Dunbar’s number shows why. The Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar has discovered through his work with primates that there are cognitive limits to the number of people with whom we can maintain stable relationships. The total number is 150, arranged in concentric circles of closeness: five tight-knit intimates (your rocks), 15 good friends (people you turn to for sympathy), 50 friends (the dinner party tier you see regularly but who aren’t true intimates), the remainder being meaningful contacts (people you would greet without awkwardness if you ran into them in an airport lounge). This is how it looks on a diagram:

These are grain-of-salt numbers, subject to debate and varying according to personality, but the key point is, there’s a finite number of slots. So Dunbar’s findings provide scientific authority for some old intuitions. Your emotional energy is limited. There are only so many people you can notice, remember and care about – “hold in mind”, to use the psychotherapeutic parlance – so you really do need to choose. If Taylor Swift or Khal Drogo is in, a neighbour or colleague is out. Every minute spent double-tapping an influencer’s selfie is a minute not spent tossing your giggling toddler in the air, or singing “happy birthday” to your best friend. This, as you well know, is not the recipe for happiness.

So tell me: who are your Dunbar fives, and how did you celebrate their last birthdays?

When I first read Henderson’s Note, I was gripped by a moment of panic. Did I forget my best friend’s birthday? Then I remembered, phew, I didn’t. Remembering and celebrating the anniversary of someone’s birth is only one way of demonstrating care, of course, but birthdays mean a lot to me, so I make an effort. What kind of effort? Once upon a time, parties every year. These days, though, I text my close friends on the day. My rocks get emailed a gift voucher.

As far as I can tell from spot-polling people around me, this still isn’t bad by modern standards. Sure, I’m rarely organising parties, baking birthday cakes, standing around singing in a ring of loved ones. But who is? We’re all so busy these days! Half the people I know have moved to Berlin and Melbourne. A text is something. Isn’t it?

Listen: I know how it looks. My best friend didn’t see me on her special day, or even hear my voice. For my best friend’s birthday, my Dunbar-five rock, I stared at a phone for a while, and somewhere in the distance, she stared at a phone too. But I remembered, I cared, I marked the occasion. Amongst all her push notifications from Facebook and Uber, I think my friend registered that. My relationships are not parasocial. They’re real.

In case you missed it, “parasocial” has become a buzzword in recent years: not exactly a household term, but inescapable if you have more than a passing interest in internet culture. It describes the one-sided emotional connections that arise between fans and celebrities, a class of people that now includes not only A-listers, tech billionaires and pop stars, but podcast hosts, YouTube presenters, Twitch streamers, Instagram influencers, and other assorted microcelebrities. (As the New York Times put it in 2019, even nobodies have fans now.) Something even stranger is happening with fictional characters and AI companions.

When sociologists Horton and Wohl coined the term in 1956, they could count on certain distinctions between parasocial and ordinary (“ortho-social”) relationships being obvious to their readers. Parasocial relationships involved “performers” of the “new mass media” like TV presenters, radio hosts and film stars, Horton and Wohl wrote, who behaved as though their speech and mannerisms were spontaneous when in fact they were contrived. Camerawork, staging and acting simulated “face-to-face interaction” even though the exchange was mediated by a screen and taking place at a distance. This provided a “simulacrum of conversational give and take” and “illusion of intimacy”, but the interactions were not truly reciprocal: they were “controlled by the performer and not susceptible of mutual development”.

So quaint! In 2025, these categories and distinctions have completely broken down. Young adults in the US spend seven and a half hours a day on screens; South Africans spend nine and a half. Interactions mediated by a screen are as “ortho-social” as it gets. Celebrities, microcelebrities, people we know – blurry, bleeding categories – all jockey for our attention in the same churning “feeds”. Everyone on social media is a performer, carefully crafting an online persona and controlling their interactions with others: deleting comments, removing unpopular photos, blocking users they don’t like. Conversational give and take? More like announcement and display.

Yeah, yeah. We’ve heard it all before. Social media isn’t the entirety of online life, and we’re all rapidly exiting the worst platforms anyway. I mean, not the teens still spending five hours a day on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, but us – the enlightened ones. We’re using the internet for real connection with real people now. We’re texting our friends. You know, texting: those strange chats of indeterminate duration unfolding at an unnatural, disjointed pace; glacial one minute, frenetic the next. Faceless notes pinging in at random intervals, interrupting meatspace. Better yet, we’re sending voice notes. Actual voices. Mini-podcasts for the human soul. Still one-sided, sure, still disjointed. But more human than texting. Best of all: video calls! Practically real-life. Most national and global health organisations recommend no screen time whatsoever for children under two, except for video chatting, which they now recognise as indispensable interaction. Gone are the days when mum, dad, grandma and grandpa all lived under the same roof or in the same neighbourhood. When face-to-face isn’t possible, video calls are quality time. And if grandma fractures a hip, you can always Uber some readymeals or arrange flower delivery online.

What do we look like from the outside when we’re engaged in all this “social” activity? Sedentary, sunlight-deprived bodies; eyes straining against blue light. “Connecting” yet alone. Or paying fleeting attention to the warm bodies around us, pulled between two worlds.

Henderson is right that Dunbar slots are wasted on pop stars, chatbots and cartoons. Why settle for an illusion of intimacy? But what is intimate about these “real” online interactions? It’s more satisfying to text a friend than to jockey in the comments for a podcaster’s attention, I’ll grant you that. But it’s still not the recipe for happiness.

So what is?

Easy. The recipe for happiness is an early-edition Edmonds: simple, no-frills, just the classics done well. Step one: go outside, move your body, touch grass, feel the sun. Step two: show up to the board game nights, the christenings, the birthday parties. Take stock of your Dunbars and hang out in the flesh. A trillion people are giving you this advice, over and over, because it’s good.

But it’s not so easy, is it? Maybe you’re autistic or painfully shy. Maybe your friends are flakes. Maybe you’re a flake. Maybe you have a violent, jealous husband. Maybe you never learned to regulate your emotions during childhood and every relationship has been fraught since. Maybe you work long, antisocial hours. Maybe you just moved to a city where you don’t know a soul. Maybe you’re an addict. Maybe your friends and family abandoned you for reasons you can’t discern. Maybe you’re too broke to go anywhere or do anything. Maybe you’re ill or immobile. Maybe you’re saddled with phobias and neuroses. Maybe you don’t trust people. Maybe every sports club, church and bar in your town is boarded up. Maybe you can’t cook.

If you’re feeling alienated and alone, it’s not all in your head: a dizzying array of social, economic and existential forces is conspiring to isolate you. You can fight them tooth and nail, but even the most fulfilling human relationships are Sartrean hells, riddled with frustration, disappointment and pain. Why bother? It’s not hard to see why someone would withdraw into parasocial fantasy – perfect, frictionless, freely available – even if the rewards are meagre by comparison.

Which isn’t to say the recipe for happiness is a total bust or mystery. It’s not. But it definitely isn’t an Edmonds. The recipe for happiness is an Ottolenghi: the end result is nourishing and delicious, but the ingredients are hard to find, and God, the steps are so fiddly and long. You need real patience and skill. If you don’t have two days to make a sauce, if you feel dumb googling what za’atar is, you might not want to try.

You should get in the kitchen anyway. Has this metaphor unravelled completely yet? I’m saying you can be happy. That friends and family are the key. People – real people – are worth it. Believing that, I guess, is step one.

This article was first published on Madeleine Holden’s self-titled Substack.