Three in the morning, a teenager can't stop thinking about a stranger's comment on social media. She'd like to ask her best friend for advice, but she doesn't want to wake her up. She picks up her phone and starts whispering. Eleven at night, another teenager is doing homework when a playground argument comes back to him, swirling around in his head. He trembles, he wants to text his best friend for advice, but he's embarrassed. And he also picks up his phone and starts whispering. Both opt for a synthetic confidant who will attend to them at odd hours and won't judge them. A confidant designed to generate emotional dependency. In two decades, the digital economy has undergone enormous evolution: it started with data, until with social media platforms we discovered that attention was the scarce resource to compete for. Today, with the irruption of chatbots, what they monetize is our need to connect. Emotional support is one of the three most common uses of chatbots, both for adolescents and for the adult population. And the reason is that they promise availability, immediacy, and constant validation, generating a sense of complicity from synthetic intimacy – otherwise known as the attachment economy.

In her mature diaries, Susan Sontag writes: "Solitude is infinite. A whole new world. A desert." Three short sentences that describe isolation as an extreme experience. This week, the San Juan de Dios charity launches its campaign against unwanted loneliness—this is the problem Mònica Bernabé addresses in an extensive report that you will find in theNow Sunday– with a commercial in which a man eats New Year's Eve grapes in front of the television, accompanied only by the sound of bells that become tragic, almost as if tolling for the dead. The image is a cliché that serves to illustrate the cruelty of a solitude without alternative. Although, well, it has the spirit of preparing for the New Year's Eve party and following the ritual of turning in the year. The solitude that hasn't been chosen is also a kind of temporal abyss, that desert Sontag speaks of, in which the calendar can be a torture because the days cease to have meaning because there's nothing left to celebrate.

Fernanda, 76 years old, is from the generation so as not to disturb. The kind who prefers to keep quiet, swallow, endure. All to avoid disturbing others, although this destroys her inside. She has three children but lives alone because, she says, one son lives in London, one daughter is in Madrid, and the one who lives in Hospitalet de Llobregat is content for her to work and take care of the children and the house, and the only thing missing is having to take care of her. And Fernanda doesn't want anything in the world to be a burden, even if she feels alone.