💜My whole life, I’ve oscillated between different time zones and tongues—from one place to another—India to America to Britain. The faces changed, the cities changed, but one thing remained a constant companion: this searing, unyielding loneliness. It was never the kind of solitude that burst into my face but rather something more insidious, like a shadow that followed me no matter where I went.
🌼Maybe I’ve always been looking for places to belong. As a teenager in Jabalpur, I remember sneaking onto Twitter late at night, talking to strangers. I was fifteen, sitting on the floor of our tiny house with the glow of the desktop screen flickering on my face, feeling like I was part of something bigger. The people there didn’t know me, but they listened. That was enough. Years later, Clubhouse felt eerily similar.
🦂The first time I entered a Clubhouse room—the app where every lonely heart became part of a collective dirge—I remember a barrage of voices, some abrasive, others distorted like a long-distance call. There was laughter, the occasional awkward silence, and a kind of electricity in the not-quite-audio, not-quite-text space. It felt like walking into a cocktail party mid-conversation, except here, you never had to show your face. And anyone could tune in and interact through highly stimulating rooms. So, I started using the app frequently whether It was late at night or early in the morning; while I was in bed or doing something. And suddenly, I wasn’t alone anymore.
🥂I remember designer Sandip Khosla hosting many rooms where young people would sit day and night, chatting. The app was so addictive that people did not want to miss out on any conversation—so much so that some even slept while staying online, using it as white noise. I remember my friend told me that she kept Clubhouse on all night, the sound of voices making the silence in her apartment less unbearable. “It’s like sleeping next to someone without the mess of real intimacy,” she joked. But I wondered if it was a joke at all.
For a moment, you could believe you were truly known, but just as quickly, you could become a stranger again and that is the paradox of Clubhouse.
🧔The covid pandemic has ended, but for many of us, the loneliness has not. And Clubhouse isn’t just an app—it is a refuge, where we seek solace in the rhythm of shared isolation. There is always a room waiting, a digital after-hours space where strangers become confidants and your real-world identity melts into whatever alter ego you decide to inhabit.
ꦅAt first, I used my real name. I spoke freely, sharing snippets of my life, my travels, my writing. But I learned quickly: never get too comfortable. Never let them know too much. One night, in a room of 300 people, I mentioned something deeply personal. The next day, a stranger in another room casually referenced it, laughing. It was a gut punch. I had been naive, treating a microphone like a confessional. After that, I changed my username. I became someone else—someone less vulnerable, more curated.
🔯Today, the app has become toxic and many people were jailed because of their grotesque behaviour; some of us decided to hide our identities as self-preservation. This led to a bigger shift—developing an alter ego. Now, I go there as a character, yet I still speak as I would in real life, which many seem to enjoy as I have more than 2000 active listeners and every day, a few new people who come to hear me talk. Praise came easily. Applause felt instant.
𒁃Over time, anonymity felt freeing, intoxicating. It also made it easy to disappear. Why? Well, the truth is that life isn’t a perfect equipoise, and sometimes, we all crave clamour. And that’s exactly what the app promised me—someone always there to listen. It allowed me to create my own world, where I gathered many listeners who would tune in to enjoy the unabashed conversations I had with my friends.
ܫI think it’s safe to say that the app has given me a space to express an extension of my personality and engage in nonchalant conversations about anything and everything—conversations I wouldn’t normally have with a random stranger in public, simply because there’s so little accountability until you’re doxxed. And that is the cost of it—I have watched friendships implode over subtweets, reputations dismantled in real time. Clubhouse has had its own economy of credibility, where threats came easily, names were just usernames, and accountability dissolved with a swipe.
꧃The illusion of closeness was both the best and worst part of it all. For a moment, you could believe you were truly known, but just as quickly, you could become a stranger again and that is the paradox of Clubhouse, and perhaps all social media, is that it creates a sense of community while deepening the very isolation it claims to combat. It gives us access to people we would never meet otherwise, but it also makes human connection transactional by making you feel both hyper-real and entirely artificial at the same time.
ꦯAnd yet, despite the intimacy of it all, I knew I would never meet these people. It wasn’t just geography that kept us apart—it was the nature of the space itself. The trust was implicit but also conditional. The fantasy worked because it was ephemeral. Take it offline, and it crumbles. The irony? We might not ever meet in real-time. But whatever happens there, we take it to our cores. The app helped us reshape out adult friendships and tackle our collective loneliness in a time where therapy costs a fortune.
ꦜSo, I wonder why I went on Clubhouse. Is it because I wanted connection? Or because what I found was a mirror. And maybe that’s all any of us are really looking for—proof that we exist in someone else’s world, even if only for a moment. The promise of Clubhouse was community, and in some ways, it delivered. It created spaces where none existed, built trust where none was required. It was a place where strangers could confess their deepest fears, where late-night conversations felt like stolen moments of honesty.
🅰But the solution to loneliness? That remains unsolved. The app is fading. And yet, I still wonder if somewhere, in some corner of the internet, there’s a room waiting for me, still buzzing with the sound of strangers who make me feel some thing.
𝄹Perhaps loneliness isn’t something we solve with technology. Perhaps we just learn to carry it, stealing moments of connection in spaces built to be temporary. We speak, we listen, and then we vanish—hoping someone, somewhere, still hears us.
(Views expressed are personal)
Aditya Tiwari is a poet, writer and activist. he is the author of APRIl is Lush and Over the Rainbow: India’s Queer Heroes
(This article appeared in Outlook’s Valentine’s Day 2025 special issue on love and loneliness in the era of technology. It was published in print as 'Swipe, Scroll—Still Lonely')
