• Jordan Reyne
• April 09, 2025
• DEUTSCHE VERSION

Hi. My name is Jordan, and I have a severe allergy to self-help gurus. I am not here to tell you to love yourself or think positively. I know that doesn’t work—because I spent decades grappling with that excruciating, bone-deep loneliness so many of us feel... Read On

• Jordan Reyne
• April 09, 2025
• DEUTSCHE VERSION

Individualism is one of the cornerstones of Western capitalist culture. At its core, the individual—me, I, myself—is the most important unit. We don’t call things iPhone, an iPad, or ‘me-time’ for nothing. These phrases reflect what we hold dear. Inherent in the cult of the individual is the belief that success, happiness, and even responsibility are all about what I do—not about the people around me or the society I live in, me. Ideally, I am in charge of my world (or will at least feel like I am), am self-sufficient, and responsible for only my own choices... Read On

• Jordan Reyne
• April 16, 2025
• DEUTSCHE VERSION

What Is Control? Put simply, having control is about having the power to elicit certain outcomes, and acting to elicit those outcomes. Western capitalist culture places a heavy emphasis on the idea that we can – and should – control our environment, our emotions, our appearance, our relationships, and our life as a whole.
Our hunger for control over all aspects of our lives is reflected in the explosion of self-help books, productivity tools, and wellness trends. .... Read On

• Jordan Reyne
• April 30, 2025
• DEUTSCHE VERSION

What if everything you were taught about your emotions was a lie? What if pain wasn’t a problem to be fixed? What if feeling deeply wasn’t a weakness — but a form of truth the world desperately needs?
For decades, we’ve been sold a story: that the rational mind is king. That if we just think the right thoughts, we can rise above suffering, solve injustice, and become our best selves. But beneath that tidy promise lies a deeper harm — one that turns our emotions into enemies, and our struggles into personal failures.. .... Read On

• Jordan Reyne
• May 16, 2025

Is competition really driving us forward—or quietly pulling us apart? In this post, we dig deep into how comparison culture, capitalist values, and performative selfhood are making us lonelier than ever. From office sports metaphors to narcissistic self-help mantras, we unpack the hidden psychological and philosophical costs of a society obsessed with winning. Expect critical insights from thinkers like Sartre, Foucault, Alfred Adler, Gabor Maté, and more—as well as personal stories, cultural critique, and a few dark laughs. If you’ve ever felt like you’re not measuring up, like your worth depends on your performance, or like everyone around you is secretly judging your life like a talent show… Read On

• Jordan Reyne
• May 29, 2025

In this post, the aim is to bring together everything we’ve discussed about capitalist values so far—specifically how they prevent real connection and, in doing so, make loneliness not just likely but compulsory. We will delving into a lot of opposites, because opposites always gain their meaning from each other. We will look at how the assertion of something being “good” (such as individualism) gives birth to it’s opposite (such as “co-dependence) being labelled as bad. We also look at how the opposite of loneliness—connection—is actively blocked by what we have decided is good or bad, in terms of the values we hold dear.

This means we are going to talk directly too about what is deemed “sick,” because central to this episode is how our culture pathologizes the opposite of its ideals. To value individualism so highly, for example, means we end up labelling our natural human need for one another as “co-dependence.” Read On

• Jordan Reyne
• June 13, 2025

I want to begin with a quote by Emmanuel Levinas — because this post is about being unseen. Or more precisely: it’s about being reduced to something you’re not. When you hear it, remember, for me, YOU are that other. For you, I am.

“The Other, that is, the other person, escapes all totality; they are infinite, exterior to any system, irreducible to the Same.”
— Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961), introduction

So, now you know why Levinas is famous for being dense, but here’s the important bit: Other people — and we ourselves — can never be fully known, never completely captured by the categories we try to stuff them into. We’re more than our job titles, our roles, our physical bits, or our bios. That irreducibility is key to true connection. It is our irreducability that invites curiosity, and that curiosity invites communication. It invites a desire to see someone – which is how intimacy comes about. In the last post, intimacy was described as seeing into one another, and not about sex. It is, instead, the antidote to loneliness. Read On

• Jordan Reyne
• June 26, 2025

Hello, dear reader. Today, I want to talk about one of the most insidious reasons you might feel lonely, isolated — and like you’re not good enough You might not know this, but those feelings are actually a typical outcome of a certain kind of upbringing. An upbringing by a narcissistic parent.

Wait wait! You might say “my parents were lovely people!”

And I believe you. However, whether you were raised by great parents, average ones, or off the scale psychos, it won’t prevent you experiencing the kind of formative influence that creates loneliness. And That is because western culture is raising you exactly like a narcissitic parent would.

That societal, narcissistic parent is asking you to trade authenticity for belonging, Through them you are learning that your needs are a burden, that your real self is unloveable and in need of constant fixing, and that connection is something to earn through performance. Read On

• Jordan Reyne
• July 10, 2025

This post is the second in a four-part series on narcissistic values in Western capitalist culture. Why would I delve into the topic of narcissism in a podcast on loneliness? The answer is, because narcissistic values are EXACTLY what drives loneliness. Think about it — hyper-individualism, the lone hero narrative, image over authenticity, control over care, and masks over openness – all of that stops us from connecting. In some cases, it can stop us even knowing HOW to connect. Read On

• Jordan Reyne
• July 30, 2025

Picture yourself in the late 1800s. You’ve been outcast by German society. You’ve been laughed at by academics and spurned by potential lovers. You are now miserable, broke, and ill, but still very, very THINKY. You are, in fact, working on another book. And even though you don’t know it yet, in that book, you will write three words that will change the course of history:
Gott ist tot.
In the aftermath of Nietzsche’s great meaninglessness-bomb, capitalism dressed up its own values — individualism, control, and self-obsession — in the garb of a new messiah. One that promised transcendence… but delivered an even deeper kind of disconnection.
This post isn’t about whether God exists or not. It’s about what came after. It’s about the commodification of “enlightenment” — the way capitalism now sells us spiritual-seeming coping mechanisms to deal with the pain and emptiness it created, all while quietly locking us tighter into the same cycles. Read On

• Jordan Reyne
• September 26, 2025

Stoicism feels honest: it admits life is often unfair and painful. But when “calm acceptance” becomes a lifestyle, it quietly props up the very systems hurting us—and it supercharges loneliness. In this post, we take on modern Stoicism, Western spiritualism, and the capitalist machine that turns emotional repression into a virtue. Read On

• Jordan Reyne
• October 19, 2025

What do Joe Dispenza, Jordan Peterson, and the Music Pedant at every hipster party have in common? They all kill curiosity — the one trait that fuels connection, reason, and genuine understanding..
In this episode of The Loneliness Industry, public philosopher Jordan Reyne unpacks how capitalism, science, and self-help culture all feed the same mechanism Karl Jaspers called “un-reason” — the death of curiosity. Using humour, philosophy, and real-world examples, Reyne reveals how “fake endings” in conversation (the faux terminus) shut down inquiry, divide people into in-groups and out-groups, and keep power, profit, and prestige intact. Read On