At the start of this year, lots of people decided that 2026 was the year they were going to be rejected. They set their new year’s resolutions around it, taking to their TikTok accounts and declaring that in 2026, they aimed to get rejected—by prospective dates, lovers, partners, bosses, etc.—sometimes setting their goals for as many as 1,000 rejections.

Of course, this means they must put themselves out there in risky and vulnerable ways (the underlying goal). It’s quite a change in attitude from a generally withdrawn cultural mood.

This rejection trend follows what some pop culture critics have observed as a resurgence of “yearning” in our popular media, art, and music—undoubtedly amplified by the joyfully thirsty sex-positive hit HBO show, Heated Rivalry. The overt yearning and desirous mood in 2025 seemed to surprise a media climate in movies and TV that had grown somewhat prudish, catering to a generation of new viewers who tended to demur at sex and nudity. At least that was the narrative.

Both of these phenomena come on the heels of an era of cultural introversion, magnified intensely by the pandemic years. Report after report have demonstrated how Gen Z and younger millennials don’t drink, party, date, or risk-take at levels exhibited by previous generations. They don’t seem to want to drive or even leave their bedrooms. The image is one of hyper-online screen addiction and a lack of “real-world” presence or participation.

More broadly speaking, however, people of every generation have exhibited an en masse withdrawal from community and human interaction, precipitated by digital automation and convenience culture (grocery delivery, Prime shipping, theatrical film on demand) and exacerbated by the omnipresent algorithm that drives us down digital rabbit holes and away from our neighbors and colleagues. JOMO—the “joy of missing out”—even became a thing, where people online gleefully celebrated their plans getting cancelled.

At first glance, we might be tempted to explain these feelings and tendencies as an understandable response to modern life being too busy and overwhelming. I’m sure that’s how most of us feel in the moment-to-moment of the day; I know I do.

Instead, consider that the technology-induced retreat from engaging in the banalities, exertions, and confrontations of human society over the last 50 years has made us less resilient and far less adept at living in community and dealing with the demands it places upon us. We have become conditioned to a bubble-wrapped lack of effort, psychologically, emotionally, and even physically.

If I know my neighbor and the cashier at my grocery store by name, then I am just a little bit responsible for their wellbeing. If I don’t, I get to exist “unbothered” and protected from their needs. I get to operate from my little cocoon that consists of my home, my partner or immediate family, and my best friends. This is what many armchair experts out there are calling “wellness” and “self-care.”

I call it estrangement and avoidance. We’re swift to cut “problematic” or inconvenient people out of our lives, our coalitions, and our groups. And we levy boundaries around the sanctity of intense isolation and alienation.

Collectively, we have come to expect a more-or-less frictionless experience in daily life because our online lives have trained us to be able to get, see, buy, do, and reach whatever and whomever we want, whenever we want. Web pages of information load in milliseconds and the snacks we are suddenly craving appear within minutes. There’s no waiting, and even our most fleeting impulses and curiosities can be satiated nearly instantaneously (although never satisfied). The user experience on apps and smartphones is specifically designed to remove barriers to the endless scroll. Friction is removed (even while outrage is amplified).

Life outside, off our phones, has thus—by comparison—veered into the overwhelming. Who wants to deal with parking, or that annoying guy at the gym who doesn’t use his headphones? Who wants to sit in discomfort?

In response to our retreat from friction, we are losing our resilience and tolerance, and we are bored. In a way, we’re exhausted by a lack of effort.

Which brings me back to yearning and rejection.

While feelings of isolation have soared, activities of solitude have disappeared. Our “free time” is burdened by screens, notifications, chats, and a perpetual parade of talking heads filling up the quiet spaces we once reserved for dreaming, but also the mental chatter humans have engaged for eons in order to create art, navigate relationships, experience awe, and process grief.

Yes, we’re overwhelmed, but not by our friends and neighbors, not by our to-do lists or even our political moment. We’re overwhelmed by the mediums through which our lives are being mediated, the demanding and addicting screens that make communication a constant stream rather than periodic or intermittent—but meaningful—connection.

The ease by which we can escape into our phones, and the subsequent boredom it yields, has some of us reaching for friction once again. In this example, it’s in the form of rejection. Yearning for rejection is a quintessential modern manifestation of our sense of meaninglessness and irrelevance that balloons in the caverns of our online worlds.

But the kind of friction we reach for matters. It’s the difference between high-risk behaviors in order to “feel something” and real, vulnerable engagement with oneself and the world around us. Rejection is a friction I can get behind.

Rejection can only come from risk. It is a brilliantly negative barometer for living life fully and courageously. As reported on the January 18th edition of Today, Explained, 1,000 rejections would mean that someone had to try for something new or something desired at least 1,000 times. And it inherently involves other people.

Yearning is the result of our languishing. Isolated from neighbors, estranged from family, barricaded behind walled gardens from encounters with strangers, satiated by an endless delivery of entertainment and supplies, and blocked from disparate opinions and lifestyles, what little left is there that resembles how humans have created culture for millennia?

Yearning for rejection betrays a heartening drive for an enlivened and challenging existence that forges people in the fire of becoming. There’s some reassurance in this trend that all is not lost, as it was only a year ago that Derek Thompson wrote about the “anti-social century” in his cover piece for the Atlantic. Notably, he remarked that our collective loneliness has given way to something darker and more anti-social because we have lost the natural impulse to reconnect and reengage—an evolutionary response to isolation that encourages survival.

Maybe there are yet still threads of that longing to reconnect, revealed in trends like setting rejection goals. And if there are, our work—and especially my own work in the world with my clients—is to make it conscious and guide that impulse toward generative, creative, and participatory action (and friction). It feels as though our very humanity hangs in the balance.

I plan to share more of my writing this year, in the vein of where my research intersects with our lived experience, and I’m glad to have you along. Hopefully you find something that speaks to you.

Until next time,

Erika

Erika L. Raney, Ph.D.
Depth Psychologist, Writer, Coach, Strategist