It
is 9pm on a Tuesday in Auckland, and Mark is scrolling
through his phone in an apartment full of light and
completely empty of other people. He has 340 followers, a
group chat that has not moved in three days, and nobody to
call about the mildly funny thing that happened at work. He
is not isolated in any obvious sense. He has a job, a flat,
a phone full of contacts. He is just lonely, in the quiet,
unremarkable way that has become common enough to have its
own research field.
The World Health Organization now
treats this as a public health issue in its own right. A 2025
WHO report found that roughly 1 in 6 people worldwide
are affected by loneliness, and that it contributes to over
871,000 deaths globally each year, placing it alongside
smoking and obesity as a measurable driver of poor health
outcomes.
New Zealand’s own picture is not much
better. A 2024 study on older Kiwis described loneliness and
social isolation as having reached “epidemic levels,” with
around 70 percent of people in social housing reporting they
had experienced it, more than any other accommodation type.
Financial pressure, housing insecurity, and adult children
moving overseas for work were all named as contributing
factors. Notably, the same study found that having social
media access made little difference: three-quarters of older
people who used it still reported feeling lonely, sometimes
more than those who did not use it at all. Younger New
Zealanders are not exempt either. Government wellbeing data
has consistently shown loneliness peaking among 15 to 24
year olds before easing through midlife and rising again
after 75, and household income remains a strong predictor,
with people earning under $30,000 twice as likely to report
feeling lonely most or all of the time compared with those
earning $150,000 or more.
A Growing Industry
Response
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Where there is a persistent, well-documented
gap in human connection, technology companies tend to show
up. Over the past decade, an entire sector has formed around
exactly this problem: companionship as a product
category.
At one end sit AI chatbot companions like
Replika and Character.AI, offering conversation on demand.
In the middle are social robots, already deployed in aged
care facilities across Japan and increasingly trialled
elsewhere, designed to provide company for people living
alone. At the far end of the spectrum are physical companion
products: highly detailed, customisable dolls built with
medical grade silicone and, increasingly, AI voice
integration. Manufacturers across this spectrum, from
chatbot developers to the physical companion makers verified
by Formosa Doll, report
steady demand growth as more people look for alternatives to
fill a gap that traditional social structures increasingly
leave open.
What connects all of these products is not
novelty. It is a direct response to Treasury’s own
observation that an ageing population, more people living
alone, and a shift toward tech-mediated rather than
face-to-face contact have all been linked to rising
loneliness. If technology helped create part of the problem,
it was probably inevitable that technology would also try to
solve it.
Who Is Actually Buying, and Why
The
demand behind this industry is not abstract. It tracks
closely with the demographic shifts already visible in the
wellbeing data. An aging population means more people living
alone for longer. Rising rates of solo living, delayed
partnering, and remote or hybrid work all reduce the number
of casual, face-to-face interactions a person has in an
average week, even while non-face-to-face contact with
family often increases.
For older adults, companion
robots and simpler AI tools address practical isolation:
fewer visitors, adult children living overseas, a shrinking
social circle. For younger adults, who report the highest
loneliness rates of any age group, companion apps and
products often address something different: a mismatch
between the quantity of social contact (constant,
through phones and social media) and its quality
(rarely deep, rarely physical, rarely
undivided).
Physical companion products occupy an
unusual middle ground here. They are not trying to replace
human relationships so much as offer a tangible, private
alternative to loneliness, in the same way a pet, a hobby,
or a support group might, just with a different
shape.
Helpful Tool, or Symptom Worth
Watching?
Not everyone agrees on what this all means,
and a neutral look at the evidence should say so
plainly.
Some psychologists and researchers see
genuine value here. For people who are housebound, disabled,
elderly, or simply going through a prolonged period without
close relationships, a companion product, digital or
physical, can reduce acute loneliness and, in some
documented cases, ease the transition back toward human
social contact rather than away from it.
Others are
more cautious. Critics worry that outsourcing companionship
to a product, however sophisticated, risks reinforcing
withdrawal rather than resolving it, particularly for people
already prone to avoiding social risk. The Mental Health
Foundation has made a related point about New Zealand’s
broader wellbeing picture: the pandemic clearly made things
worse, but it did not create the underlying problem. The
country already had a significant, ongoing mental health and
connection issue well before 2020.
Both positions are
probably partly right, which is exactly why this remains an
open question rather than a settled one.
The Bigger
Picture
What is clear is that the line between
“social technology” and “companionship technology” is
getting blurrier every year. A chatbot that remembers your
day, a robot that greets you by name, a doll built to
specific likeness and personality: these are all points on
the same continuum, responding to the same measurable,
government-tracked rise in loneliness.
Whether that is
a positive development, a stopgap, or something in between
will likely depend on the person, the product, and the
specific gap it is filling. What seems unlikely is that this
category shrinks any time soon. As long as the loneliness
numbers keep climbing, so will the range of products built
to answer
them.