Wang Zheng, a 54-year-old media professional in Beijing, lives among 22 million people yet often feels profoundly alone. After decades in the capital, she still struggles to form deep connections in a city that moves too fast to notice individuals.

“I’m especially afraid of being forgotten by society, of losing my voice — of becoming as invisible as a blade of grass by the roadside,” she said.

Wang is one of 125 million people currently living alone in China. On social media, they share glimpses of solo life — its freedoms and challenges — and voice a common anxiety: the fear of dying alone, unnoticed, and without help.

Digital lifeline

In January, an app with the blunt name Sileme — literally “Are You Dead?” in Chinese — shot to the top of Apple’s paid app chart in China. Now known internationally as Demumu, it addresses a specific fear: dying alone without anyone noticing.

The app’s co-founder, Guo Mengchu, a Gen-Z computer science graduate, noticed growing online discussions about solo living anxieties in early 2025. People were calling for an app to serve as a “last line of defense.” Within a month, working with two friends and a budget of just 1,500 yuan ($216), Guo launched the check-in app. If users fail to check in for two consecutive days, the system automatically emails their designated emergency contact.

According to Guo’s data, nearly 90% of registered users are single women aged 25 to 35 living alone in first- and second-tier cities.

A similar concept appeared earlier. Shanyan, an end-of-life care app for people living alone launched in 2020, takes the idea further. If a user fails to check in within a preset time limit and multiple reminders go unanswered, and their death is subsequently verified, the platform contacts their emergency contacts to confirm their status. Once the death is confirmed, pre-written farewell messages will be sent to designated contacts.

Shanyan’s founder, Hou Dongmin, conceived the app during lonely nights in his rented apartment. He would write notes resembling farewell messages to his friends and family, then worry the messages would never be discovered if something happened to him. Despite a small user base, Shanyan has already delivered farewell messages for two users.

Yet these apps have significant limitations. When Wang learned about Demumu, she hesitated. Who would serve as her emergency contact? At home, she might turn to property management; at work, colleagues. But no specific individual came to mind. The app’s two-day delay before alerting anyone also troubled her. “Waiting two days to alert an emergency contact is far too late,” she said.

Pang Xiaocui, a Gen-Z woman from Shijiazhuang, capital of the northern Hebei province, thought of her grandmother when reading about these apps. Her grandmother has lived alone for over two decades. “People her age don’t use smartphones — daily check-ins are impossible for them,” Pang said. “My grandmother also hated reporting her whereabouts. She felt like she was under surveillance.”

Hou acknowledges the gap: “Most people living alone are not entirely disconnected from society, but they often hesitate to activate their social support networks unless it’s absolutely unavoidable.”

The challenges of living alone

Medical emergencies reveal the vulnerabilities of living alone most starkly. An accident years ago taught Wang the risks firsthand. After injuring herself at home, her phone was well out of reach. She dragged herself across the floor toward her apartment door and used the intercom to call the property security. “One moment you’re fine, and the next, you can’t move,” Wang said. That incident was the first time she felt concerned about the risks of living alone.

Even routine medical procedures present obstacles. Though China’s regulations on medical institutions emphasize patients’ right to informed consent, clinical practice tells a different story. Many hospitals require companions to sign consent forms for procedures involving general anesthesia, serving as both legal witnesses and emergency contacts. Solo dwellers accustomed to autonomy find themselves helpless when their own written consent isn’t sufficient.

Wang has navigated this requirement through a series of medical procedures including gastrointestinal endoscopy, biopsy, and surgery. Each time, she sought a different companion. For an endoscopy, she asked a cousin, who arrived 45 minutes late. Having fasted for 24 hours, Wang was exhausted and hungry but had no choice except to wait — the hospital insisted on a family member’s presence.
For a thyroid biopsy, Wang hired a medical companion through the e-commerce platform Taobao. Although she paid 188 yuan, the companion’s only task was to hold Wang’s belongings during the procedure. Wang felt that the companion didn’t have an important role to play.

“Many people who live alone do so out of necessity, not by choice,” Wang observed. “Young people may live alone after moving to a new city for work, while middle-aged and older adults may find themselves alone due to divorce, the loss of a spouse, or various other reasons that kept them from marrying,” Wang explained.

For elderly people living alone, daily tasks become increasingly daunting. Wang’s 89-year-old father lives independently in Dalian in the northeastern Liaoning province. His home is no longer as tidy as it once was, and he has begun to avoid changing his clothes or bathing, as these tasks have become too difficult for him to tackle alone. Wang travels regularly from Beijing to Dalian to visit him, and she has hired a part-time helper to come in the mornings to cook for him. But during the remaining hours of the day, her father is left unattended — a situation that fills her with anxiety.

“For elderly people living alone, every task becomes a challenge,” Wang said.

Pang faces similar worries about her grandmother, who developed Alzheimer’s disease but insisted on continuing to live alone; she also refused to take medication. Pang’s mother had no choice but to inform the residential property management about her mother’s condition so they could prevent her from wandering off. They also secretly activated location tracking on her phone.

“Living alone becomes increasingly difficult for everyone as time goes on,” Pang said. She has often wondered how things would have turned out if her grandmother had had more peers — through community activities or classes at a seniors’ university — who could have warned her about the risks of solo living with Alzheimer’s while her mental faculties were still intact. “Perhaps everything would have gone much more smoothly,” she said.

For younger solo dwellers, safety poses different challenges. Now in her 20s, Li Haohao has already lived alone for four years. When apartment hunting, she only considers locations within a 10-minute drive of close friends. “Living alone is a significant life choice that requires a lot of preparation,” said Li.

To create a secure environment, she always double-checks locks and avoids direct contact with delivery drivers. When repair workers visit, she creates the appearance of sharing the apartment with a boyfriend.

Quan Yifan spent three years living alone in Toulouse, France, where fear was constant. To save money, she rented a small, oddly shaped apartment in a duplex where the lights flickered unpredictably and silence felt suffocating. She shared the kitchen with tenants who used her kitchenware without permission. Strangers even climbed to her window at night. She spent those three years searching for ways to feel safe enough to remain.

Finding ways to cope

Decades of living alone have allowed Wang to fully savor the freedom of controlling her own time. “Coming home feels like returning to my own kingdom,” she explained. Yet once night falls and the lights are off, she sometimes finds herself plunged into an overwhelming sense of dread.

After she discovered the scheduled power-off feature on her phone, she began listening to podcasts to help her fall asleep. Six years ago, she adopted a cat, and sharing her bed with the feline companion gradually allowed her to sink into a deeper, more restful sleep.

Wang also stays active on social media. Over the past two years, she has used it to document her day-to-day life living alone, and “#sololiving” has become a signature hashtag on her posts.

She’s not motivated purely by a desire to share — she treats this social media account as a lifeline to the outside world, a way to maintain connections with online friends who could offer medical advice or assistance if needed.

Quan turned to art. Her fears while living alone inspired her to create a comic strip about a character living solo. Her comic shows the character stretching its arms and legs, using exaggerated body language to “boost its energy field,” cleaning and decorating all corners of its home, and even shaking hands with ghosts, saying, “Pleasure working with you.” Drawing these ghosts helped her confront her inner fears. “After overcoming those fears, I came to truly enjoy living alone,” she said.

Offline, residential communities are introducing specialized services. In Sijing Town, in Shanghai’s suburban Songjiang District, some communities have installed free monitoring devices in elderly residents’ living rooms, allowing children and neighborhood committees to monitor well-being.

One example is the residential community Yunyi Liucun. “The devices detect activity in the living room,” explained Li Chunhui, the community’s deputy Party branch secretary. “If no movement is detected within a set period, the system automatically alerts family members and residents’ committee personnel. If we confirm the individual hasn’t left, we immediately contact their children to assess whether a wellness check is necessary.”

The community has also classified over 50 elderly residents using a color-coded system: red for those without children or whose children live in other provinces or overseas; yellow for those with children or relatives in Shanghai; green for those with children in Songjiang District. “We contact red residents every two or three days, and green residents about once a week,” Li said. The neighborhood committee has gradually become the first point of contact for elderly residents living alone.

Seeking connection

Although solo dwellers often emphasize that their lives are “no different from anyone else’s,” when they try to connect with like-minded people online, meaningful exchanges are often hard to come by.

Wang has created two group chats on Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, for people living alone — one group for those aged 45 and above, and another for those aged 50 and above. The groups remain mostly quiet. Even topics Wang initiates, such as “safety while living alone,” generate little discussion. Only news stories about individuals dying alone occasionally spark discussions, particularly around advance care planning.

This silence is no coincidence. Three or four years ago, Wang created a group chat for people who lived alone. With 500 members, the group was full, yet almost no one discussed real circumstances or struggles. “Most middle-aged and older people living alone are reluctant to share; there’s a sense of shame,” Wang explained. The group eventually devolved into casual chit-chat about everyday life.

Wang has studied some online communities of single mothers and found that their connections are far tighter. “That’s because they share highly concentrated and clearly defined pain points — for example, who takes care of the child when you’re at work?” In such situations, mutual support networks form quickly. But for people living alone, who comprise a range of age groups, what common challenges do they share? Wang admits she doesn’t yet have an answer.

Yet the emotional need for connection among people living alone is real. The RedNote page “Just Me,” which shares anonymously submitted posts, has published numerous posts about being “on one’s own,” many of them from followers who live alone.

The account’s creator, Zhang Mo, believes that “being alone” has become the norm in an increasingly atomized society. “Even if you don’t live alone, there are many moments when you can only rely on yourself,” she noted.

Zhang created the page when she was living alone herself. Feeling deeply lonely and unable to sleep one night, she suddenly knew what to do. At 6 a.m., she got out of bed and created the account with a call for submissions. The next day, she woke up to find the page had gained 20,000 followers.

One submission left a particularly strong impression: a young woman who had just graduated was living alone in a big city with little savings and inadequate winter clothing. She asked for advice on how to “get through the winter with dignity.” Her post received nearly a thousand comments, and many users reached out to Zhang, hoping to offer assistance. “But she didn’t feel her situation was really that dire,” Zhang explained. “She had posted mainly to seek emotional connection.”

Responding to user feedback, the Shanyan app has added a comment function. “If we make these supportive interactions public, they can take on a warmer tone,” said founder Hou. He also mentioned that the app might develop community support functions in the future, allowing users to voluntarily join groups, share locations, and quickly find help nearby when needed.

Wang hopes technology will eventually enable online communities for people living alone to address specific needs, facilitate targeted mutual aid, and become genuinely useful. She believes in the power of shared circumstances bringing people together.

Despite the challenges, some truly enjoy this lifestyle. The fact that her father, now nearly 90, can still live peacefully and independently is itself a source of comfort for Wang when she thinks about her own future.

“No matter how old someone is or how much their physical abilities decline, their wish to live alone deserves respect,” Wang said. “Living alone is not something to pity — it’s a commitment to living life on one’s own terms.”

Wang believes this is the deep, unspoken understanding shared between her and her father as two generations of people living alone.

(Due to privacy concerns, Zhang Mo and Li Haohao are pseudonyms.)

Reported by Yang Shuyuan, Wang Qian, and Cheng Yidan.

A version of this article originally appeared in Original (Jiefang Daily). It has been translated and edited for brevity and clarity, and is republished here with permission.

Translator: Carrie Davies; editors: Wang Juyi and Elise Mak.

(Header image: 500px/VCG)