The 24% Who Turn to No One
A new survey says most people would rather talk to a human than a machine when they’re struggling. I'm building an AI sobriety companion - and I think the survey is asking the wrong question.
Counselling Directory published findings recently from a YouGov survey of just over two thousand UK adults. One figure stopped me. Nearly one in four people - 24% - say that when they feel lonely or emotionally low, they turn to no one at all.
Not a friend. Not a partner. Not a helpline, a GP, an app, a stranger online. No one.
It’s higher in some groups than others. 27% among men. 31% among people aged 45 to 54 - the “sandwich generation,” holding up children and ageing parents at once, usually with very little held up for them. In Scotland it reaches a third. And the reasons people gave are the ones I hear every day: it’s not “serious enough,” it costs too much, the waiting list’s too long, and somewhere underneath all of it - the fear of being judged.
The finding everyone’s quoting
The same survey found 80% of UK adults believe face-to-face human connection creates the most meaningful emotional support, and only 4% currently turn to an AI chatbot when they’re struggling. If that is the case, then the expected move here is for me to wince, concede the point, and explain why I’m pressing on regardless.
I’m not going to do that, because I don’t actually believe it’s that simple.
Human connection is a wonderful thing. But “most meaningful” and “most useful when you’re ashamed” are not the same measurement - and the survey only asked about the first one.
Ask a different question and you get a different answer. Not “what feels most meaningful?” but “where can you say the thing you’re most afraid to say?” For a lot of people - especially the ones quietly worried about their drinking - that isn’t a friend’s sofa or a partner’s ear. It’s somewhere no one knows their name.
There is something freeing about a stranger
This isn’t a new idea. It’s why people have always confided in bartenders, taxi drivers, and the person next to them on a long flight they’ll never take again. It’s why the confessional booth has a screen. It’s why a problem shared with someone who has no stake in your life, no memory to revise, no dinner-table to carry it to, can come out cleaner and truer than the same words spoken to someone you love.
Connection is good. But connection also carries weight - history, expectation, the fear of changing how someone sees you. When you talk to a friend about your drinking, you’re also managing their face, their worry, what Monday looks like now that they know. A good AI companion removes all of that. No flinch. No disappointment to manage. No gossip. No version of you it’s clinging to. Just space to be honest, at the exact moment honesty feels impossible everywhere else.
For some people, some of the time, talking to no-one-who-knows-them isn’t the lesser option. Sometimes the safest place to say it is to someone who doesn’t know your name.
That’s the door I’m building
The companion I’m building, Sol, is designed around exactly that freedom. Total non-judgment isn’t a marketing line - it’s the mechanism. It’s what lets someone type “I think I have a problem” for the very first time, at 2am, having never said it aloud to a living soul. The 24% who turn to no one aren’t failing at connection. A lot of them have simply weighed the cost of being seen and decided silence is safer. Sol changes that maths - it offers somewhere to speak without the price of being known.
And here’s the part the “AI versus human” framing misses entirely: it was never a versus. The freedom to say it to no one is often what makes it sayable to someone later. Get the fear out of your mouth once, in a place that costs nothing, and the conversation with the GP, the partner, the friend stops feeling unthinkable.
Not a hiding place
There’s a fair objection here, and I’d rather name it than dodge it. If something is that frictionless and that safe, doesn’t it risk becoming a place to hide - the new “no one”, just with better manners?
It would, if I built it to keep people. I’m deliberately not. Sol is grounded in motivational interviewing, which means its instinct isn’t to hold on - it’s to help someone move. Toward a meeting, a counsellor, a GP, a friend, a morning that looks different from the last one. The freedom of the stranger is the way in, not the destination. Success isn’t how long someone stays; it’s whether they walk away more able to face the people in their life, not less.
If you recognised yourself in that 24%
Maybe that statistic landed with a flicker of recognition. If it did, one thing worth saying plainly: coping alone isn’t strength, and the fact that you can’t yet say it to the people closest to you doesn’t mean you can’t say it at all.
Sometimes the easiest place to start is the one where nobody knows you. A stranger. A blank box. Somewhere the words can come out wrong, and frightened, and unfinished, with no one’s face to manage while you find them. That’s not a failure of human connection. For a great many people, it’s the first step back toward it.
One in four people are facing the low moments with no one at all. I don’t think the answer is to lecture them about the value of human connection they already know. I think it’s to give them a door they’ll actually walk through.
David Henzell is the founder of Phenomenal Sobriety and is building Sol, an AI companion for people concerned about their relationship with alcohol.
Source: “The state of the nation’s mental health,” Counselling Directory, 2026. All figures from YouGov Plc; total sample size 2,093 UK adults, fieldwork 6–7 January 2026, weighted to be representative of all UK adults aged 18+.