I moved to LA for the same reason everyone moves to LA: because I thought proximity to the entertainment industry would feel like belonging to it. I was twenty-three, overqualified for the jobs I could get and underqualified for the ones I wanted. I knew people — not important people, but people who knew important people, which in LA counts as a form of currency.
What nobody told me is that the entertainment industry is one of the loneliest professional environments in existence. Not lonely in the obvious way — you're constantly surrounded by people, constantly at events, constantly in rooms where things are happening. Lonely in the way that matters: nobody tells you the truth, nobody's schedule is their own, and every relationship exists on a spectrum between genuine and transactional that shifts depending on what you can do for someone this week.
I've worked in PR, production, and management. I've been the person making the calls and the person waiting for the calls. I've sat in rooms where million-dollar decisions were made over lunch and rooms where a single unreturned email ended someone's career trajectory. In all of these rooms, I've noticed the same thing: everyone is performing. Not maliciously — professionally. The performance is the job.
The loneliness comes from the gap between the performance and the person underneath it. When your professional survival depends on managing relationships, maintaining personas, and controlling narratives, the muscles required for genuine human connection atrophy. You get very good at reading rooms and very bad at being in them without reading them.
I watch my friends in other industries — tech, medicine, education — and I notice something I envy: they complain about their colleagues, but they have colleagues. Real ones. People they see every day, share inside jokes with, occasionally dislike but fundamentally know. Entertainment doesn't have that. We have collaborators who rotate project to project, contacts who appear and disappear based on relevance, and a constant low-grade awareness that the person across the table is evaluating whether you're useful.
This isn't everyone's experience. People build real friendships in this industry. Genuine mentorships exist. Lasting professional partnerships happen. But they happen despite the structure, not because of it. The industry's default setting is isolation disguised as access.
The cruelest part is that you can't talk about it. Admitting loneliness in entertainment is admitting failure — it means you're not well-connected enough, not important enough, not social enough to have built the network that everyone assumes you have. So you perform the role of someone who's fine, who's thriving, who's so busy they couldn't possibly be lonely. And the performance becomes another layer between you and the thing you actually need.
I'm still here. I'm still in the rooms. I'm better at the performance now than I was at twenty-three, which means I'm probably worse at the other thing. But I'm writing this because I think someone reading it is sitting in a similar room, performing a similar version of fine, and wondering if the gap they feel between the industry's promise and its reality is just them.
It's not just you. It's the architecture of the whole thing. And knowing that doesn't fix it, but it makes the loneliness slightly less lonely. Which, in this industry, counts as progress.
