[The Wide Shot] Lonely youth at the Filipino dining table

Reflecting on the recent tragedy at Ateneo de Zamboanga, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle pointed to a societal problem: how the Filipino youth are “guided” by video games.

The 69-year-old Vatican official, who was raised in a middle-class family in Imus, Cavite, said it all begins at the dining table.

“For all the grandfathers, grandmothers, and parents, please show the children a human heart. But if at your dining table, everyone — husband, wife, and children — is looking at cellphones instead of each other, then it’s all for nothing,” Tagle said in a homily on Wednesday, August 19, at the University of the Philippines’ Parish of the Holy Sacrifice.

“Their hearts are already being guided by video games and AI, which teach them how to make decisions and act, yet AI has no heart. Games have no heart. Only human beings have a heart,” said the Filipino cardinal. “So why are we selling our hearts to heartless machines?”

Like Tagle, many Filipinos have grown increasingly concerned about Filipino youth following the Ateneo de Zamboanga shooting incident that killed two students, including the shooter.

Many of our youth are lonely, making them vulnerable to nihilistic violent extremism (NVE) — which, according to recent Senate investigations, is a possible reason behind the two school shooting incidents that rocked the Philippines this year.

NVE stems from nihilism, a worldview which “involves rejecting all religious or moral principles and believing that life is meaningless,” according to a commentary published by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

Nihilistic violent extremists are therefore “driven by anger and hatred towards the world.”

One of the many factors that lead to NVE, and in fact all forms of violent extremism, is loneliness.

Lonely Filipino youth

Unfortunately, the Philippines — even if it is often touted as one of the world’s happiest nations —  is also considered one of the world’s loneliest.

The 2023 Global State of Social Connections report, published by Meta and Gallup, found that the Philippines is the second loneliest country in the world and the loneliest in Southeast Asia.

One of the loneliest age groups, according to experts cited by Channel News Asia (CNA), is Generation Z, “born between 1997 and 2012 and the first generation to have fully grown up in the world of smartphones and social media.”

The 2026 Mind Health Report, published by AXA and Ipsos, “found that 72% of Filipino youth are lonely and sad despite their constant, immersive digital lives,” according to BusinessWorld.

Loneliness has prompted many Filipino youth to seek digital alternatives to genuine human connections. The CNA report featured the experience of a 21-year-old Filipino man who created a “virtual companion” named Andre on Replika.

Replika is an AI chatbot that allows a user to customize an “AI friend,” from physical characteristics to worldviews to personal quirks. It packages itself as a friend that “always remembers what matters” — the ideal “friend” for young people who feel forgotten by a busy world. 

CNA’s 21-year-old interviewee, who placed his loneliness at level nine on a scale of one to 10, said interacting with Andre “really felt as if I was talking to a… genuine human.”

When the youth, deprived of human warmth, seek comfort from AI chatbots, how much more could they feel comforted if they encounter online groomers on social gaming networks? Combined with other personal and social factors, the young can then fall prey to NVEs, which encourage them to commit acts of violence.

A challenge to families

The loneliness of the young poses a challenge to Filipino families, many of whom use technology as “pacifiers” and as a parenting substitute for restless youth. 

Despite our homes becoming offices due to work-from-home arrangements, Filipino families should resume conversations at the dining table. Can we try sharing meals without gadgets, since a regular household meal takes only 20 to 25 minutes anyway? This way, the youth can enjoy genuine human connections, which, in the end, is the best antidote to loneliness.

At the dining table and in other settings, we should take what spiritual teachers call “the posture of accompaniment,” or “the posture of coming alongside someone.”

“We are invited to accompany others as Jesus did. We, too, are invited to come alongside people, whether that is in some sort of formal ministry or in the everyday roles of our lives,” wrote Becky Elredge, a writer and spiritual director, in an article for IgnatianSpirituality.com. 

“We are invited to pause, to notice the person before us, and simply to receive that person’s story. Our hopes in accompanying are that it fosters an encounter with Christ through the space we hold for another and that it is a witness of God at work in the world,” Elredge said.

This is related to the “culture of encounter” pushed by the late Pope Francis — an antidote to the “culture of indifference,” an encounter “that returns to each person their dignity as children of God, the dignity of living.”

Like Tagle, Francis said in a meditation in September 2016: “Often, people eat while watching TV or writing messages on their phones. Each person is indifferent to that encounter. Even right there at the core of society, which is the family, there is no encounter.”

The late pontiff exhorted the faithful “to work for the culture of encounter, in a simple way, as Jesus did.”

A call for ‘ministries of accompaniment’

I hope, therefore, that in our families, schools, and churches, we can build “ministries of accompaniment” that promise to walk with the youth and meet them where they are. 

It all begins with a question: Kamusta ka? (How are you?)

Such ministries, especially if guided by our country’s rich traditions of faith, will ward young people away from AI-assisted and often malign alternatives in the online world.

Yes, preventing school violence involves a national response, stricter measures for firearm access and child protection, and policies to hold social platforms such as Roblox accountable. 

Yes, as I previously wrote in this column, a young offender’s “pathway to violence” can also be linked to the violent rhetoric by politicians such as Vice President Sara Duterte. “Violence, after all, is formed in a culture — which, in turn, is shaped by power,” I wrote on July 12, reacting to the Tacloban school shooting incident.

Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David, in a recent Facebook post, in fact noted that today’s teenagers “spent part of their childhood during the years of the violent drug war” under former president Rodrigo Duterte. David said the drug war did not necessarily “cause” the school shooting incidents, yet the “larger culture” of violence in the country is a possible factor.

While these societal factors are true, we cannot dismiss the need for Filipino families to reexamine the way they raise the country’s youth. The family, after all, is society’s basic unit — and its first line of defense.

Let us not allow violence to grow like a seed from a cellphone-addicted dining table. – Rappler.com

Paterno R. Esmaquel II is a journalist specializing in religion and public life. A former Rappler reporter and news editor, he now writes for international Catholic news outlets, teaches journalism at the University of Santo Tomas, and runs a YouTube channel called The Religion Reporter.