Why do so many women spend more time with pets than people? Where do I start?

There are very few humans with whom it’s OK to just sit, perhaps trouserless, and scroll in feral silence (posed by model). Photograph: SolStock/Getty Images

‘The average woman with a pet now spends more time ‘actively engaged’ with her pet than she spends hanging out face-to-face with fellow humans on any given day,” I read in the Atlantic. It was a dissection of the “crisis in social fitness”, alternatively known as “why we’re all destined to die alone, our faces eaten by the very pet whose company we have chosen above our own kind”. Am I, a pet owner, or my pet-owning friends (of all genders) surprised? Of course not.

Humans are great for certain things. Opening jars. Forensic textual analysis of single-word WhatsApps from potential romantic entanglements. Separating dark and light washing. Remembering why you hate your boss. But despite all that, pets make better low-key hangout companions.