Come Together!

Have we reached peak loneliness?

“Lonely Maria pl9” (1960), Evaline Ness (American, 1911 – 1986).

Within the past week, the New York Times launched a friendship bootcamp; The Atlantic theorized that the lack of dining rooms is destroying our communal bonds; The Cut acknowledged that the heterosexual dating scene is garbage right now and desperately needs to change. (Dear Cut readers, may I direct you to a book called Rethinking Sex: A Provocation that theorized just this phenomenon ahead of its crest? It’s even on sale!)

We’ve reached peak loneliness, and the papers want us to do something about it.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health crisis in 2023, perhaps one of the broadest acknowledgments yet of what had, I think, already come to be seen as an alarming and dangerous rise in isolation. The crisis was highlighted and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, but even before 2019 it was increasingly evident in people’s everyday lives.

Since then, a disaffection with the state of things has only intensified. Complaints are louder, and recognized as representative of the majority, rather than the loud laments of a few. Theories of the case are being proposed. Solutions are being offered, and in some cases, actually being adopted. Consider two of the bestselling books of 2024 so far: Rhaina Cohen’s The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center is an exploration of what it means to prioritize deep friendship bonds, in order to avoid or escape the isolation of the nuclear family or bimodal romantic bonds.

Jonathan Haidt

’s The Anxious Generation is a jeremiad against smartphones, detailing the harms that the devices — particularly the isolation they have enabled — have wreaked on younger generations, with suggestions for pushback that seem to be having significant uptake.

These trends are all good news!

Recently, writer and political commentator

Yuval Levin

suggested that our politics and culture are reaching an inflection point, moving from organizing around individual and personal freedom to embracing solidarity. We have exhausted, or are exhausted by, the push (that started in the 1960s) to regard self-fulfillment the highest goal. We want, now, to build together. We sense that we will need to do so in order to salvage the future. We’ve reached the peak (or nadir?) of loneliness and there’s nowhere to go but up.

Of course, Levin pointed out, the process of moving from one mode of living to another is bound to be messy and confusing on both micro and macro levels. Solidarity can be theorized negatively, for instance as nationalism (see the EU election results!) or factionalism (see current gender relations in the US!). But still, underlying much of the current tumult is an impulse to find ways to come together in community rather than continue to soldier on seperately. The moment feels grim, but underlying it is a new possibility.

It’s a hopeful thought! So of course, I should add some caveats. Reaching an inflection point doesn’t mean that the individual experience of loneliness won’t continue to occur, or even that rates of such experiences won’t continue to tick up. It could, I suppose, continue to get worse. (Our tech overlords seem excited to chivvy us along in that direction). But still, it does feel as though a shared recognition of our loneliness has finally dawned. And if so, that’s the first step back from the brink.

Read also:

The Adventure of Loneliness

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