The Adventure of Loneliness
Feeling alone isn’t a sickness. It’s part of life.
Editor’s note: In the Wisdom of Crowds spirit of engaging with the deep differences (which you can read about here), we are thrilled to publish an essay by guest contributor
, who is making his first appearance on our pages.In his essay, Chris advances an unlikely thesis: that loneliness is not all bad. Today, the conventional wisdom is that Americans are lonelier than they’ve ever been, and the statistics bear this out. Chris does not question the prevalence of loneliness, but he does question how the concept is interpreted. Moreover, he is skeptical about the way that our institutions are trying to solve loneliness.
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—Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor
Loneliness has undergone a rebranding in the last decade. Where once it was a feeling that touched all of us at different times, for different durations, and for different reasons, it is now seen as something much more narrow and grave. Loneliness was once considered a normal stage of life, a sad stage but one that could be fruitful as well. During a period of loneliness, especially if that period comes early in our lives, we can become individuals. But today, loneliness is seen as a social disease.
Just look at the alarming headlines, which report that a “loneliness epidemic” is upon us. “America has a loneliness epidemic,” goes one from All Things Considered, “here are 6 steps to address it.” USA Today goes further warning that loneliness is “Killing Americans.” The trend is big enough for the Department of Health and Human Services to release an 82-page report on the crisis.
This public alarm over the rise in loneliness is well-intended. The rise in lonely males, in particular, is a foreboding indicator for society. Having been left out of, or retreated from, the 21st century, many men in industrialized nations have developed a set of customs in isolation from the rest of the world. Young men especially have given over to base habits: violent video games, grotesque pornography, and/or any folk philosophy they happen to find in open-source landfills. What remains is a conception of loneliness that is less an emotional hardship than a social problem, with clear culprits and victims. And so the lonely are treated as anti-social, juvenile delinquents-in-the-making.
That voice, however, is soft. It is the kind you might hear sitting across from a guidance counselor or a social worker. “Some men grasp the importance of … meet-ups,” Michelle Cottle writes. “Other men require more of a nudge to get with the program. … As with so many aspects of a relationship, reciprocity is the key to survival.” Importance … program … survival—but with a nudge! Soon loneliness goes from a hardship to a delinquency; the lonely go from being seen as the afflicted to becoming culprits. The burden of intervention comes from above in a typically authoritarian spirit.
All loneliness-reformers believe in the centrality of sociability, and that a surplus of loneliness threatens it. But that is to think of social life in a particular way. It is to see social life as a community of people who are seen to be cohesive, who are aware that they must always act in acceptable ways. The more coherent and conformist a community is, the less lonely are its members.
But what if the nudge has a sharp point? What if the pressure to cohere and conform is painful? There might be costs to becoming a joiner. A cohesive community might be happier, more open and eager to share; but a sense of private life is lost. A community may have a unique culture—shared jokes, linguistic tics, and rituals—that nonetheless overshadow individual quirks. Any communal setting, whether it is a book club, a pickleball gathering, or a group chat, is an enclosed crowd. The specter of Stepford, CT escapes the boomer imagination and threatens the younger generations. What these loneliness-reformers are proposing as an alternative is more like the appearance of belonging than the feeling that should go with it. Indeed, it leaves many people with questions about what it truly means to belong.
If loneliness can persist even in the type of community that the loneliness-reformers wish to create, then perhaps it’s time to try a different solution. If you find yourself sliding back toward loneliness even after joining a community of some sort, there may be a good reason to stay lonely, if only for a while. If loneliness cannot be made extinct, then maybe there’s harm in trying to make it so. Maybe it should be cultivated, or at least made more bearable for all.
A cultivated loneliness would not constitute merely an escape from the reformers’ idea of coherence and conformity—their regime of mandatory fun. To the extent that loneliness is something bad, it’s when you escape from conformity but do nothing after that escape. Or when you escape, and embrace something equally dehumanizing. That would make loneliness a defeat. A more cultivated, aware loner is driven by curiosity rather than defeatism. The aware loner wants to reclaim private existence. His lonely space is a new territory in need of mapping. It is not without dead ends and hazards, but it’s not without resources as well.
Privacy is suspect in the post-digital era where delinquent loneliness flourishes. It suggests that people who want privacy might have something to hide. Acts of omission and compartmentalization are seen as transgressive. But to the loner these are necessary components for territorial integrity. These help to determine what—and who—belongs within his lonely space, and what should be expelled. It allows for a loneliness that is open-ended, subjective, awkward, resistant to routine, and emotionally volatile. It does not endear itself to social analysis or opinion journalism.
Instead, the loner today resists the loneliness-reformers by becoming weird and dangerous. This type of self-defeating loner rebellion was a major theme in 1990s arthouse cinema. Today’s loners might feel affinity with Dawn Wiener, the New Jersey middle-schooler in Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse. Dawn longs for an existence where she is not tormented by her peers, cruelly singled out by her teachers, or neglected by her family. She has one friend whom she sees as a burden. They seek refuge in an ugly backyard shack she calls the Special People Club. When her parents demolish it for their convenience she is sent out into a painful odyssey of rejected friendship and unrequited affection, and in the process letting her much-hated younger sister go missing. Her one constant connection is with Brandon, a boy who calls her “retard” and repeatedly threatens to rape her. As the film progresses, the division between bully and bullied becomes blurred and shared pains become unavoidable.
Or consider the titular character of Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 late-Gen X fairy tale Morvern Callar. Morvern leads an unremarkable existence as a grocery employee in Scotland, which is disrupted when her live-in boyfriend commits suicide on Christmas morning. Tasked with sending his novel to publishers, she does so only after replacing his name with hers, disposing of his body in a moor, and emptying his bank account to go to Spain with a friend. She avoids the debauchery of her chav fellow travelers, often listening to the mixtape her boyfriend left her (making up the film’s iconic soundtrack), and gets lost in the desert villages. What looks like an existential fugue state is more poignantly a mourning ritual of a most freewheeling and private sort, concluded beautifully as Morvern wanders silently through a Spanish cemetery, her awed, perplexed future publishers (who make her £100,000 richer) trailing behind.
The extent to which “offbeat” comedy overlaps with reality is little remarked and of no service to serious minds who think only in terms of sickness. And fair, the overlap might not be quite as apparent to others as it is to me. But if you believe, as I do, that loneliness is something to navigate rather than to resist, an indie comic mind is good to have.
Perhaps the loneliness-reformers’ greatest error is a linguistic one. What they think of as “loneliness” is closer to “solitude.” Solitude, in English anyway, is a slippery term. It can be a soothing way to being alone, but an aloneness that you seek and consists of pleasant distractions (playing Solitaire). But the word might also refer to an aloneness you are sent into and consists in mindless suffering (solitary confinement). What the reformers have in mind is a benign combination of the two, voluntary suffering through ephemeral amusement. It affects surly, solitary males insofar as it turns everyone into surly, solitary males.
All this isn’t to suggest that an understanding between the lonely and the loneliness-reformers is impossible. Indeed, each has something to learn from the other. The reformers may come to understand that existence does not end when one goes out of sight of the crowd. The lonely will discover that hidden beneath the benign authority of mandatory fun is a legitimate fear of the damage wrought by chronic loneliness. But ultimately, loneliness is a personal trial, not a crime, and not a social problem. It is not the task of the lonely to carry the burden of other people’s anxieties when their own are heavy enough.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
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I agree with your point about solitude. But your lens is colored by some pretty big cultural shifts that you don't acknowledge. The first is our excessive emphasis on the individual as the source/being/perspective of human experience. This is not actually the way we've existed for most of history. (Solitude in this original sense, wouldn't result in the school shootings we've seen from the dangerous male arch-type you didn't acknowledge) The next is the explosion of human connection that has ramped itself up incoherently over the past 100 years. Our ability to travel places so quickly, to communicate from across the globe if we wish. And do so seemingly in a transparent and meaningful way (which Covid fortunately disproved e.g. zoom is not a real way to meet and engage each other as fully human). These two factors have huge impacts for what we mean by isolation, community, purpose all leveraged towards answering the question of how does human flourishing happen?
I think I agree with you that loneliness isn't the problem. The problem is much greater than one social pattern, and that pattern is a symptom of a larger social malaise that deserves a conversation that includes a great deal more than the few camps you've identified.