Loneliness Unsolved
The basic experience underlying totalitarianism, the experience that continues today to make it likely that totalitarianism remains a constant concern, is loneliness, an alienation from political, social, and cultural life. Hannah Arendt focuses on loneliness in her analysis of the origins of totalitarianism. “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” Arendt argues, “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.” Loneliness is the feeling of being “deserted by all human companionship”; it is “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” As a modern phenomenon, loneliness is visible in what Robert Putnam calls the loss of social capital. Americans of all classes and all political persuasions report having fewer close friends than ever before; many say they have no one they can confide in or count upon in an emergency.
Matthew Shaer writes about more recent research on loneliness in the New York Times Magazine this week, focusing on the work of Richard Weissbourd. Weissbourd agrees with Arendt that loneliness is a particularly modern problem. “Compared with other ailments of the mind, loneliness is a surprisingly modern concern: Although large segments of the world have probably always been anxious, have always been depressed, have always been wrathful, they were not always lonely in the specific (and negatively connoted) way contemporary experts understand the emotion today.” It turns out that the word “loneliness” only comes to be widely used after 1820, at which point its use skyrockets. Some sought to explain the rise in loneliness sociologically, as the result of mechanization and urbanization. Others, like the German psychologist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann wrote in 1959 of a “truly debilitating loneliness, of the type she observed in growing rates in her patients — loneliness that was “nonconstructive if not disintegrative” and that led to “the development of psychotic states. It renders people who suffer it emotionally paralyzed and helpless.”” The source of loneliness is metaphysical, the feeling of abandonment and the loss of meaning in life. Arendt used the word “Verlassenheit” to describe loneliness, the utter abandonment to a meaningless existence. Shaer’s essay is a great introduction to the vast field of loneliness studies today. He writes:
Traditionally, the moments Americans have been most afflicted by loneliness have also been moments of major societal change: It is no accident that David Riesman wrote “The Lonely Crowd” in the age of TV dinners and white picket fences that separated one neighbor from the next. “There’s a cyclical nature to it,” says Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University and the author of “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.” “You look through the literature, and you can read anxiety about loneliness in the early 1900s, when everyone started listening to the radio. Or later, when we worried that cars would lead to us driving away from our families and neighborhoods in search of something new. You can read it in the ’60s and ’70s, with the sexual revolution and the rise in divorce rates. Throughout, loneliness is a ready-made discourse, right? It’s always there for us” — our go-to explanation for the recurring sensation that the culture is changing too fast and leaving us behind.
If the loneliness “epidemic” today feels uniquely profound, Klinenberg believes, it is only because the current dislocation is occurring at an unprecedented scale. “We’re the first people in the history of the earth to see the conditions of social life change in this way,” he says. “And they’ve changed dramatically.” Political dysfunction, global warming, a waterfall of mental health crises — and on top of it all, a transformation, in the internet, in the way we communicate.
The easiest way to respond to these dislocations, and to try to account for the loneliness they elicit, is to wish them away — to try to jam the genie back in the bottle. Weissbourd calls it a “palpable nostalgia for old modes of closeness,” and it’s everywhere in the responses to his and Batanova’s follow-up survey, from earlier this year, in which subjects were asked if Americans today are lonelier than they were in decades past and if so, why. “Previous generations,” one respondent writes, “weren’t as self-centered and helped each other more.” Another speaks of a time when individuals “lived in closer proximity” and “relied on family members to a greater extent.” “It took a community,” a third says, “to survive.”
This sentiment, too, colors many of the various proposed policy fixes, like Britain’s mail-carrier plan or the 2023 guidance from Murthy, who suggests near the end of his advisory that lonely individuals “reach out to a friend or family member” and that parents encourage their children to participate in structured, in-person activities “such as volunteering, sports, community activities and mentorship programs.” One implication is that shrinking the gap between realized and desired social relations, and thus conclusively ending the loneliness epidemic, will merely be a matter of recreating, in some sort of updated form, the types of community alive in an older era.
Unfortunately, history rarely works that way. “One big problem I have with the current rhetoric around loneliness is that we treat it as if it’s permanently going in only one direction,” Klinenberg told me. “It’s not. It’s a more interesting phenomenon than that” — and more nuanced. When loneliness gripped the Western world during the Industrial Revolution, everyone didn’t suddenly retreat to their ancestral villages; the radio didn’t make us permanently lonely. We built new communities in the city, far from our families; we used radio to expand our world and to talk to people on the other side of the country. We adapted. And as hard as it may be to accept, the path out of loneliness in 2024 lies almost certainly via a similar route — forward, forward.
There are signs that a similar mass evolution is already underway. Take the smartphone, a device that gets a lot of blame for our lack of physical connection and that has simultaneously led to other, but no less meaningful, forms of togetherness. “I wrote an entire book about online dating, and to give you one example, I know as much as anyone about how much it can suck to be on Tinder,” Klinenberg says. “I also know the internet is the main way people meet their spouses these days. I think about cases of people who have rare diseases and are able to share information and get better care and feel connected because the internet allows them to do so. I think about trans kids, who are at risk of distress because they feel so rejected and alone in some families and are now able to talk to people like them — to get messages that affirm them.”
None of which is to say we won’t still need physical togetherness — only that there may be less of it, and the physical togetherness that does persist may look different than it did for our ancestors. Ninety-six thousand Taylor Swift fans singing in sync, the thunder of a crowded football stadium and then a gazillion internet threads in which the attendees relive and post photos and remember the euphoria of their shared experience. A romance that exists partly in the real world and partly online, and in which emotional closeness is not diminished but enhanced by a steady stream of the sort of soul-baring disclosures that social media apps can facilitate.
There may be bumps, hurdles and obstacles, but as is the case with Cacioppo and Hawkley’s evolutionary theory, those bumps could be part of the learning process, the adaptation process. Part of the drive that forces us together.
Squint, and you can see it: a scenario in which the loneliness crisis today is really a mass period of acclimatization. It’s a bridge, an evolutionary step, during which we make our peace with certain trade-offs and realities — that in 2024, we’re not all going to race to rejoin the local grange. That we’re not all going back to church or temple or the mosque. That our kids may grow up far from their grandparents and aunts and uncles — far from the towns where we were raised. That the workplace will remain diffuse, tethered by Zoom meetings and the occasional in-person happy hour. That we may often see friends more on FaceTime than we do in real life. And most important, that despite it all, we’ll find one another again.