Why Loneliness Matters in the Social Age

There was an interesting article recently about teens and social networking, and insight of the article was that teens want to socialize IRL, but there is nowhere for them to go without parental supervision.

I would argue that this approximately true for adults, American cities don't have pedestrian-only town squares, the public transit is abysmal (because long ago they ripped out all the streetcars, which led to the destruction of many social places, like Excelsior Amusement Park and Wonderland Amusement Park),

[warning anecdotal evidence]

The few dynamic social spaces I've known have been

Paved (Hidden Beach),

Pushed out due to rent increases (Loring Bar, Little Nikkis Cafe, CyberX),

Turned into a Bank of America (Filter in Wicker Park),

Out of business due to the smoking ban (The tobacco shop next to Filter in Wicker Park)

Purposefully destroyed by fake art to prevent gatherings (That little area next to the Subway on State Street in Madison, WI (where I used to play hackeysack))

Not to mention that we destroyed all the beer gardens during WW2 (this really happened), because that was too German, you can't drink a bottle of wine in a park like the French do, because I guess the drunks would abuse it, and the parks we do have generally don't also have any commercial activity whatsoever, not even a little kiosk where you can buy a coffee.

That's not even considering the destruction of ethnic neighborhoods by intersecting them with freeways (the old Catholic neighborhood [that no longer exists] that used to surround the Basilica in Minneapolis)

You know we're doing something wrong with urban design (which I argue is directly related to loneliness), when you see statues of children playing and not actual children playing.

Further reading/viewing:

James Howard Kunstler: The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs

James Howard Kunstler: Geography of Nowhere

The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

Streets for People: A Primer for Americans

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

Interesting article, but I can't help feeling that for the author the feeling of loneliness is a symptom of something underlying. Which makes the loneliness itself much less interesting.

The reason I say this is, because it affects reaction and treatment. If someone complains of persistent leg pain, you don't delve too deeply into the nature of the pain and whether society is sufficiently kind to leg-pain-sufferers, if it turns out their leg is caught in a bear trap.

The Stephen Fry quote makes that particularly clear. If a well-loved public figure, by his own admission possessed of good friends and many social engagements, can feel tremendously lonely - and if the post author, who can discuss feelings of tremendous loneliness with friends and counsellors yet still feel lonely, then it doesn't seem worthwhile discussing "public discourse on the cultural ramifications of technology" or "our growing dependence on technology to communicate" as the article does. Because the author, actually being in a state of depression, might well feel just as lonely if those things were totally different.

Related but an off-shoot question, people who are "settled down," in your late 20's/30's/40's/50's/60's, have families and various obligations, how do you deal with loneliness?

As someone who is on the precipice of turning 30 (27 currently), speaking strictly for myself - I've found that loneliness for me and my older peers is different from the angst of adolescence a la Holden. Tbh, younger people tend to think in more black and white terms and very ambitious but most haven't gone through the "test" of one's vulnerability and limitation. Unfortunately, we also live in a marketing society that sells products and dreams on the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) that exploit the impressionable young people (e.g., the "MTV" high school memories with the "Coke" concert experience with friends; the "Ivy League" class room experience, the "Liberal Arts" self-exploration, the "Sexy-Times" with la-femme-de-Zooey Deschanel and "Peter Thiel/Steve Jobs entrepreneur" iconoclasm).

Whereas I was a jack-ass when I was 21, thinking I was special and therefore deserved and expected external tokens of accomplishments at every stage in my life (I was crestfallen at age 21 after being rejected by YC because I couldn't post a smug post on FB to snub all of my classmates and friends; and most importantly, have that as a validation to my insecure self-worth; a loneliness stemming out of FOMO). My loneliness nowadays is more centered around the splintering of between mine and my friends and acquaintances' goals and vision.

Some of my friends are still going at it with early twenties vision of grad school, startups and traveling, albeit with some bruises and splints. Some of my friends have fully "embraced" adulthood, complete with jumbo mortgage loans and X month into pregnancy and parenting books and diapers. Friendships/liasons have changed from one-on-one interaction to couples or single "dating" another couple or single. But most alarmingly, how much less I care and am affected by my peers' ideas and vision because how much I've fully embraced my own vulnerabilities/personality and focused fully to vest on my own ideas.

People who have past their 20's, how do you deal with loneliness? Do you focus on your family or really close friends after twenties, or do you focus on pursuing your own ideas with a community of likely-minded people, or do you come up with some kind of philosophical reconciliation?

My first year or two of university were somewhat similar, with periods of significant loneliness, which I can now, many years later, compare to grief in its intensity and debilitating effect (knowing full well that my recollections of those affects is hazy at best).

Part of this was the feeling of isolation caused by being in a new place without the "support network" I had in high school.

"Putting myself out there" didn't help much (I was involved in several groups, including drama productions, where one literally puts one's self out there).

What helped immensely were one or two intimate relationships, in one case a summer romance (yeah, I know how cliché that sounds) between second and third year and in the other a sometimes rocky and difficult two year relationship over my last two years (fourth and fifth).

Thinking about these relationships Vs friendships Vs acquaintancies prompts me to speculate that there is a strong positive correlation between the amount of time one spends with another person and one's sense of well being: Acquaintances were little blips of goodness that drained away quickly when the other left (minutes, say?), the feeling of goodness from being with a friend could last hours or even a day or two, but with highs and lows, but living together had me feeling good about myself all the time, even after a bad fight, with amount of time spent with the person directly related to the depth of the relationship: You don't spend as much time with your acquaintances, even if you want to, because they have other acquaintances and friends and lovers, and they want to spend time with them; you spend more time with friends, because you are their friend too; and you spend so much more time with lovers because that is the choice you have both made.

In 20/20 hindsight, I am quite glad we didn't have the Internet (it would one year after leaving U that I learned to spell TCP/IP and another year before I got my first email address) and that phones calls were so expensive: If I had had "anchors" elsewhere that I could easily reach and hold on to, I don't know that I would have stayed where I was.

As it was, I had to "bear down" and "barrel through" until better times came by. Sure, a different path could have led to just as good a life, but I'd hate to travel back and take that chance: Things are good, very good.

Because nothing could be accomplished without avoiding constant distractions which comes from society. When Sartre said his famous "the hell is other people" he probably meant this too. Others, like Mishima, Rand, Nabokov, Hesse also emphasized if not loneliness but certain safe distance from so-called society. It is perfectly ok to be alone from all that socially constructed reality they created for themselves. Like Tibetans said "the hell is a not a place, but a consequence of behavior of inhabitants".

So loneliness is required, at least it is more bearable and natiral condition for those who is labeled as by society as "introvert" or "autist" or other words they cannot understand. Introversion is an effect, not a cause, and with good books, like "Catcher" cited by OP one is never alone, and it is a better condition than being "social animal" before TV set, or with a bottle on the street.

This is an interesting article. I found myself agreeing with it most of the time. At the same time, as someone who has overcome a lonely path, I can't help but put a lot more emphasis on culture than on the others.

American culture is a lonely culture, as my wife is always pointing out. We send our kids to college alone. We retire alone. We look at social problems like poverty as if they are held by the individual alone. Loneliness is the price of freedom but it is also the price includes lack of real social and physical support.

When I moved to Indonesia two years ago, things went downhill with my marriage fast. My wife was always threatening to send me back to the States (every couple weeks) and I couldn't develop a sense of place in the midst of the uncertainty. I felt like I was half-way around the world from anyone who cared about me except for the kids. It was a very dark, depressing, and crippling place to be (business-wise, personally, and more). And so things continued for most of two years. Eventually we did overcome our problems (in no small part due to me eventually deciding I had to ignore her threats).

Here's the basic thing. It doesn't take many people to combat loneliness. Quality matters far more than quantity. Getting out there and meeting people is a smallish part of the battle. A much larger issue is building real friendships with a small number of people.

Having two or three close friends makes a world of difference.

I think we're mainly lonely because we learn to value sex as the primary goal in interpersonal relationships, thereby devaluing everything else. There is a linear relationship in western culture between the rise of emphasis on sex, which at first seemed "liberating", and the decline in feelings of connectedness with other people. Read some of the older literature which seems "repressed" by today's standards, and you will see that people had a better appreciation for life's other blessings, placed a higher value on friendship, and had more substantial friendships with other people. I don't think it has much at all to do with technology or the "pace of life", or even materialism; it's mainly about sex and where it lives in our value system. We don't want to go back to being repressed, but our current value system needs some adjustment, which will be difficult because it is a form of addiction. Like other addictions, it gradually drains meaning from the rest of life. Ironically the epic glut of pornography could help turn the tide, as people just overdose and realize how empty the whole thing really is. The recent rise of mainstream sadistic fantasies like 30 Shades suggests the end of the line for this kind of thing; what would be next?

Loneliness can't be addressed easily via social networks as you are not really authentic self when you are on them. When you are on Facebook, you want to project a positive image of yourself so you can get more Likes as a 'way to go'. On LinkedIn it is professional you and you have to be careful how you brand yourself there to be viewed by potential employers or customers. Twitter is not expansive enough to form meaningful connections though it can be done over time with a small group of people. The best way is still connecting in person seeing the person's face and body language. 'Find better people' is the advice to live by.

I think it's a very interesting and well-documented article. Everything is actually summarized in the 4 minute video half-way through the article, if you're short on time. Basically our need for self-actualization and the lens that our social platforms offer (idealized)is killing our social experience, by emphasizing quantity (connections and likes) over quality (content)and an easy excuse not to admit you're lonely: but I have x-amount of friends on...

Nice post :D

Louis C.K. had some good points on this: http://youtu.be/5HbYScltf1c

This advice is far better than it sounds:

> “Find better people,” he replied.

I began feeling very much like the author describes in my late high school years. I was nothing like the unpopular guy stereotype though. Yes, between my passion for programming and my introversion I was not exactly a lollypop, but I wasn't the nerd that everyone hated. I was a drummer trying to start a band, occasionally rebellious towards the teachers, and while I wasn't quite the most popular person in the school, my girlfriend was. I went out regularly and thought I had a lot of friends.

Truth is, though, I didn't. I felt increasingly lonely and trapped and misunderstood. My passion for programming was regularly getting at odds with my social life and I felt stigmatized for not giving my friends the attention they needed. Instead of talking to them, I gradually moved my coding sprints later and later in the night which, coupled with some problems I had with my parents, destroyed my sleep schedule (which has actually been messed up ever since).

I gradually shut every door I could shut, in everyone's face, until the loneliness I felt was matched by the lack of human contact; my social life became bleak, my love life pretty much ended as I gave up fighting for a five-year relationship that I was, by then, considering hopeless, and got stuck in a complicated relationship with someone who was about as mentally disturbed as I was (and, to some degree, still am).

Professionally, things weren't bad, but intellectually, I thought they were. Initial good results made me hopeful towards a career in academia, which contributed even more to my reclusiveness, as I spent most of the time I didn't spend on my undergrad courses doing hopelessly narrow-topic research. However, I felt my mind degrading every day, perpetually trailing what I could have achieved if I'd have been, you know, like every normal person. Having your line of thought interrupted by suicide plans every couple of hours is not exactly conducive to steady intellectual improvement. About five years into this, I was battling depression first-hand, and my aversion to therapy meant I avoided seeking help like the plague. I started smoking and began drinking more and more heavily every day. I gave up heavy drinking, but I'm still stuck with the nasty pipe smoking as an occasional relief. I still went out a lot, but almost always alone, to the extent that the owner of the bar I became a regular client of got a small table in a corner, with a single chair, only for me.

"Better people" doesn't sound cliche to me now. Most of my then-friends haven't spoken to me in a long, long time now, but some of them stayed, even as I was shutting doors in their faces. Some of them felt powerless to help me and kept a polite distance from me, and I was hearing from them only on anniversaries or the occasional gathering when I felt strong enough to bear human presence. But they never got away, and stuck by, even though they did all the friendship work by themselves. I never asked them out, rarely asked how they felt and never called them to see how they were doing (so yeah, in retrospect I was an asshole!); but somehow, every few months, I'd still see them for a drink. I still got invited to New Year's Eve parties and, when things were going really rough, someone who I hadn't seen in months popped up with a good word.

My love for programming also brought me close to good people. Between my low self-esteem and my disdain for flipped meritocracy, I was sure I could never get a job (low self-esteem) in a large, well-established company, and I was sure I'd end up hating it even if I somehow managed to trick them into hiring me. I got my first real job in a startup; my programming and electronics skills were, apparently, good enough for my colleagues to respect me professionally, and their kindness and good-temper also meant we ended up getting along as friends -- to the extent that, a long time after the company got disbanded and we no longer work together, we still go out for drinks.

I don't think I will ever come back to my pre-depression self. I always feel it lurking in the back of my head, like a shadow that dangles over me, and it tainted so many things that I no longer see the world like I saw it before. On the other hand, I'm pretty much a functioning individual now. Some things are still hard for me, like going to large parties with people I don't know, but I can do it without breaking down when I get home and spending the rest of the week hugging the pillow and crying myself to sleep on and off. A lot of things helped me here; getting back to my old hobbies again, getting a job I loved, but none of these were as incredibly important as being surrounded by honest friends was.

What's most incredible is that many of these guys didn't even think they did anything grand. They were genuinely surprised when I told them how much they helped me. Many of them felt somewhere along the lines of "I actually felt bad for calling you so rarely and thought you didn't want to hear too much from me because I'd been kind of an asshole". To "normal" people, it probably feels this way, but to someone whose phone rings for weeks at a time only because of SMS spam and payment reminders from the operator, an SMS with "so what's up dude?" is incredibly important.

This is a wonderful discussion thread. Keep it coming!

I'm quite lonely day in and out. My manners and Way are generally nonconformist/self-deprecating.

Thank goodness for childhood schizophrenia, or else I'd have not one singleton of a friend.

Oh, and thanks Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory too, I guess..