I was so lonely and miserable in grad school that I went full meta and chose the medicalization of loneliness for my thesis topic.
To be clear, there was no shortage of people in my program inviting me to socialize. I was not suffering from isolation. I had gone from many years of working independently as a remote, self-employed person to spending hours in cramped quarters with people who were not my fellow travelers.
Their very presence is a big part of what led to an agonizing bout of depression, which fueled my research and eventual story on the subject that was published in The Guardian.
What is loneliness, and why do the distinctions between acute and chronic loneliness matter?
Ever since former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy famously declared loneliness an “epidemic” in 2017, alarmist news articles and social interventions aimed at getting people to get out more and “talk to strangers” have proliferated. Join a club. Volunteer. Don’t be afraid to reach out first. People like you more than you think!
There are kernels of truth, and certainly good intentions, in all the peppy (if misguided) advice out there that conflates casual acquaintanceship and regular social interactions with close, meaningful relationships.
Murthy’s concerns were supported by Cigna’s 2018 Loneliness Survey, based on the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a questionnaire which asks respondents to indicate whether each of 20 statements describes how they often, sometimes, rarely or never feel.
For example: “I am unhappy doing so many things alone”; “there is no one I can turn to”; “my interests and ideas are not shared by others.” Results revealed that nearly 50% of Americans said they sometimes or always felt alone, and 1 in 4 rarely or never felt that others understood them (in the 2020 survey, 61% of Americans reported being lonely, an 11% increase in just two years).
The pandemic’s arrival in early 2020 further muddied things for the understanding of loneliness though. Suddenly many people were experiencing very real, acute loneliness because they were physically isolated and unable to see their friends and families.
That social pain, however, largely went away as COVID-19 restrictions lifted, and people were able to gather together again. Public events returned, and those who experienced situational loneliness experienced relief.
However, as I wrote in my thesis, chronic loneliness is an altogether different beast. As cultural historian Fay Bound Alberti wrote in her book “A Biography of Loneliness,” being alone is not an indicator of loneliness. Instead, “It is a conscious, cognitive feeling of estrangement or social separation from meaningful others; an emotional lack that concerns a person’s place in the world.”
I think people instinctively understand this. They know the difference between “pajama friends” — people you feel so at ease with that you could comfortably hang out with them wearing PJs — and someone on your softball league or at church who you can make friendly small talk with.
People are not satisfied with having mere acquaintances in their lives, and there’s a cottage industry of experts rising up in response to this lack many of us feel. The loneliness discourse is morphing into what I’d call the friendship industrial complex. Two prominent journalists — Anna Goldfarb and Anne Helen Petersen — are publishing books on the subject, and there will surely be more to follow.
And yet, every week it seems, there’s a new article proclaiming the easy ways to do away with loneliness, by doing very obvious things that involve increasing social interaction, rather than focusing on how to find and develop more meaningful intimate relationships.
A culture writer I respect recently suggested that you should just start going to meet ups and hosting game nights to make more friends. It’s a common trope that if you’re lonely, you should just get out there and do more socializing. People love to offer advice on all the ways you can connect more.
As I experienced in grad school, if you are more on the chronically lonely end of the spectrum, increased socialization can just exacerbate your feelings of isolation. It’s the quality of the people you spend time with that matters, and while it’s fairly easy to meet new people and have a fun time, it’s much more difficult to find people you really vibe with and want to share your life with.
We all have different social needs, and while I know the value in light company — delightful little conversations with my mailman, neighbors and people at my gym — it is no substitute for having the meaningful relationships in your life that you desire.
How do we go about ‘solving’ loneliness?
Perhaps the only way to heal our loneliness is by embracing a collective solution. A recent Paris Review story on the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman and the loneliness he suffered throughout his life looks at this human affliction with more empathy than the usual writings on the subject.
The writer, Richard Deming, quotes Arthur Miller reflecting on the early days of his work on “Death of a Salesman,” proposing that trying to save ourselves separately is immoral, and that “that is the corrosive among us.”
Deming writes, “The challenge, maybe it’s an imperative, is to find ways to save ourselves collectively, to throw off the ‘pretense of self-sufficiency’ and confess, without shame or recrimination, that we need one another. First, we need to be able to learn from each other the very nature of that loneliness that Miller mentions.”
Whereas much writing about loneliness fills me with dread and makes me feel alienated for seemingly feeling so differently about what I lack, the oddly specific hole in my heart, Deming’s eye on the matter gives me hope, and inspires the sense that we could all be in this together, as it were.
“What we can do with our loneliness is find a way of tethering ourselves by fashioning things out of what we each of us feels, even our most alienated, painful feelings,” he writes.
“Art, in whatever form, can be a way of doing this. An artist such as Hoffman reveals their own anguish in the face of loss and isolation, but their work grants us access to that pain in order to find ways through our own loneliness, to create our opportunities for discovery. In the end, that’s what it’s all about.”
There may be no tangible solution to loneliness, but if we could bring our most radically present, curious and vulnerable selves into our interactions with one another, we would create more opportunities for intimacy, for salving this pain that we each experience in singular fashion.