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Why Loneliness Lies Not in Our Heads But in the Ruins of Civil Society
As the American Scholar put it last Autumn, “It’s now official: America is suffering from from an epidemic of loneliness.”
The magazine’s certitude followed the appointment of Britain’s first “Minister of Loneliness” and the “battle plan” that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released last year to sweep away social isolation.
All I can say is “It’s about time,” for 15 years have passed since University of Chicago psychologist John T. Cacioppo, the visionary father of “social neuroscience,” published a paper1 astonishingly concluding that “social species do not fare well when forced to live solitary lives.”
“Melancholy and the Mystery of a Street” by Giorgio de Chirico (1914)
Who ever would have thunk that? Since by now you’ve realized I’m being facetious I’ll admit I think the real question is “Who on Earth hasn’t already figured that out?”
All of my favorite literary characters, in fact, would be stick-figures had they not learned to apprehend through solitude.
Let’s start with God. Forlorn when he can’t find Adam in Genesis 3:9-10, he shouts “Where are you?” As Jack Miles writes in “God: A Biography” (Knopf, 1995), after Adam confesses “I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid,” God “suddenly becomes quasi-parental..intimately putting garments on their bare bodies..as if he missed them.”
Now we have Jonathan Haidt‘s newly published book “The Anxious Generation” (Penguin Press), which places the blame squarely on amoral and greedy social media companies that hook children on smartphones “during vulnerable developmental stages.”
“There is just no way to pin the surge of adolescent anxiety and depression on any economic event or trend,” he concludes.
Really? What about the fact that the percentage of families where both mom and dad were away at work rose from 31% in the 1970s to 65% in 2022, thus eroding binding civil traditions like commiserating over shared dinner? What about the concentration of wealth in a dozen people’s hands, or the fact that we’re leaving our children with Herculean problems like global warming and real estate costs so high that it’s impossible for young adults to even imagine buying a home?
As Substack’s Anne Petersen wrote in her 2020 book “Can’t Even” (Mariner Books), “In America there is still no mandatory paid parental leave; subsidized and affordable childcare is difficult, if not impossible to find; school runs for just 3/4 of the year and 2/3 of the workday.”
As Guardian columnist Kenan Malik wrote last week in reviewing Haidt’s book, “Too much of contemporary discussion about the impact of social and technological changes on people’s psychology—from the influence of social media on the well-being of the young to the effect of hyper-individualism on our sense of self—fetishises psychology at the expense of social analysis. We look for loneliness inside our heads when its source lies all around us, in the destruction of collective life, the erosion of communal bonds, the ruin of civil society, the squeezing of public spaces.”
Haidt’s solution is to further oppress Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) by prohibiting them from using smartphones before age 10, from browsing the Internet until they turn 14 and from all access to social media before 16.
To me the most telling problem is not the inherent evil of social media but the mysterious disappearance of community. Afte our Covid isolation I thought we’d all be bear hugging our neighbors. Not so.
Take the Nextdoor Neighbor app, for example. Before Covid it focused mostly on adopting puppies and baking apple pies for new residents; today it’s mostly about which cameras can capture trespassers in high resolution.
Freud thought that because all humans are plagued by loss nearly everyone needs to vent while lying on the couch.
Fortunately, British psychiatrist John Bowlby helped create a genuine social science now known as attachment theory, that delineates stages of childhood development that can be summed up as attachment, affiliation and mastery. Babies with a “secure base” eventually learn to wander a bit before coming back to mom in the first stage. Adolescents with empathic parents develop a sense of self. And adults, after trial and mostly error, finally find something they can master.
Bowlby, along with Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget and other developmental psychologists are in good company—recognizing, as Socrates told Aristotle, that to be happy humans need both friends and the self-knowledge derived from personal experience.
Or as 91-year-old actor Ellen Burstyn recently put it, “What a lovely surprise to discover how unlonely being alone can be.”
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2020, 09. December ; 97(6): doi: 10.1037/a0016076.