Modern Loneliness

I drove up the freeway to Ipswich early on Easter Sunday a couple of years ago. It must have been after the worst of COVID had receded, but it can’t have been too long after that weird, liminal disruption to all of our lives.

The clock was running. I do remember that. I was making the hour or so round trip to pick up an old friend we were hosting for Easter lunch. I remember what we had. A slow-cooked shoulder of lamb with all of the trimmings, and chocolate, of course. Way too much chocolate. It was a very old-fashioned meal, top-shelf stodge, really. But this was an old-fashioned friendship, one that reached back over 50 years to the very first day of primary school.

That had been in September for me, shortly after my family arrived in Brisbane, among the last of the Ten Pound Poms. I recall a few things about my first day at school. They sat me down next to the only kid who didn't have someone sitting next to him, and he promptly wet himself.

We were sitting at one of the old-fashioned wooden desks that put two students next to each other on a fold-up bench. When I realised what was creeping across the bench towards me, I put my hand up to ask Sister Angela if I could move. The rest of the class burst out laughing.

The casual cruelty of that moment stayed with me for decades. It’s with me still. I wonder whether that kid remembers it, too. I wonder whether he's even alive to do so.

The other thing I remember from that day was making a friend. The same friend I was driving up the freeway to pick up for lunch half a century later. Not the kid who wet himself, but one of the few who didn't seem to find it funny. He came and found me at ‘little lunch’ and explained that he used to sit where I was now sitting, and it was no fun at all, not for him, not for me, and not for the other kid. Looking back on it, he was remarkably empathic for a six-year-old.

That might be why we became friends, but our shared love of Doctor Who also helped.

I hadn't seen him for many years; the Easter Sunday, I drove up the freeway. In the way of things, our lives had taken very different paths, and we had drifted apart. I knew he'd been doing it tough. He lost half of his family to cancer. He’d had his own close calls with that motherfucker. And, well, he'd been the fat kid in class, too. He carried that struggle with him into adulthood.

I was prepared to find him reduced in his circumstances. I was not ready to find him ravaged. That's what the years had done. They had ravaged him. I had to help him up the front steps of our house, and when I put my hand on his arm to steady him, my fingers sunk into the flesh like pressing into a warm marshmallow.

It was a shock. As a kid he had always been the bigger one, the stronger one, larger than life itself. And in the intervening years, life had taken its revenge on him for that perceived slight.

There's a lot I could share with you about that day, but I won't. All you really need to know Is that I had never been more unprepared to confront another’s isolation. I had thought I was simply reconnecting with a mate who’d drifted out of reach over the years. Instead, what happened, I think, is that I blundered into the singular exile of a man who had gradually lost himself in the house where he grew up but now lived alone.

It feels sometimes as if we are all forever in danger of losing ourselves and our connection to others. It feels, too, as though we’ve never been more connected at the very moment we drift apart.

It's a difficult idea to grapple with, modern loneliness, because it is beset on all sides by contradiction, and every time it seems you've made some definitive conclusion, that determination reveals its negating argument. And yet, I can't help but feel as though so much of the sorrow of the world is the sorrow of loneliness.

That implies a collective experience of something which, by definition, we cannot share. Last week, when I touched upon this subject in a private column, a surprising number of people replied with their personal experiences of loneliness. Some simply knew themselves to be introverted, some had been diagnosed with spectrum disorders, which served to isolate them from all others at a molecular level, and many reflected on the everyday experience of feeling disconnected in a crowd, at a party or some other social gathering.

Leo: I've never been more lonely than at a crowded party with people who I knew slightly but who all knew each other better. The worst period of isolation in my life was working shift work in my 20s with a team of people I realised I had nothing in common with. Nothing. It was years of being ignored and slighted.

Susan: I went away with 11 people recently, all uni friends of my husband or their spouses, and I came back very sad because none of them took any time to engage with me and my (obviously) weird hobbies.

Halwes: I feel lonely when I'm in the city. Good as gold by myself for weeks at a time in the bush but get a really despairing feeling when I land in any city. I say good morning to people in the city who look at me like I'm about to rob them.

Such experiences, while uncomfortable and gruelling, are neither unique nor unexampled. Two thousand years ago, Seneca warned us that where there is no love, crowds are not company; faces are just a gallery of pictures, and talk merely a tinkling cymbal. Recall Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, having “the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown” even amidst the social whirl of London, while The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway was both “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

Long before Leo hit the party circuit, Susan came home forlorn from an uninviting university reunion, and Halwes frightened all those passersby on his morning constitutional; Matthew Arnold wrote that in the sea of life, ‘we mortal millions’ were fated to live alone, ‘with echoing straits between us thrown’.

Maybe it is simply that, at scale, individual loneliness metastasises into some much rougher, greater beast, but modern alienation presents as different not just in scale but also in effect. Heart sickness and ennui, the most interior of feelings, become externalised as mass pathologies.

It’s not a simple algorithm. The inputs are many, and the outcomes diverse. Does Trump give rise to QANON? Well, duh. He was the star of that shit show. But COVID and the mass isolation of global lockdowns were arguably the producers, with a big assist from the structural collapse of old media business models and their replacement by online social platforms configured as virality engines. Good luck disentangling that, or with quantifying how much of the growth of armed white nationalist militias is driven by the erosion of anglo-saxon political hegemony – and how much is just a lot of sad, lonely men getting together to cosplay the apocalypse on the weekend because the other sad, lonely men in the local chapter of the Aryan Brotherhood are the only ones who’ll play with them.

I recall a guest on one of The Bulwark’s eleventy billion podcasts, some dude who’d set himself the Sisyphean task of going deep on the armed wing of the alt-right so we wouldn’t have to, explaining with some measure of surprise just how many Proud Boys and Oathkeepers had fallen down Hitler’s rabbit hole because this was what they had instead of rewarding friendships.

Loneliness is complicated.

Modern loneliness is all about the tech until it’s not.

When I first started to think about this, I already had a title for the essay or maybe just a subtitle.

It’s the Phones, Stupid.

Graphs like these are why.

The ski jump into anomie takes off at the exact moment a generation of teens got their first smartphones and social media accounts. It might not be causation, but that’s some profound-ass correlation, right there, between Zuckerberg getting rich and the rest of us getting miserable. By the sort of coincidence that is either creepy or simply inevitable in a digitally saturated world, I was pondering this on my muffin walk this morning when an email from the tech writer Mike Elgan popped up in my feed, almost as though he couldn’t help butting in on the topic.

We’re currently living in an era where technology impacts literally everything. As one obvious example, our politics is characterized by divisiveness, disinformation and radicalization. Nearly every aspect of this new politics was brought about by the existence of the global internet, social media and the ability of anyone to create any kind of content and instantly reach a global audience by gaming algorithms. Russian disinformation, Chinese censorship, the decline of traditional media, the small-donation fundraising of radicals in Congress — all of it is the direct result of digital technology.

Elgan went on to point out that education, religion, science — even dating and marriage have been similarly impacted. Indeed, ‘every aspect of human society is now mediated and affected by machines.’

Jaron Lanier, the VR pioneer turned technology doomsayer, lays much of the blame on the business model where we all traded away our personal data for free access to search engines and social media. Echoing Elgan on how tech has reshaped our politics and culture, Lanier says the dominant platforms created a faux communal space while designing the algorithms that controlled it to exploit base human weaknesses such as vanity, irritability, and paranoia.

We have rewritten our wetware. Alienation is not just a feature; it’s the profit engine driving everything.

But it is not in itself, everything.

Our agency has been diminished, but human will is not extinguished. We can still make choices. They might be inconvenient and uncomfortable, but being hard does not make them unsound. Reading a book is much harder than scrolling a social feed. Reaching out from isolation can be undeniably more difficult than just sitting quietly in our empty spaces. For one thing, just sitting doesn’t expose us to the pain of rejection. And while we sit, we can always scroll.

But honestly, it’s better that we don’t.

As I grow older, I find that I have to put more effort into reaching out. Because, of course, I do. The things that make friendship and connection so easy when we’re young, time and proximity, work against us as the years pile on. With children and careers, time becomes short. The friends we held close in our teens and twenties might well scatter to the far side of the world in their thirties and beyond. It seems as if we’ll never have that easy confluence of time and presence until, of course… we do. Because the seasons of work and parenthood also pass.

There can probably be no one solution to modern loneliness because it takes so many forms for so many different people. But pulling back from one’s particular circumstances to the general question of how we might lessen the pain of isolation, we find alternatives. That might mean driving for an hour on Easter Sunday to pick up an old school friend who would otherwise have spent the day alone. Or it could mean hosting online drinks and a Zoom or FaceTime chat with some blog buddies to discuss the first season of Fallout. (We’ll be doing this in a week or two, and I am excited!) One completely analogue solution and one digital, but both require more time and effort than pulling to refresh my Facebook feed, and both are very personal to me, of course.

Your experience will vary.

But loneliness is one of those problems we literally cannot solve alone.