The new loneliness

Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact with other even for a fraction of a moment. Iphones, Ipads, Facebook etc are all technological gifts of the last decade that have made this possible. The fact is that now almost everyone has an iphone or blackberry that they feel compelled to look at all the time lest they miss by a nano second some breaking news or an email. At how many parties do you see people looking down on their blackberries while trying to converse with some one standing or sitting next to them. When I questioned one who was listening to my diatribe on technology while simulaneously pecking on her blackberry, listening to her iphone  and having an ipad on her lap, and said that maybe they were insulting the speaker by looking down on their blackberries rather than at him, the response was that they could multitask!

But within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, it is clear that we are now suffering from an unprecedented alienation. We may be interconnected to a major degree yet it seems that we have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. Various studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history. A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to another major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. 

In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. But it is clear that social interaction matters. Now we meet fewer people for we are interconnected and can read the facebook pages cant we? We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant. Steven March makes the same argument taking Facebook as an example in this article.  "A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. "


We now live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we seem to be becoming. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information. We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing. Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state.

We also know that being lonely is extremely bad for your health. If you’re lonely, you’re more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn’t lonely. You’re less likely to exercise. You’re more likely to be obese. You’re less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline.

And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. You buy these gadgets like iphone and blackberry which further isolate you from direct human interactions. These omnipresent new technologies inevitably lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy.

It is time we understood that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are.