In the previous post, Part 1, I criticized claims of a so-called “epidemic of loneliness” in America. Those claims are based on misunderstanding loneliness–for example, confusing it with actual isolation, not appreciating that most loneliness is longing for a romantic partner, and muddling loneliness up with other sad emotions.
Moreover, there is little evidence that Americans have been increasingly feeling lonely. More American teenagers may have since about 2010 felt loneliness as well as other distressing emotions. But the panic that there is a large and general “loneliness epidemic” is not warranted by the data. If so, why is there so much concern about loneliness?
This post examines talk about loneliness, listening for that talk in the present, in ancient civilizations, and back again in recent times. Naming and addressing loneliness seems to be another form of self-absorption that spread from the genteel bourgeois of the 19th century to the wider public.
Talking about Loneliness
Media attention to a “loneliness epidemic” took off exponentially about ten years ago. In 2012, for example, The Atlantic gave us a “report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.” In 2013, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat also addressed the “loneliness epidemic.” By 2017, former Surgeon General Murthy was “sounding the alarm.” This tocsin rings more and more often (appearing even in my rabbi’s address on Yom Kippur.) Yet, the loneliness alarm is not new (except perhaps for the medical metaphor). American opinion leaders have sounded it over and over for generations. Here is a walk back through some of those episodes.
In the late 1990s, Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” essays (later followed by his 2000 book of the same name) generated discussions of how “lonely bowlers” exemplified rising loneliness in America. Others in that period warned about the then-emerging internet. “Sad, Lonely World Discovered in Cyberspace” read a key headline of 1998.[1] The evidence then, as now, was weak.
A couple of decades before that, journalist Vance Packard’s best-selling A Nation of Strangers (1972) examined “the pervasive loneliness of our times,”[2] attributing it largely to increasing residential mobility (although residential mobility had been declining for generations–and still is.) Sociologist Philip Slater’s The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970) reached a hipper audience with its blame of capitalism for presumably rising loneliness.
A couple of decades earlier still, major books like sociologist David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950; 1961) and journalist William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) described middle-class Americans as emotionally alone even as they spent their days among many fellow workers, attended church in record numbers, married early, and had unusually large families. Riesman described his contemporaries as “dreading loneliness” and trying but failing to assuage that dread in crowds of other lonely people.[3]
In these years intellectuals also warned about “alienation,” a term used more often in the 1960s than even loneliness.[4] And essays about existentialism abounded,[5] as did references to “rootless” Americans[6] and obituaries for the decline or even loss of community (alarms predating Putnam by more than a generation).[7]
Progressive reformers, yet several decades before, worried about isolation and loneliness in the declining villages of rural America. Answering a large federal survey in 1908, a great majority of farm women said that they were dissatisfied with the “social intercourse” available to them.[8] One wrote thankfully to President Theodore Roosevelt for having initiated the inquiry into rural conditions: “It must have been divine inspiration that caused you to try to understand the loneliness of a farmer’s life.”[9] A 1915 report of another survey of farm women highlighted how “loneliness, isolation, and lack of social . . . opportunity . . . form[ed] the text of letters from all parts of the United States.” Yet another survey in 1919 of 10,000 farm households concluded that “the farm woman feels her isolation.”[10] (Many complainants also described the emotional disinterest of their husbands.) Curiously, however, there seems not to have been much media interest in this peripheral, poor population, much less discussion of a loneliness epidemic. There was some concern about loneliness in the cities, leading to the formation of “less lonely clubs” as antidote.
This quick review is not a history of American loneliness, but of American talk about loneliness. Yet, talk matters; naming loneliness as a specific, important, harmful condition leads to discussion, distinctions, awareness, self-examination, diagnoses, clinical treatments, therapeutic careers and businesses, and eventually, in the U.K. and elsewhere, a Ministry of Loneliness. A deeper historical issue, however, is whether loneliness is an eternal human emotion or something recently developed.
Going Way Back
The academic field of the history of emotions presumes that emotions change over time (and place). Scholars have shown, for example, how nostalgia and sentimentality emerged in the west in the nineteenth century and then bloomed in the twentieth.[11] British cultural historian Fay Alberti, in her 2019 book, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion, argues that “loneliness was prevalent in 2019 but rare two centuries earlier,”[12] and was thus a modern invention. In sharp contrast, philosopher and psychiatrist Ben Lazare Mijuskovic asserts in Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature (2012) that “man [sic] has always and everywhere suffered from feelings of acute loneliness and . . . his entire existence is consumed by the struggle to escape” loneliness.[13]
Who is right about the history of experiencing loneliness we cannot know, that being extremely difficult to assess. Then, who is right about the history of naming loneliness? Both Alberti and Mijuskovic, like many scholars, use great literature to eavesdrop on the past, but they hear different things. Alberti concludes that loneliness appeared in English literature only around 1800; Mijuskovic concludes that almost all writers, from ancient Greek philosophers to modern Russian novelists, have discussed loneliness.
Alberti seems more accurate, in part because Mijuskovic repeatedly conflates aloneness with loneliness. For example, he cites Milton’s 1645 reading of Genesis that “lonelines is the first thing which Gods eye nam’d not good,” but, as we shall see, Milton errs–it was aloneness, not loneliness, that God condemned.[14] Alberti writes that prior to roughly the 18th century any rare uses of “lonely” simply meant aloneness, as when Jesus “withdrew to lonely places” (Luke 5:16, NIV translation). She also uses the much more recent, but still pre-modern, example of Robinson Crusoe (1719): Crusoe “is alone but never defines himself as lonely.”[15]
Looking millennia back to Ancient Israel, the Hebrew Bible often describes characters who are alone. Let’s re-visit Genesis 2:18 (in the Alter translation): “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the human [Adam] to be alone. I shall make him a sustainer [Eve] beside him.’” In Numbers 23:9, the diviner Balaam describes nomadic Israel as a “people that dwells apart.” Various figures before Jesus make solitary sojourns into a wilderness. “Alone” appears dozens of times–but “lonely” as we understand that word, never.[15a] It is not that the Hebrew Bible is inexpressive; it is replete with strong human (and godly) emotions–anger, grief, jealousy, love, hate, devotion, etc. But not loneliness. Neither Adam nor other biblical characters complain of or are described as feeling lonely. Allusions to something akin to loneliness are found in Psalms (e.g., Ps. 25:16; 68:6), but the psalmist is ruing separation from God, not from people. The Song of Songs tells of a woman’s longing for her lover, but I haven’t yet found a translation of Songs that describes her as “lonely.” Whether the feeling existed or not, loneliness is unnamed in these ancient writings.
The Greeks, too, described volatile emotions and episodes of separation–desired separations from the polis in Arcadias and painful exiles from home–but again not explicit loneliness.[16] Calypso found Odysseus “sitting on the shore, and his eyes were never dry of tears . . . as he longed mournfully for his return, for the nymph was no longer pleasing in his sight. By night indeed he would sleep by her side . . . but by day he would sit on the rocks and the sands, racking his soul with tears and groans and griefs . . . .” We moderns may infer that Odysseus is feeling loneliness rather than, say, regret, distress, or anger, but loneliness is not named.
“Loneliness” Arises
Loneliness is named with increasing frequency in the last two or three centuries, at least in Anglo-America. The emerging bourgeois culture of the 18th and of the 19th century was awash in romantic sentimentality, including the celebration of pathos and melancholy.[17] Expressions of loneliness are plentiful in the letters and diaries of many middle-class Americans, especially but not only novel-obsessed young women.
Take, for example, 20-year-old Emily Dickinson–“I write A. to-night, because it is cool and quiet . . . and . . . because I am feeling lonely; some of my friends are gone, and some of my friends are sleeping–sleeping the churchyard sleep–the hour of evening is sad . . . .” A 17-year-old girl who would die at 19 wrote in her journal, “I feel lonely and unhappy . . . . I’m thinking about Rowena, and how all that is left of her is lying pale and cold at her home . . .. The other members of the family have gone to attend her funeral, and I am here alone.” Union General Ben Butler, writing to his “dearest wife” in response to her complaint of loneliness, shared the emotion: “What a dear, petted, spoiled child . . .. I wrote as plainly as I could that I was lonely, sad without you, and you must come, come, come.”[18]
Some in this era embraced loneliness as the painful corollary of an ennobling solitude. Emerson insisted on self-reliance over society and Thoreau boasted of self-improvement through (supposed but not real) self-isolation in Walden woods. Others, too, praised the virtue of solitude as they warned that cities provided not too little but too much sociability.[19]
Thus was loneliness named, examined, and accepted as part of modern life, eventually with less of the Dickinson and Thoreau romanticism and more as simple emotional distress.
Why the Modern Naming of Loneliness
Naming, confessing, and even embracing the pathos of loneliness seems to be a relatively modern development. Why? It may reflect, as Alberti claims, newly-experienced loneliness. That is possible but likely unprovable. Such an explanation, moreover, must contend with a seeming contradiction: that feelings of loneliness emerged or increased just as more Americans came to live nearer to one another, to live longer in the same community, to enjoy healthier and more secure lives, and to more easily stay connected with family and friends.[20]
The classic decline-of-community arguments imported from fin-de-XIXème-siecle Europe claim that industrialization, migration, and urbanization tore people out of their intimate village lives, leaving them alone and lonely in crowds of strangers. These descriptions turned out to be, for the most part, true in the short run. Many domestic migrants and global immigrants decried their loneliness and some in America even “took the gas” to end the pain. But these descriptions were false in the long run as immigrants brought kin to join them and build ethnic communities. Similarly, being occasionally in crowds of anonymous strangers–Times Square being the quintessential cliché for modernity–does not mean that individuals in that crowd lack intimate ties or feel lonely; they typically don’t.[21]
Such decline arguments claim (incorrectly) that modernity created loneliness by sundering or impoverishing relationships. But if loneliness reflects the shortfall between expectations for relationships and their reality, why not look instead at whether modernity raised expectations for sociability and intimacy? Tocqueville’s 1830s analysis that democracy locked Americans into “solitude” as well as Durkheim’s 1890s description of a modern “anomie” direct us to consider rising expectations rather than sundered ties. For political scientist Luke Fernandez and historian Susan J. Matt, this is the key, that “Modern technologies have made friendship, romance, and social connection look easier than ever, and therefore the absence of such relationships has become all the harder to bear.”
Or perhaps this: Loneliness, I pointed out in Part 1, most often comes from missing a romantic partner. Americans’ standards for marriage rose notably about 100-150 years ago as spouses, especially wives, increasingly demanded more companionship and affection from their mates. Historians have read that transformation in the charges plaintiffs listed in divorce filings that seemed to describe loneliness in marriage.[22] Maybe, then, talk of loneliness flourished not because isolation increased, but because expectations for intimacy in couples increased.
Nineteenth-century middle-class romanticism, with its delicate sensibility, melancholy rumination, and sympathy (notably for slaves, families of drinkers, and far-away heathens), spread down the class hierarchy.[23] Also diffusing were practices of self-examination and self-fashioning. Nineteenth-century expressions of such self-inspection included confessions of sinners who were born again during religious revivals. Today, this practice entails joining twelve-step programs, attending therapeutic retreats, and visiting bookstore sections devoted to self-help. In these ways, more Americans have become more conversant in the increasingly elaborate vocabulary of emotions–including loneliness.
Today
This spread of conscious “self-fashioning” may explain the popularization of loneliness talk over the last couple of centuries, but why is there the surge of loneliness talk right now, in the early 21st century? Perhaps popular self-inspection and inwardness has recently accelerated. While references in American books to being lonely have doubled since about 1990, references to being loved, much more common to start with, have tripled.[24] We just may be in an era of hyperbolic attention to emotions (the anger in political polarization being further evidence).
Or perhaps we are today simply going through one of those cycles of concern about loneliness that I described earlier, like the 1990s, 1970s, 1950s, and so on. Generation after generation, claims of burgeoning loneliness make sense to Americans because most of us share a deep, nostalgic, powerful intuition that modern life is a fall from grace, that where once we lived in warm, harmonious, tight-knit communities—says this collective memory—we now live in cold, discordant, and lonesome spaces. No amount of historical or sociological research to the contrary will shake such a deeply-felt conviction.
I suspect that there is yet an additional reason, too, for the power of the loneliness meme today: It sidesteps class and material conditions. Loneliness is an emotional pain that, while more common among the poor, the infirm, and the angst-ridden teens, has been felt by every modern American at some time. Making this common experience a focus of our public concern avoids confronting harsh, worldly, and politically volatile inequities in our society.
As I said in Part 1, a loneliness agenda also means less attention and fewer resources to deal with other “epidemics”—gun violence, school failure, opioid addiction, maternal mortality, homelessness, climate migration—and, you know, real, non-metaphoric epidemics.
===== NOTES ======
[1]Here with follow-ups along same line: Political scientist “Mr. Nie asserted that the Internet was creating a broad new wave of social isolation in the United States, raising the specter of an atomized world without human contact or emotion.” For recanting of this claim, see here and here.
[2] Page 176 of Nation of Strangers.
[3] Page 158 in The Lonely Crowd : they could “no more assuage their loneliness in a crowd of peers than one can assuage one’s thirst by drinking sea water.”
[4] My analysis of nGram Viewer and word counts in New York Times.
[5] My analysis of nGram Viewer.
[6] nGram Viewer.
[7] nGram Viewer.
[8] Page 590 of Larson, O. F., and T.B. Jones. 1976. “The Unpublished Data from Roosevelt’s Commission on Country Life.” Agricultural History 50 (October): 583–99.
[9] From “What the Wives Say: Extracts from Letters Received in Our Farm Home Inquiry,” Good Housekeeping 49 (June, 1909):41–42. Cited also in Ellsworth, note 51.
[10] Page 15 of Ward, “The Farm Woman’s Problem,” Department of Agriculture Circular #148, 1920.
[11] On nostalgia, this earlier post on Susan J. Matt’s Homesickness: An American History. On sentimentality, see this post and Steve Pinker’s Better Angels.
[12] Page 233.
[13] Mijuskovic, 3rd ed., location 1160.
[14]Mijuskovic, 3rd ed., loc. 984. Furthermore, Milton, writing in 1645, specifies that it was the absence of a mate–not of general companionship which angels provided–that was “not good.” See here, Genesis Places.
[15a] Personal communication, Robert Alter (Sept. 26, 2023).
[16] This is my reading of Corso, “Escaping the Community in Archaic Greece,” in The Birth and Development …Arcadia.
[17] I discuss this, with many references, in Made in America, pp. 218ff. See also this excellent essay by Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt.
[18] These examples come from a collection of “North American Women’s Letters and Diaries.”
[19] On both these points, see Fernandez and Matt.
[20] These propositions are presented in detail in my book, Made in America.
[21] See my own work (and of others, like Lynn Lofland) in urban studies. Lots of research on immigrant communities support the story of ethnic buildup. A Marxian variant of the decline-of-community argument describes capitalism and commercialism as creating modern loneliness by commodifying relationships. The best research, however, suggests that commerce actually breaks down barriers between people and emotionally enriches relationships.
[22] Also discussed in Made in America.
[23] Mark Twain noted this phenomenon in Huckleberry Finn, which includes a comic send-up of a recently departed, small town teenager whose melancholy writings led Huck to conclude that “she was having a better time in the graveyard.”
[24] My nGram Viewer analysis: In 1990, the proportion of times that the terms “I am lonely” + “she is lonely” + “he is lonely” appeared in American English books was two-thirds the proportion represented by “I am loved” + “she is loved” + “he is loved.” By 2018, the lonely references had roughly doubled, but the loved references had tripled. Does this mean anything about the experiences? Who knows? But they say something about writing of loneliness and loving.