Have you felt lonely recently? Not just in the romantic sense, but a general, palpable sense of loneliness?
Are you craving human contact and relations?
Do you find yourself spending more and more time alone instead of in the company of friends, family, or strangers?
Good news — you are not alone in feeling alone!
Look at us, already off to a good start in finding community with others!
You have most likely seen at least one headline in recent days that claims there is an ongoing loneliness epidemic. As if the pandemic wasn’t enough, we are now confronted with another mass threat to our health that is even less outwardly visible than COVID-19. At least in the case of Corona, most had the decency to wear a mask in public if they were sick.
Should those impacted by this new epidemic adopt a visual shibboleth that alerts others of their suffering? Perhaps a frowny face button with the plea “Help Me Have a Nice Day?”
I must admit that I too have suffered from this affliction from time to time. Even though I have plenty of friends and family who love me and enjoy my company, I can’t help feeling positively isolated from time to time. Sometimes, admittedly, it is a self-imposed isolation — particularly in the winter as I tend to hibernate in response to cold weather.
I can get inside my head occasionally and entertain the thought that my friends are simply putting up with me out of a sense of pity or obligation. This fear was only exacerbated when I stopped drinking. I often took on the role of a clown when the taps were flowing and found it easy to foster laughter with my booze-fueled tomfoolery.
I was never someone who needed booze to socialize, it came quite easy to me. Booze simply served as a supplement, allowing my brain to turn itself off for a few hours at a time. The brain is the organ that can make us feel lonely when it’s feeling understimulated. Even though we are quite a bit more sophisticated than our other primate cousins, we are still a social species and can be crippled when denied genuine interaction with other people.
Solitary confinement, the punishment for prisoners in which they are locked in a small space and denied meaningful human interaction for varying periods, has been classified as torture in many countries because of the horrific impact it has on the human psyche and one’s health.
The United States is not one of those countries. We still employ the use of solitary confinement liberally — we use loneliness as a weapon.
I know that fact might have depressed you a bit, but look at it this way — at least your bout with loneliness hasn’t cost you your sanity (hopefully)!
In these modern times, loneliness has become an entire industry. In Japan, one can hire boyfriends or girlfriends who will spend the night in bed with you. Mind you, this is not commercialized hanky-panky as that is still banned (for the most part) in Japan. Rather, this is simply individuals hiring total strangers to provide another warm body in their bed — perhaps with some cuddling added in as well.
More staggering is the state of the hikikomori, Japanese who have more or less retreated entirely from human society, with some foregoing human interaction for years at a time. Government estimates place this population at an estimated 2 million.
The causes behind this type of behavior are by no means exclusive to Japan, nor do they only impact specific age groups, sexes, genders, etc. In reality, our world of hyper-connectivity through social media and increasingly miraculous technology has led to a period of intense loneliness for the primates inhabiting it.
A potential science experiment: would a chimpanzee hide in a tree all day if we gave it an iPhone?
In May, 2023 — three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murphy announced that half of all Americans were suffering from loneliness.
To put that into simple terms, that means either you or I are lonely right this very second. I am writing this in the parlor of the brownstone that I reside in. I live in New York, America’s most densely populated city. Yet, I don’t know the names of any of my neighbors as I have never spoken to them — with one exception.
While attending an event at a social club I am potentially interested in joining, I learned that another potential member lived on my street, directly across from my apartment — kismet! We took the same subway back and had a pleasant conversation. On my end, it was mainly recounting my recent surgery that saw the removal of my gallbladder. He was a recent arrival from Georgia, following his girlfriend to the Big Apple.
We met back in November. We haven’t spoken to each other since.
If you think that’s bad, I haven’t spoken to many of those I considered my nearest and dearest friends back in high school since we graduated in 2015. Remember 2015?
I was 18 years old — I still had my gallbladder.
This is all too common of an occurrence. For me, one of the main issues is my reliance on proximity when it comes to maintaining friendships. I am not great at utilizing social media for its supposed purpose of staying connected with people. I mainly have it just to promote my writing as I can’t think of any other way to share it that is within my current means.
Once I make it big, my profiles will be deleted quicker than an Ambien-inspired Roseanne Barr tweet. Personally, I find social media to be more irritating than enjoyable. A large majority of content is crafted with the intent to elicit hatred and unbridled anger as this encourages engagement more so than any positive feeling might. Hate has become as big of a business as loneliness, but I’ll save that particular topic for another article.
For some, friendships forged during early childhood and in the schoolyard were simply a result of proximity and would never stand the test of time. Regardless, aren’t all friendships and relationships based on proximity to some extent? Is that a bad thing?
And, if that is the case, why don’t I know the names of any of my neighbors?
The title of this piece was shamelessly stolen from my favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. His book, Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!, was not well-received by critics and audiences alike. Even as an unabashed Vonnegut acolyte, I will willingly admit that the novel is not Kurt’s finest. Despite this, the novel’s focus on loneliness stayed with me.
To try and even give a basic overview of the novel’s plot would take far too much time, so I will spare you that. The important piece for this article is the Presidential campaign of the main character, Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain. The “Daffodil-11” within Swain’s name is a result of his successful campaign for office. Running on the promise to make America “lonesome no more,” Swain institutes a national system of extended families that are identified by government-issued middle names, comprised of the names of random objects in nature and a random number ranging from one to twenty. Individuals sharing their government-issued names became cousins, and those with the same number became siblings.
Thus, each American citizen was provided an extended family numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Regarding what one should say to a panhandler if they still felt foolhardy enough to rely on the kindness of strangers in this new society, Swain offered the following:
You ask him his middle name, and when he tells you “Oyster-19” or “Chickadee-1” or “Hollyhock-13” you say to him: Buster — I happen to be a Uranium-3. You have one hundred and ninety thousand cousins and ten thousand brothers and sisters. You’re not exactly alone in this world. I have relatives of my own to look after. So why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooon? — Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain
How can you not love Vonnegut?
Unfortunately for both Dr. Swain and society at large, a plague decimates the world population and places humanity on the brink of extinction. Yet, even in the face of complete societal collapse and the potential end of the human race, Americans continue to selflessly assist any member of their artificial extended family in need, regardless of risk or benefit to themselves.
Though this scenario is completely ludicrous, not even considering the rest of the novel’s positively whacky plotlines, there is something beautiful about this thought. The idea that what we consider a level of respect and care only worthy of blood relatives can be extended to complete strangers in order to ensure that no one is ever left by their lonesome. Unregulated love and empathy for our fellow man — what a foreign concept in this day and age.
I believe one of the biggest causes of this epidemic is simply that we are all terrified. Every day we are presented with further evidence that this beautiful blue marble of ours is growing sick and tired of us, we fossil-fuel-obsessed apes. Reactionary politicians continue their public affair with fascism. Progress that was paid for in blood is being curtailed with minimal resistance by the institutions we were told would keep us safe.
Trust in each other has cratered — is it any surprise we’re not feeling particularly social?
I want to keep this particular article short so it can serve as an introduction to what I aim to treat as a larger series discussing loneliness and its impact on people. Consider this an Hors d’Oeuvre.
I will go ahead and make it clear right now that I do not claim to have any silver bullets to loneliness. It is a condition that can be attributed to a multitude of factors and varies wildly from person to person. In my case, loneliness stems from a fear that my relationships are fraudulent. In other cases, someone may truly be completely devoid of any genuine, loving relationships in their life.
To those people, I offer the following:
“Howdy, stranger. This is Dylan. I know you don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but I wanted to let you know I was thinking about you all the same. I know I would have a fantastic time getting to know you inside and out: your passions, your fears, what makes you laugh, what makes you cry, et cetera. I know you’re probably thinking that I’m moving a bit fast, and that information like that is something you’d only divulge to your closest friends or family. Well, I’ve got good news for you — I’m also a homo sapien! So, we very well may be cousins or siblings, depending on how far back you’d be willing to go. The last time our family was all together may have been a few thousand centuries back, but there’s no time like the present to get reconnected! Feel free to drop me a line anytime you fancy it. I’ll be here, waiting patiently at the receiver with a non-alcoholic drink in hand — waiting to reminisce, as all good friends do.”
I will be celebrating my birthday with friends this coming weekend. I’ve decided to reach out to friends I haven’t spoken to in a while and invite them to the shindig. I’m extending the invitation to old friends, good friends, new friends, acquaintances, lovers, former lovers, and maybe the Subway engineer on my morning commute — if they show up on time.
I ask all of you to consider each other as family, to resist the temptation of self-imposed isolation — to be lonesome no more.
And if you have a problem with that, why don’t you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooon?
