Loneliness: Another Epidemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed structural deficiencies of American capitalism: corporations run solely for the benefit of CEOs and investors; workers without paid leave; a healthcare system with inadequate personal protection equipment for MDs and nurses. Social distancing to reduce the number of Covid-19 cases exposed that individualism caused a different epidemic — loneliness.

The 2000 U.S. census uncovered that one out of every four households consists of only one person. Roughly twenty percent of Americans feel so isolated from others that loneliness is a major source of unhappiness in their lives,^[1] irrespective of race or gender.[2] Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States from 2014 to 2017, reports that “loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with obesity, [as well as with] a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety.”[3]

Loneliness, the desolate, empty feeling of being deprived of human companionship, is an inescapable consequence of individualism. Alexis de Tocqueville was the first person to use the word “individualism” and reports “that word ‘individualism,’ which we coined for our own requirements, was unknown to our ancestors, for the good reason that in their days every individual necessarily belonged to a group and no one could regard himself as an isolated unit.”^[4] When a person thinks of himself as an isolated unit, “there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart;”[5] solitude for most of us means loneliness.

Our highly competitive society also breeds loneliness. In school, through competitive sports, academic grading, and the constant vying for popularity with peers, school taught us that a student who fails does not have much value. We saw only two categories of persons — winners and losers. Since each of us desired to be loved, we wanted to be a winner or associated with a winner. Under such circumstances, friendships could not last, if we exposed our weaknesses and defi­ciencies. Consequently, we learned to hide behind masks. To escape from the fear of failure, rejection, and loneliness, we never revealed our true selves to others.

In the workplace, “the isolated individual has to fight with other individuals of the same group, has to surpass them and, frequently, thrust them aside,” according to psychoanalyst Karen Horney. “The advantage of the one is frequently the disadvantage of the other.” [6] The situation where everyone is a real or potential competitor of everyone else creates a diffuse, hostile tension between individuals, as is clearly apparent among members of the same occupational group, regardless of the disguised attempts to camouflage envy and hatred by politeness.

When a friend and I compete for the same prize, his success makes me sad and depressed, and I ask, “Why do I seem to secretly hate my friends?” Writer Gore Vidal said publicly what many of us feel privately: “Whenever a friend succeeds a little something in me dies.”[7] In the twisted world of individual competitive success, the desire to be a winner leads to envy and to the hope that “friends” and strangers alike will fail, that everyone will fail but me.  

In everyday life, we Americans exhibit a profound disconnection from our fellow citizens. We Americans move away from our families, do not know our neighbors, and get accustomed to walking down the same crowded streets every day without looking anyone in the eye. We are careful not to invade another’s personal space. If a stranger in a fast food restaurant asked us to share a booth, we would immediately perceive him as a threat or perhaps as mentally unbalanced; we are perfectly happy to sit alone in a swivel chair facing a blank wall. Except for elevators, buses, and trains that force us into close physical proximity, we have little physical contact with others. Most of us are repulsed by a documentary that shows Africans eating rice from the same bowl with their hands or by the thought of many Chinese huddled closely in the same bed. We are disgusted by accounts of how South Sea Islanders like to share half-chewed betel nuts. We would probably throw up if we saw the pitcher and the catcher of the New York Yankees exchange wads of chewed tobacco.

No matter where we are, even when in a familiar group, we Americans always feel a vague sense of estrangement and loneliness. Many popular songs express the aching pain and empty feeling of social isolation. “The more people around, the more you feel alone,”^[8] Bob Dylan agonizes. “All the lonely people, where do they call come from?”^[9] The Beatles ask. In 2008, with the financial markets near collapse, Dutch photographer Reinier Gerritsen went down in the New York City subway system to capture the mood of commuters.^[10] He found subjects often filled with sadness and despair. Almost no one was smiling.

The most frequent callers to suicide hotlines are not suicidal but lonely, desperately wanting someone to talk to. The loneliness indus­try with its singles bars, dance clubs, and online dating services caters to those who feel isolated or abandoned. Suzanne Gordon, the author of Lonely in America, observes, “When people are desperate for companionship, they will do things they would not ordinarily do, go places they would not ordinarily go, and listen to promises that they would otherwise find ridiculous.”^[11]

The lonely often experience feelings of worthlessness and failure that they cannot publicly admit to in a success-oriented culture. One young executive complains, “I don’t think anybody in the world really cares about me or what happens to me. I get so goddamned lonely. I just want someone to care about me.”^[12] Another young man says, “You want to know what it’s like being single? After a while, you get tired taking night school classes just to meet lonely people. I guess you get bummed out and kind of lonely. I’m getting married soon. It certainly will be a relief.”^[13] But using another person merely to escape from loneliness seldom works out. From years of counseling, psychologist Rollo May points to why many marriages founded on loneliness spawn negative emotions: “Spouses expect the marriage partner to fill some lack, some vacancy within themselves; and they are anxious and angry because he or she doesn’t.”^[14]

One young woman explaining her divorce said, “I felt lonely but couldn’t identify it as loneliness. How could I be lonely married to the love of my life?” The romantic illusions of courtship often disappear after marriage: “By the time we got married, it was like there was no reason to try to impress, entertain, or charm anymore.” Another divorced woman agreed that the thrill of courtship did not carry over into marriage: “When you’re dating, you put more effort into yourself and the other person. Then after you’re comfortable for a while, things start to slip; you’re not quite as nice. At least I’m not.” A recently divorced man confessed, “I was flat out the world’s worst husband. I was inconsiderate, I was selfish, I was utterly self-absorbed.”^[15]

Much promiscuity that on the surface appears to be hedonistic devotion to pleasure is driven by intense loneli­ness. For many people, sex is a way of making human con­tact, of breaking through the barriers of the isolated, autonomous self, if only for a night: “Hence the many heartaches on waking up the next morning. Two people in bed who would probably hate each other under any other circum­stances,” confesses a thirty-two-year-old San Francisco lawyer.^[16]

Much of contemporary American writing is almost wholly concerned with the question of loneliness. Think of the magnificent short stories of Ann Beattie or Raymond Carver, where each person comes into the world alone, travels through life as a separate individual, and ultimately dies alone. Many, if not most, modern writers assume that aloneness is the human tragedy, the condition of all humankind. Novelist Thomas Wolfe understood the intense loneliness of his life as universal: “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people . . . we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.”^[17]

As far as I know, this is unique to modern Western literature. Cer­tainly, the human tragedy in Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles is not aloneness. The Chinese scholars I consulted informed me that in Chinese literature the only kind of loneliness is that which arises when lovers or families are separated. Professor Hsu said that in China “there is absolutely no expression of the idea that aloneness is the essential condition of man.”^[18]

Movies, television shows, songs, and novels convince most of us that romantic love is a remedy for loneliness. We are taught that an intensely felt and all-consuming attraction towards another person is the peak experience of human life; the one unique person destined for us will fill the emptiness we feel. As a young person, I, of course, fell for this pop-culture understanding of love, but then why wouldn’t I have?

Counterfeit Love

In high school, I must have appeared like an exchange student from another planet. My hair was never combed; I sported an Afro years before Afro-Americans introduced the hairdo into mainstream America. My unmatched clothes resulted from gifts from various relatives. In the classroom, my demeanor alternated between brooding silence and impassioned outbursts about tangential topics. Given such weirdness, you would think not one girl would go near me. On the contrary, many girls found me a mystery, the only alternative in our high school to the fair-haired, all-American jock. Girls pursued me, and always in the same way. A girl would let me know through the grapevine that she wanted me to ask her for a date, and I willingly obliged. The only girl I knew in high school who did not work through the grapevine was Rita Willihnganz. She was a year behind me, and I only knew her by name. One day she walked up to me and bluntly asked, “Why don’t you ask me out?” I did, and for years afterward my life was never the same.

I fell head over heels in love with Rita. I found her turned-up nose, her blond, bobbed hair, and her blue eyes divine. She was like no other girl I had met. When Rita looked at me, her innocent face told me that at that moment I was the only person in existence. Her openness said that I had nothing to fear; I could be myself, and no matter what that self was, she would find it marvelous. Her inquiring eyes told me, “You are a mystery that I want to know.”

When the two of us were together, the world orbited around us. Our magical love gave significance to foreign movies, summer stock theater, and restaurants. Without our love, the world would be nothing.

Everything in my life had become perfect. The world was enchanted. At the beach, beads of water hugged the delicate curves of Rita’s body. The bright afternoon sun loved her golden hair. At night, we stood in the moonlight, in front of her house, and kissed goodnight. In the background were silhouettes of trees, and if music had begun to play, I would not have been surprised.

I became one of those mad lovers who are subjects for comedies. I took up the ukulele, and at night as our canoe glided across the still waters of Green Lake, I serenaded my love. I used the boxing lessons that I received as a boy from Mr. O’Neill to defend my love’s honor. The high school boys to show their manliness often made disparaging remarks about all the girls, except Rita. I would go insane if any boy even suggested that Rita might have a blemish. If Rita’s father had forbidden me to see his daughter, I swear I would have kidnapped her, for I could not live without her.

My falling in love was completely predictable, although at the time I had not the slightest idea what was happening to me. In my ignorance, I thought I finally grasped human happiness, for I knew I was in love. The feelings I experienced were overwhelming. Every time I was with Rita or even thought of her, I was swept away on a sea of joyous emotion.

Our love was exclusive; friends, family, and previous interests had to be brought within the sphere of our love or abandoned outside. In practice, little could be incorporated into our love; so, in effect, Rita and I were separated from the rest of humankind, and this made our love all the more wonderful. Since no other person had ever made me feel like this, I knew that Rita was the love of my life, the only person in all human history that I could love, and I was the only person she could love. This was true love; we were fated for each other. On our very first date, I immediately recognized that I had met the person intended for me.

Rita gazed into my eyes, her fingers gently touched the back of my hand, and suddenly the wall between me and another person was broken down. Never before had I felt this oneness with another, and it was the most exhilarating experience of my life. Miraculously, love had healed me; I was no longer isolated, lonely, or empty inside.

I not only believed the myth of romantic love, I lived it; and I lived it more intensely than any fool I’ve known. But how could I know that the love that I experienced was a counterfeit love? Isolated from others, I was profoundly lonely and craved human companionship. Before I met Rita, I felt desolate and at times empty inside and haunted by the fear that I was not lovable. To numb the pain of my sixteen-year-old existence I started to drink my father’s Seagram’s Seven and listen to Billie Holiday records. I didn’t think anybody in the world really cared about me or what happened to me. I knew that I could not force any person to love me, so I passively waited and hoped for some young woman to come along and love me.

I now know that loneliness is the constant companion of every American. The more the self is emphasized the more a person becomes isolated. The more I was cut off from others the more desperately I sought love. As it had for countless others before me, love stepped in as a remedy for my loneliness.

Looking back, I now see that I not only did not love Rita, but I hadn’t a clue about what it meant to love another person. I loved the emotions that Rita produced within me. I loved how she made me feel good about myself. While I thought I loved Rita, in fact, I fulfilled my own emotional needs. Just like an infant, I could not love; I could only be loved. In truth, through Rita, I loved myself.

Despite my illusions of oneness with another, I was still isolated. I suspect that Rita was also isolated and not in love with me. She was in love with romantic love and assigned me to play the part of the romantic lead in the script she imagined. Rita fashioned her script from bits and pieces of mass culture. Unbeknownst to me, she lifted words from Broadway musicals and stole gestures from the movies. Only recently did I discover that the special terms of endearment that she taught me and that we whispered to each other were taken from the musical Fantasticks. Our love was a dual egoism, held together by the exchange of needs: she needed a romantic lead, and I needed emotional comfort. How typical! How pathetic!

I, of course, played my part to the bitter end. After two years of “love,” we broke up, and I was the forsaken lover for years, wallowing in self-pity and melancholy. I believed my life was over, and I would never love again.

Genuine Love

Years later, life, itself, forced me to understand love. Thank God that each day brings new opportunities at getting life right. No one can go back and change his or her upbringing; no one can alter the culture that he or she happens to be born into. But each day is a new beginning, and life itself tries to wake us up. Sometimes, the jolt life gives us is so dramatic that even a sleeping dolt like me awakens from a slumber of ignorance. One of the most profound experiences of my life was witnessing my first daughter’s birth. Suddenly, from nowhere, and right before my eyes, appeared this perfectly formed human being — an absolute miracle. When this miracle of life was placed in my care, I learned how to love.

Not until my three children were born did I see that love is not a strong emotion, not a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. I read to my children every night before the three of them went to bed. Some evenings, I did not feel like reading because I was tired or had work to do. Feelings come and go, but love endures because it is an act of the will. I promised to take care of my three children the best I could, so I read them stories out loud, even when every cell in my body screamed for rest. Love is a commitment to the smallest details of daily living.

Parents and children, obviously, are not equals. My children were to be loved, and I was to love them. In this love that held us together, they received, and I gave. For them love was passive; for me love was active.

What could I give to them? The money, the clothes, the food, and the other material things I gave were the minimal necessities of life, and of not much consequence, as far as I am concerned. What, then, could I give them? I had only one thing to give. My life. Not that I literally sacrificed my life for them. I hoped to give them everything that made me alive: my love of the mountains and the desert; my joy at the beach; my love of cooking and enjoying good food with friends; my love of music; my passion for learning; my quest for wisdom; my striving to be charitable to others. I wanted every physical, intellectual, and spiritual good to become part of their lives. I desired the good for their sake, not mine.

I am sure that my love failed them in many ways. I did not have enough to give, and I often failed to give what I had properly. The two solaces I can take is that all human love is flawed and that throughout life, a person’s capacity to love should constantly develop, although it is never perfected. I hope that I can love better now than I could ten or twenty years ago.

On the surface, it looks like my children did all the receiving and gave back nothing. But the more I gave, the more I received. What did I get back? The three of them taught me about love. They gave me the opportunity to love, and without that, I would have been one of the most miserable persons who ever lived.

Endnotes 

The photograph in the text is “Wheat Field” by Matthew Henry on Unsplash.

[1] See John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: Norton, 2009), p. 5.

[2] “Cigna U.S. Loneliness Index: Survey of 20,000 Americans Examining Behaviors Driving Loneliness in the United States” (2018) https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8294451-cigna-us-loneliness-survey/docs/IndexReport_1524069371598-173525450.pdf.

[3] Vivek H. Murthy, “Work and the Loneliness Epidemic,” Harvard Business Review (Sept. 27, 2017).

^[4] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolu­tion, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1955 [1856]), p. 96.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York: Norton, 1937), p. 284.

[7] Gore Vidal, interview, Sunday Times Magazine (London, 16 Sept. 1973).

[8] Bob Dylan, “Marchin’ to the City”, on the album The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006 Tell Tale Signs.

[9] The Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby” on the album Revolver.

[10] See “Alone Together,” The New York Times Magazine (April 3, 2011), p. 45-47.

[11] Suzanne Gordon, Lonely in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), p. 223.

[12] Quoted by Gordon, p. 84.

[13] Quoted by Gordon, p. 84.

[14] Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself (New York: Norton, 1953), p. 14.

[15] See the interviews of divorcées by Dana Adam Shapiro in Adam Sternbergh, “A Brutally Candid Oral History of Breaking Up,” The New York Times Magazine (March 13, 2011). Available http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/magazine/mag-13Monogmy-t.html?scp=1&sq=brutally%20candid%20oral&st=cse.

[16] Quoted by Gordon, p. 31.

[17] Thomas Wolfe, “God’s Lonely Man” in Thomas Wolfe, The Hills Beyond (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), p. 186.

[18] Francis L. K. Hsu, Americans and Chinese (New York: Schuman, 1953), pp. 83-84.