September 19, 2024
Tackling the loneliness epidemic
I’m having incredibly mixed feelings about this New York Times article on the loneliness epidemic—how bad it was even before the Covid pandemic, how much worse it’s gotten, what the societal roots of the very concept of loneliness even are. And I know it’s not a single writer’s position to solve this, or prescribe the solutions. It’s not what he set out to do and it’s not his responsibility.
It’s a good read and that made it bother me all the more that it ended in a way that felt glib and callous.
Squint, and you can see it: a scenario in which the loneliness crisis today is really a mass period of acclimatization. It’s a bridge, an evolutionary step, during which we make our peace with certain trade-offs and realities — that in 2024, we’re not all going to race to rejoin the local grange. That we’re not all going back to church or temple or the mosque. That our kids may grow up far from their grandparents and aunts and uncles — far from the towns where we were raised. That the workplace will remain diffuse, tethered by Zoom meetings and the occasional in-person happy hour. That we may often see friends more on FaceTime than we do in real life. And most important, that despite it all, we’ll find one another again.
And sure, true enough, we aren’t going to go back to the way things worked in the 19th century or even the 1980’s. That’s not realistic and it’s probably not happening.
But the thing is I’m just not really in a place where I can accept “This is just going to suck until we get used to it.”
It’s hard for me to fathom looking at what the protective factors against loneliness of earlier years might have been, to identify those things outright, to look at how fundamentally bad for so many people reliance on virtual and online interaction is, and then effectively say “We can’t seriously consider reviving some older varieties of community or social activity, though!”
Nothing to see there.
When actually, we have choices. I know that the way the world is now makes everything harder.
But how do we think the world changes?
I know we’re all busy, I know we’re all tired, but what that doesn’t mean is “helpless to make choices about how we have relationships and the kinds of communities we build.”
If you specifically miss having a church community, for instance… can you consider going?
They do still exist. I won’t pretend that we’re all going to run back to church or temple or mosque at the rates that we used to attend, or that that’s the right choice for everyone, but if that is specifically the kind of community you’re missing… they are still there.
Can you write somebody a letter or postcard? (Mail is cool but I know not everyone can write by hand! A good friend of mine who moved away in the pandemic and I trade “letters” by Facebook messenger like it’s 1996 when this is what teenagers were using e-mail for.)
Can you make a coffee date with a friend? Honest to goodness, stop saying “we should get coffee sometime!” and then not doing it, and assuming that the expression of the abstract intention is good enough?
Can you make a date and call someone on the phone? I know, I hate the phone, too! But I started making plans again to talk to friends on the fucking phone again, once in a blue moon. I knew things were bad when I started thinking one night “You know what, I think things felt better when I used to occasionally talk to someone on the phone for two hours, and I can’t remember the last time I did that, and I don’t know why we stopped.”
Yes, I have shitty auditory processing, and yes I get hand cramps, and it still helps, it really does, if the alternative is just not talking to someone you miss and not knowing what’s going on in their life for years.
No, none of it is a panacea. None of it’s magic. All of it helps.
And part of what turns these things into fixtures of our lives again is just continuing to do them.
Yeah, we live in a world now that makes things harder, but part of making them easier again is just habit.
Social structures don’t rebuild themselves out of nowhere and no effort by us.
And I have seen a lot of vitriol out there from people who’d rather we all still be living in lockdown, who accuse those of us who aren’t or can’t be, of feeling entitled to frivolous entertainment despite the dangers…but it also feels to me like the pandemic made a lot of us forget certain things were or are even possible, because they were literally forbidden for such a substantial amount of time, and heavily tabooed for even longer.
And now a lot of people are left looking around, feeling lost and unable to even imagine how to alleviate their loneliness, and there is also a very substantial danger in that.
It’s true, we’re not going to reconstitute American society the way it was 50 years ago. And we also aren’t helpless to identify the things and the kinds of interactions that we’re missing and figure out ways to add those things back into our lives.
To say “Hey, why don’t we do this anymore?” And… do it.
Yes, new ways of togetherness are probably going to emerge. But there are also things that there just isn’t really a substitute for. I go to a lot of concerts. I’ve had deeply meaningful experiences in crowds of thousands of people. It’s not a substitute for having people actively involved in your life on a regular basis. I treasure my online friends and the unique intimacy of some of our conversations. It isn’t a substitute for spending time with friends in person.
And I think whatever newer forms of togetherness emerge are going to be better if we don’t accept our current loneliness as something inevitable or just a stage that has something waiting for us on the other side we don’t have to build ourselves.
Chavisory's Notebook 