Some thoughts on loneliness

From fall 2014-early winter 2017, I spent a large proportion my life alone. I was living in Virginia, far away from my friends and family. My commute to work was 90 minutes one way (on a good day). To cope with the brutality of my commute, I worked from home two days a week. My sweet partner had obligations that led to frequent, prolonged travel, which meant that for weeks at a time, my interactions with other human beings would be limited to the three days I spent in the office, and the interactions I had via phone and social media. It wasn't unusual for me to spend four or five days at a stretch without having any human interaction at all, outside of the phone. And while I tried to find friends in my area, via MeetUp and other social networks and even tried going to a Unitarian church, none of it ever stuck.

As a result, I was chronically, deeply lonely. A kind of loneliness that can't really be understood, unless experienced. A grey, emptiness that shadowed everything. Even when things improved - when my partner returned, when my friends or family would come to visit - the pleasure and the nourishment from these interactions was undercut by an understanding that it would end, and I would again wake up in an empty house, in an empty neighborhood, hours away from anyone who knew or cared about me.

If it sounds depressing, that's because it was. It's difficult to define what constitutes loneliness in order to study it - is it complete and total isolation? What if the isolation is by choice rather than by circumstance? These questions have been best studied among gerontologists, who examine the impact of isolation and loneliness on the elderly.  The main takeaway from the large number of studies on this topic is that loneliness is akin to smoking, in terms of the severity of the health impacts it brings: studies have consistently found increased risk for cardiovascular disease, accident, stroke, inflammation, cognitive decline, depression, and (somewhat intuitively) suicide. Essentially, loneliness and isolation seems to act like a kind of chronic wasting disease - slowly chipping away at the heart, the brain, and the very cells of the body.

It's not just an individual concern either. Salon published an article recently assessing the disease of loneliness that is plaguing America, and how these deficiencies in love, belonging, and community subsequently are undercutting our health, our neighborhoods, our cities, and our nations. It's a beautiful article and I encourage everyone to take a read through it. Though there are many cultural and personal reasons for loneliness (a culture that values individualism, the development of technologies that reduce need for human interaction, the hectic, overscheduled life that many of us lead), the outputs are universally negative: increased suicide, disease, and drug and alcohol abuse. A disconnect from our neighborhoods and a reduction in empathy and understanding, which is reflected in the passage of public policies designed to support individuals, rather than communities.

The answers to these challenges are seemingly in the reversal of their negative:

• to balance out rugged individualism with doses of communitarianism - promoting values that benefit the whole, rather than simply the part 
• to reduce utilization of technologies as a replacement for human interaction (whilst still relying on them to maintain connections where physical interaction isn't possible)
• to reduce structured time and increase availability for connection (sort of a counterintuitive, honestly, when thinking about loneliness)
• to purposefully connect with our neighbors and communities 

However, to prescribe so simplistically seems to be part of the problem. If it were this simple, we'd all be doing it. It isn't. I want to go into depth with these concepts and discuss them more at length. I actually believe that loneliness is but a symptom of a host of underlying factors playing out in society right now. To make it less like a novel and more like a blog, I'll just do one concept per post. Also - I don't have all the answers and am still struggling with all of these pieces myself, so grains of non-prescriptive salt are strong. This is more for me than for you, dear reader (you two cute bots from Asia).