Mr Lonely Movie

[Nathen Paisley]

Giventhe potential health consequences for those who feel like they have few or no supportive social connections, widespread loneliness poses a major societal challenge. But it underscores a demand for increased outreach and connection on a personal level, too.

There's evidence that lonely individuals have a sort of negativity bias in evaluating social interactions. Lonely people pick up on signs of potential rejection more quickly than do others, perhaps better to avoid it and protect themselves. People who feel lonely need to be aware of this bias so as to override it in seeking out companionship.

Loneliness researcher John Cacioppo argues that just as you can start an exercise regimen to gain strength and improve your health, you can combat loneliness through small moves that build emotional strength and resilience. He has devised techniques for people at particularly high risk for chronic loneliness, such as soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. They may be useful to anyone.

The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:

In certain circumstances, being outside, not fitting in, can be a source of satisfaction, even pleasure. There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure. Sometimes as I walked, roaming under the stanchions of the Williamsburg Bridge or following the East River all the way to the silvery hulk of the U.N., I could forget my sorry self, becoming instead as porous and borderless as the mist, pleasurably adrift on the currents of the city.

It was in the lacuna between self-forgetfulness and self-discovery that Laing found herself drawn to the artists who became her companions in a journey both toward and away from loneliness. There is Edward Hopper with his iconic Nighthawks aglow in eerie jade, of which Laing writes:

There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs.

The diner was a place of refuge, absolutely, but there was no visible entrance, no way to get in or out. There was a cartoonish, ochre-coloured door at the back of the painting, leading perhaps into a grimy kitchen. But from the street, the room was sealed: an urban aquarium, a glass cell.

If I sound adamant it is because I am speaking from personal experience. When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.

The Lonely City is a layered and endlessly rewarding book, among the finest I have ever read. Complement it with Rebecca Solnit on how we find ourselves by getting lost, David Whyte on the transfiguration of aloneness, Alfred Kazin on loneliness and the immigrant experience, and Sara Maitland on how to be alone without being lonely.

Since my dignity or worth is disconnected from any particular feature of myself as an individual, however, my friend can recognise and affirm that worth without acknowledging or engaging my particular needs, specific values and so on. If Setiya is calling it right, then that friend can assuage my loneliness without engaging my individuality.

In addition to developing new needs, I understood myself as having changed in other fundamental respects. While I knew my friends loved me and affirmed my unconditional value, I did not feel upon my return home that they were able to see and affirm my individuality. I was radically changed; in fact, I felt in certain respects totally unrecognisable even to those who knew me best. After Italy, I inhabited a different, more nuanced perspective on the world; beauty, creativity and intellectual growth had become core values of mine; I had become a serious lover of poetry; I understood myself as a burgeoning philosopher. At the time, my closest friends were not able to see and affirm these parts of me, parts of me with which even relative strangers in my college courses were acquainted (though, of course, those acquaintances neither knew me nor were equipped to meet other of my needs which my friends had long met). When I returned home, I no longer felt truly seen by my friends.

Another way to put it is that our social needs go far beyond the impersonal recognition of our unconditional worth as human beings. These needs can be as widespread as a need for reciprocal emotional attachment or as restricted as a need for a certain level of intellectual engagement or creative exchange. But even when the need in question is a restricted or uncommon one, if it is a deep need that requires another person to meet yet goes unmet, we will feel lonely. The fact that we suffer loneliness even when these quite specific needs are unmet shows that understanding and treating this feeling requires attending not just to whether my worth is affirmed, but to whether I am recognised and affirmed in my particularity and whether my particular, even idiosyncratic social needs are met by those around me.

Claims of rising loneliness are often part of a larger narrative about fraying social bonds in America. In this framing, loneliness is seen as one symptom among many of a larger set of problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that between 1999 and 2016, the most recent year for which data are available, suicide rates had increased by almost 30 percent,1 and some states, such as New Hampshire, Vermont, and Utah, saw their rates increase by over 45 percent. Stories about the perpetually-plugged-in-but-socially-disconnected teen draw wide attention.2 Moreover, there is an emerging consensus in the research community that chronic loneliness has a number of negative consequences.3 Some scholars have even recently advanced the argument that it should be a public policy priority.4

The worry that loneliness is on the rise in America routinely surfaces in national media. Vivek Murthy, former U.S. Surgeon General, has argued as much across numerous articles, interviews, and television and radio appearances. For example, in the Harvard Business Review he stated: "Loneliness is a growing health epidemic. We live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization, yet rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s. Additionally, the number of people who report having a close confidante in their lives has been declining over the past few decades."

In a speech across the Atlantic previewing the report of the 2017 Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness, Rachel Reeves MP noted that "[i]n the last few decades loneliness has escalated from personal misfortune into a social epidemic." In part spurred on by that report, British Prime Minister Theresa May considered it so important that she initiated a variety of efforts to better understand and address the problem, including appointing an under secretary to coordinate those efforts across the government (which was often reported as May's appointment of a "Minister of Loneliness").

Despite claims of a new crisis, one can find similar concern with the problem of loneliness going back many decades in bestselling books, major newspapers, magazines, and television programs. The 1950s brought us The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, a bestseller; the 1970s brought us The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point, also a bestseller.5 Our rising concern with loneliness appears to extend even further back in time. Although it is certainly an imperfect measure, Google's Ngram Viewer shows below that the word "loneliness" appeared infrequently in books until the early 19th century, when it steadily increased in relative frequency to the late 1960s, shooting way up until the early 1980s, then declining roughly to levels that prevailed between the 1930s and 1960s. Whatever the status of our actual loneliness, we certainly seem preoccupied with it.

The problem of loneliness is inherently interesting to us at the Social Capital Project. The project has documented the withering of our associational life since the early 1970s. One possible consequence of that deterioration might be the broadening and deepening of Americans' experience of loneliness. But loneliness is not always written about or analyzed rigorously, is sometimes conflated with other important but different concepts, and media reporting about it is often unduly alarmist. This is unfortunate because, as one scholar pointed out, "overstating the problem can make it harder to make sure we are focusing on the people who need help the most."6

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