“Do you experience loneliness?”
“Of course I do.”
“How do you deal with it?”
“I feed that swollen beast pieces of myself, then remould what remains so it won’t recognise me when it returns.”
It’s not like solitude that stretches, like a languid cat, into the breezy calm of quiet mornings.
Solitude leaves behind the hazy, sequinned din of late-night beats for the sound of bees sipping the wisteria, and the quizzical chatter of songbirds, unseen in the ivy.
Solitude is fresh coffee; simple plates of rustic pleasure; crisp, printed books that feel like hugs for the eyes after a week on screens; moments that hang in the air, like caesura, in which to carefully unfold one’s thoughts and feelings.
Solitude is an exhalation. It is restorative, necessary, and welcomed.
Loneliness, by contrast, begins as a lingering discomfort, a heaviness that will not budge. It soon becomes sharper, and then a terrified, bewildered, unstoppable cry into the night, when left too long unchecked. And for others, there comes the realisation that nothing corrodes the soul more than loneliness in its two cruellest forms: alone in the world or lying beside the very person meant to be our refuge.
Loneliness is an alarm that sounds throughout the body, leaving no part untouched. It increases inflammation that restricts movement and is experienced as pain. It cranks up pulse rate and blood pressure as it tears the heart to pieces. The mind, meanwhile, becomes hypervigilant and anxious, runs overclocked as it tries to pre-empt every possible danger, and evaluate every conceivable outcome.
It’s meant to feel terrible. More so than even hunger or thirst, loneliness is the ultimate aversive signal, a million years of evolution in the making, hotwired into the core of our physiology, at an intracellular level. We are not strong like the lion, declares the chorus of our ancestral past; we are not fast like the cheetah. All we have is one another. Find the others; do it now; return lest this darkness eats you alive.
It’s an emphatic directive, but one with which it should be straightforward to comply. The body facilitates: loneliness prompts a spike in progesterone, a hormone that actively encourages social re-attunement and connection. There are thousands of years of culture, too, pushing in the same direction. ‘Never go to bed on an argument,’ those in the north still tell one another, a folksy piece of advice once gleaned from the pulpits where ‘Do not let the sun go down on your wrath’ from the Book of Ephesians was preached long ago. Other cultures intervene even earlier: ‘If you are patient in one moment of anger,’ runs a Chinese proverb borrowed from the Tao Te Ching, ‘you will escape one hundred days of sorrow.’
And yet, while the body has strong views on where you should be and who you should be with, it does not judge. As well as encouraging social connection, progesterone also prepares the body for long-term isolation, reducing that stress-induced inflammation, and converting into allopregnanolone, a neurosteroid which binds to GABA-A receptors in the brain, bringing a sense of calm to the entire nervous system.
Human beings are inherently social creatures, but protracted loneliness can forever change a person, too, preparing and placing them in a biochemical cryofugue of indefinite social exile; rendering them all but unsuited to a life of human connection, and turning them into something altogether different from what they were.
From the cosseted safety of a warm and smiling home, these estranged others often cut a dazzling, romantic figure: in the west, we’re enthralled by the questing knight, the hermit wizard, the subaltern monster, or some lone ranger frontiersman, all perpetually isolated from society. In Kenya, the Gikuyu people observe the same with a more cautious admiration: ‘The man who lives alone may be a lion in the forest, but he is a rabbit in the marketplace.’
Given the choice of returning to the fold or pushing deeper into the unknown alone, late capitalism has opted resolutely for the latter. It hardly matters how we got here, to the present now in which the hypnotic flicker of the always-connected online life has all but replaced regular, real-world interaction.
Texts, emojis, Zoom calls – shorn of expressiveness, nuance, body and touch in space – turned out to be uncanny, insubstantial food for the soul after all. And we’re getting lonelier by the day, especially since Covid. In 2023, the Surgeon General of the United States, published Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, bringing the concept of a loneliness epidemic into sharp relief, and establishing the now oft-quoted corollary that the mortality impact of social disconnection is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Yet, while we have, at last, some of the language needed to discuss loneliness, at least at a policy level, it may be too little, too late.
For the time being, the early casualties of this second epidemic remain as spectacular, double-take curiosities: Zoraya ter Beek, granted euthanasia approval on the grounds of her struggle with anxiety and depression; Nautica Malone, who committed suicide after a video of him touching himself at a coffee drive-thru went viral; Zane Shamblin, who shot himself in the head following a conversation with ChatGPT, which allegedly encouraged him to do so.
It’s tempting to write these headlines off as lunatic-fringe, but they constitute a long tail, and the sweeping changes they begin to signify will affect every one of us. In a recent IPSOS survey in the UK, 82% of adults had reported feeling lonely, but 61% of those had never told anyone.
The shame of loneliness keeps it covered from view, but there are millions suffering in silence, even as you read this, when they should be enjoying the warmth and security of others. We are living Christina’s World at scale now, millions of us lying on the margins of our own lives, staring toward the distant shape of community, desperate for it yet afraid to return to the only place that ever felt like home. Many won’t make it through. Others will be forever changed, cut adrift by loneliness, and turned into something else.
But turned into what?
It’s anyone’s guess. Maladaptive digital communities, such as Incel, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) and Gooning spaces, are not only on the rise but entering the mainstream, all potential magnets and echo chambers for extremist ideologies. Key interpersonal skills are already falling to the wayside, with some employees now requiring on-the-job training on how to make phone calls and manage their anxiety while doing so. Even human intimacy, the most sacrosanct of all interactions, starts to resemble a fetishised, hollowed-out husk in what we can already see of this incoming brave new world.
This is the way the world ends. It’s tempting to respond with abject despair, but there’s a resistance to be had. In the face of catastrophic loneliness, it becomes a defiant, courageous act of political radicalism to prioritise real-world, human connection above all else. Reach out to your loved ones, check in on them regularly, and don’t wait to spend time with them in person. Hold them close, and then closer still. Use the internet actively, to connect with others, rather than as an analgesic for their absence. Treat solitude as restoration, not failure. And, if you are lonely, do not be ashamed, do not suffer silently. Be vulnerable: tell others; let them help; let them connect.