How loneliness creates trauma

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The world has never been safer for the average human than it is today. The average human is less likely to personally encounter war, famine, disease, and violence today than at any point in human history.

And yet, it feels like we’re surviving an epidemic of trauma. I have no idea how you’d even know whether today’s humans are less traumatized, on average, than they were when objectively more traumatic shit was happening to us. And it definitely could be that we’re just much better at recognizing and naming trauma today. But it still makes me wonder why trauma doesn’t seem to be decreasing as precipitously as traumatic events have.

I think the answer may be loneliness.

The spread of liberal democracy and the economic prosperity and innovation it creates has decreased worldwide rates of war, famine, communicable disease, and violence.

However, we’re also seeing an epidemic of loneliness in wealthy liberal democracies. As I wrote last November, loneliness is the biggest problem facing modernity.

Why can liberal democracy and economic prosperity do so much to decrease problems as seemingly intractable as war and famine but can’t seem to help us get close to each other? I don’t know, man. But I do have some suspicions.

I do suspect there are aspects of liberal democracy and economic prosperity that are fundamentally alienating.

People rally around their flag, not their copy of The Wealth of Nations. Part of what makes a religion unifying is the idea that it’s the way the truth, and the light. It doesn’t work as well when it’s a way, a truth, and a light. Interdependence with a small group of geographically close people for survival is unifying in a way that working for a global conglomerate can’t quite replicate. You even see this on a small scale. I read once that people in poorer neighborhoods know and rely on their neighbors more than people in wealthier neighborhoods.

Liberal democracy and economic prosperity are great, don’t get me wrong. They’re probably worth it, even if they do cause atomization.

At the same time, we’re going to be better off if we acknowledge our loneliness problem and work on it.

Which means acknowledging that we’re lonely, first. That’s pretty well-established.

Then I think it’s helpful to consider the possible downstream effects of our loneliness.

I believe trauma may be a downstream effect of atomization.

I’ve been reading a lot about trauma recently.

In Polysecure, the author points to research showing that whether a person is supported before, during, and after an event that could be traumatic is the difference between whether or not they are indeed traumatized by it.

In The Body Keeps the Score, the author writes “As long as their caregivers remain calm and responsive to their needs, [children] often survive terrible incidents without serious psychological scars.” Elsewhere, he writes “Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being.”

It’s interesting to me that we have all this money and manpower going to further reducing war, famine, disease, and violence. Which is great, obviously. But where’s the infrastructure going towards reducing loneliness? Where are the white papers and think tanks and non-profits? Deaths of despair are far more common than deaths due to crime, yet the attention and funding looks like the opposite is true.

It may be that in our quest to become healthier, wealthier, safer, and more free we’ve set up incredibly effective barriers between individuals. What if these barriers have been so successful that the biggest remaining threat to human well-being is that we’re now too isolated from each other? What would the world look like if we recognized how isolated we are and took the challenge of creating community as seriously as I think it warrants?

I don’t know, man. But from mushrooms to masculinity to trauma, it’s a theme I keep coming back to. Maybe this newsletter isn’t about power at all. Maybe it’s all actually about connection.