Loneliness is the biggest problem facing modernity
Normally, I’d cancel any optional impending Zoom commitments if I thought I might cry. But this time I went for it. I told my friend at the top that I was very sad. Ostensibly, I was sad about being single and about my Thanksgiving plans. It was the Tuesday or Wednesday before Thanksgiving and my plan was to make porn. Most of the time I’m fine with being single and had been looking forward to the shoot. But sometimes I’m sad about things that don’t normally make me sad.
He couldn’t really be there for me. He tried valiantly, joking around to cheer me up and giving me dating advice. But I didn’t need distraction or direction in that moment. I needed to be held, metaphorically.
***
Loneliness is the biggest problem facing modernity. It's endemic. It's worse for your health than smoking. Lack of civil society and upward mobility in your town best explained voting for Trump in the primaries. And no one talks about it because it's embarrassing.
That above was my response to this tweet:
My friend texted me that he was moved by my tweet. “I struggle with it constantly,” he said. Despite a loving wife and very close friends he often feels alone. “Connection - real connection - is hard to find. And like a thirsty man in a desert, I can never get enough.”
I’ve been lonely most of my life.
Ever since realizing I was lonely and had always been lonely I’ve been obsessed with loneliness. I’m obsessed with how common it is. I’m obsessed with how dangerous it is.
But what fascinates me and frightens me most is the self-reinforcing nature of loneliness. Studies show lonely people come across as more awkward, insecure, and desperate in social situations. It’s the same brain quirk that causes hungry people to eat more junk food and poor people to make worse financial decisions. Scarcity trips up our decision-making. Researchers think our brains severely discount the future when we experience scarcity because for most of human evolution scarcity was an immediate, existential threat. Our genes care about keeping us alive long enough to reproduce. They don’t care about credit card debt.
Acting desperate further alienates people. Unable to escape scarcity mode, many lonely people learn to avoid social situations entirely. Avoiding social situations only gets easier as we get older. Social isolation also hastens dementia, which is itself isolating. Loneliness, then, becomes a death spiral.
Anyway, I could go on at length about the research on loneliness. And I would really like to. Because that’s fun and comfortable for me. But I want to talk about my experience with loneliness.
***
I, like many people, have been spending a lot more time alone since the pandemic hit. Mostly, this has honestly been great for me. It’s helped me see how much of my social time was kind of wasted on surface-level relationships without staying power. I’ve been more selective and deliberate about who I spend time with than at any point in my life. I’ve begun to learn how to enjoy my own company, throw myself into projects, start new hobbies, and work on developing something akin to discipline.
But sometimes I worry I’m spending too much time alone. Before Thanksgiving I was happy with my choice to not go anywhere or see anyone. It was the right thing to do in the middle of a third wave of COVID, and it felt like a relief. I’d just seen that part of my family in October and traveling for Thanksgiving is always a clusterfuck. But occasionally the question would creep into my head: Could spending Thanksgiving alone mark the beginning of a loneliness death spiral?
My friend offering to come over and take pictures of me for my OnlyFans that day mostly allayed my fears of loneliness-induced early onset dementia and gave me something to look forward to. That she brought me home-cooked turkey, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes with gravy, and green bean casserole all made from-scratch and absolutely delicious was an unexpected treat.
But for some reason I was still sad on that Zoom call. So sad that I started crying. I couldn’t help myself. I got off the call and just sobbed.
Normally I’d berate myself for being sad about nothing, for burdening my friend with my sadness, for being foolish enough to hope he’d be there for me in the way I needed him to. I know this because those thoughts did pop up. But this time, they didn’t find any purchase. This time I felt proud of myself for taking a risk by being vulnerable with my friend. I didn’t take it personally that he couldn’t hold me this time. I wasn’t angry with him or with myself.
I realized that, yeah I’m sad about being single. But what I’m really sad about is being lonely. I’m sad that I don’t have a best friend.
Specifically, I realized I didn’t have anyone I felt like I could call and cry on. Now, the truth is I have many people who would have been happy to be there for me in this state. But I didn’t feel comfortable or safe calling any of them. Not because of anything they have ever done or said. But because that’s just too vulnerable to me.
What I wanted in that moment was to have that kind of intimacy with someone. What I felt in that moment was the desire to cultivate that intimacy by practicing being vulnerable.
For so long I’ve thought of myself as radically vulnerable because I put my embarrassing secrets on the internet. But that’s easy for me.
What I realized for the first time is that asking one individual person to be there for me and hold me when I’m deeply sad is a bridge too far for me right now. I don’t know that I’ve ever been able to do that. But I want to. I want to work up the courage to call someone when I’m crying or about to cry and share that emotional space with them. And obviously I want some people in my life to feel safe and comfortable asking me for the same.
Real connection is incredibly difficult to cultivate. It requires asking people for help. It requires believing I’ll be able to reciprocate when the time comes.
I like to live in the studies and the research and the theories about how agglomeration effects, suburbanization, workism, car-dependency, secularization, and the nuclear family ideal conspire to alienate us from each other.
But I think the opportunity to create the kinds of relationships I might be capable of, for me, lies in being vulnerable and taking risks.
And in destroying the suburbs. Who’s with me?
I recognize myself in this piece and I'm pretty clueless about what to do about it. I used to live a life where I had a several overlapping circles of friends and in the past decade, due to a variety of factors, they are almost all gone. Or the friendship has just gone dormant.
And yeah creating new relationships of those kinds are hard; I've never been the most trusting sort and I think that we have a general crisis of mistrust in our wider society.
It seems so strange to me that most of us are experiencing the same problem, to lesser or greater degrees, and that we're all stuck while the solution is each other. I suppose it's no stranger than the rest of this world.
Indeed; something of an enduring theme through much of pop culture at least:
“Only the lonely
Know this feeling ain't right” (Orbison)
And:
“All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?” (The Beatles)
And, something of a personal favourite:
“Seeking only workman's wages, I come looking for a job, but I get no offers.....
Just a come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there”. (Simon & Garfunkel)
Amen to that, brothers, amen to that.
And apropos of which, I happened to read your guest column on the topic over at the Honest Courtesan not long ago – I commend your honesty and that of Maggie: may your tribe increase. :-)
Though my experiences have generally been on that the other side of that fence, of that transaction. But I was often fortunate enough to talk to many of the escorts that I had engaged. And it was something of an enduring theme, it was a common thread running through many of their experiences with their other clients that so many of the latter were rather desperately lonely.
Rather a “funny” business in many ways. And it has its share of pathological aspects, and the experience on the client side can often seem like drinking salt water. But, as I once sort of “jested” with a woman escort agency owner, sex workers are often the unsung heroines – and heroes – of the mental health department. Think her response – ““Mental health, physical health -- and marriage counseling. Escorts do it all” – sort of justified that assessment. :-)