A compound with armed guards and an intricate security system seems typical of a prison facility, but apparently billionaires choose to live like this, too. If they don’t spend most of their time in these residences, well, then they get to own another house they don’t call home; as Rebecca Solnit pointed out in her recent piece for the London Review of Books about the evolution of San Francisco, the rich don’t really live anywhere. Those with the means to do so buy up apartments, mansions, sprawling estates, islands; they employ chauffeurs and chefs; they fly private. At a certain income level, isolation scaffolds the everyday infrastructure of a life.
We’re in a loneliness epidemic, says the federal government. The Surgeon General’s report endearingly provides its own definition, citing, “perceived isolation or inadequate meaningful connections, where inadequate refers to the discrepancy or unmet need between an individual’s preferred and actual experience.”
Lack, basically, of a specific, social type. We feel that we’re apart from one another; there is a gap between our desired connections and the connections we actually have. By surrounding this phenomenon with the language of health, so much writing on the subject is in search of a reason for our shared affliction. Presumably, this will lead to a cure—medicine is such an optimistic field to me, with its focus on the future, cause and effect.
I’m not a doctor and I have a hesitancy towards diagnosis as a definitive interpretation. People and their problems are individual. It is obviously very useful, to those treating us, to refer to similar cases and descriptions of symptoms. Loneliness, though, strikes me as fraught: it hinges fundamentally on perception, as the government acknowledges, and it also seems to comprise many different feelings. It’s easy to make a judgment that somebody is alone. It’s less easy to qualify that somebody is lonely, but even then I’m speaking to my own emotions, which generally happen to me on a scale rather than a binary.
But I can still accept that Americans today are frequently withdrawn, left wanting, insecure in their relationships, unsure how to proceed. Just like billionaires, really, though I don’t think that the architects of the current public health crisis are intentionally recreating their own living conditions in the populations they're after. Technology executives want our data in order to sell us more things, in order to make more money; they need our attention, clicks, views, engagement because they have sad fantasies of bunkers and patrols and they want the capital to realize these dreams. We’re a captive audience—they are, at the very least, quite good at creating products that command our time. And in turn our time is, more and more, spent alone.
The phones, then.
I see blame assigned to them all the time. Some of it is compelling, and some of it is less so, but perhaps the reason that I’m intrigued by this line of thinking, this particular diagnosis, is that I’m generally on my phone when I see these arguments.
Access to the internet, and all of its articles and social media platforms and stores and apps, is the defining feature of the smartphone. A simple phone grants you the ability to call your friends and family, which surely enables you to converse more easily and thus connect with people you might not otherwise hear from very often. This is a nice thing. But the chance to get online—it’s right there, in my hand, in your hand—is so convenient and so slippery.
There’s a great financial incentive for companies to get you on the internet as much as possible, so that advertisers can sell as much to you as possible; this is what I mean when I identify tech executives as the creators of the loneliness epidemic. I don’t mean to discount human will. You can, of course, put your phone down. It is just made very difficult to do so. Addictiveness is baked into the apps—algorithmically curated feeds, tailored ads, the endless scroll. We’re being shown what certain engineers believe we’ll look at longer.
The most rigorous research on internet addiction generally concerns social media: Studies on addictiveness and mental health all reveal scary statistics, like a 25% increase in teenage suicide between 2009 and 2017, and increased risks of antisocial behavior and depression and anxiety and sleep disorders. The neuroscience behind engagement focuses on dopamine and its release and reception. Apparently, with consistent social media use, these are fried: Notifications and interactions with your posts trigger too many feel-good hormones, and too much of a good thing can reduce your ability to recognize when something is good.
It’s interesting to read about the neurochemistry; it’s interesting to read a lot of academic studies, which don’t really provide a complete analysis. Reducing feelings to chemicals in the brain is too simple. I can speak for my own emotional experiences on social media, though; articulation can also provide explanation.
To my perception, when people like my posts, I feel affirmed that what I have written is funny, or that I am pretty, or that I am something else that is generally positive. It’s a good feeling in the way that a compliment is a good feeling. Most compliments are more memorable to me but perhaps happen less frequently. I can quite easily tweet something idiotic and receive a notification that five people have liked it, but I can’t really walk into a room and get five people to tell me that they like what I have to say. I don’t know that I share things on social media just to get this kind of assurance, but I’ve also been online consistently since I was fourteen years old. At a certain point this all just became habit.
I do also use social media to communicate with my friends and family; I’ve used it to make new friends. Pictures of my cousins’ children and the vacations that my friends take enable me to keep up with major events, but I recognize that these are just highlights, snapshots of lives that are more capacious than a single post allows. I’ve written before about how we can curate an image of ourselves online. This behavior isn’t always innocuous—you can very easily lie and deceive people through what you share online—but it also isn’t always harmful. I don’t believe that someone who predominantly posts images of their happy young family is always happy with their family, but I also don’t believe that any family is always happy.
This gap between reality and invention (or curation, or whatever you’d like to call the presentation of the world that people compose on social media) is disorienting, especially when you look at it for too long. It’s a lot like desire: a conflict in oneself, a strain towards a life yet to be realized if it can be realized at all. The fear of missing out is commonly referred to, this idea that realizing that other people are having fun makes you anxious about how you are not sharing in this fun. But I think that social media produces a distinct, graver concern—a feeling that there is always something you are lacking. It’s unnatural, after all, to chase to the bottom of a scroll that doesn’t end. It isn’t useful or healthy to be fed constant reminders of lives that you will never have.
All of this might not coalesce to induce loneliness, exactly, but it does lead to some kind of emptiness, an emotion that’s right next door. And it can spur too-conscious assessments of our social landscape and where we fit into them. By engaging socially with people via interactions with their posts, social media collapses what is normal about human contact and connection. A discussion over DM is different from a discussion in person, obviously, but the issue there is one of degree. It means something to see someone’s face and gestures when you’re talking to them, it can lend to a deeper understanding, but you can have an involved, in-depth conversation over text. Engagement as a like or a repost, meanwhile, is notably unlike how we engage in real life, and these encounters feel shallow because they are shallow.
Still, though, we want to interact with our friends. Everyone is on social media; why would you shutter potential networks with everyone you know? But these apps are engineered to keep us looking, and so we keep looking. Our own understanding of reality—how we live in every moment, and how other people live, too—is segmented from what we see on our feeds, which are by design so much more engaging than quotidian doldrums.
It isn’t fulfilling to keep checking a phone, but this is where the idea of dopamine makes sense. There might not be something fascinating there right now, but there could be: In the past there have been shiny notifications, a like from someone you like. Every absence has the potential to be filled. Lacan described a subject disappearing into fantasy during a state of desire; real life falls away. A social life that consists of so many online interactions is going to result in feelings of longing because there is always this nagging, oppressive sense that the internet has just a little more to offer, if you just open your phone once again, or twice, or three times.
What is actually on offer is not totally real, either. If a person isn’t entirely distinct from themselves when they’re manufacturing an online presence, if they don’t disappear totally into fantasy, then they’re still not revealing every part of their self, their life. This is the impossible task in any relationship, of course. There is always a distance between who you are and how other people perceive you. But the short-form nature of social media posts don’t allow for anyone to be known fully, and it’s very lonely to be misinterpreted.
This loss of power—in perception by others, in addiction to a phone—is matched by broader economic and social conditions. Younger generations are used to the idea of shrinking returns. Everything is getting more expensive relative to the wages we earn. The world is growing less inhabitable, too, heating to historic levels day by day. The Surgeon General has an idea of a discrepancy between what we have and what we require; unmet needs are abundant.
These are political problems that require political solutions: tech regulation, namely, but more public spaces and greater investment in teachers and care workers would help, too. I’d advocate for all of that even without the so-called loneliness crisis, though, because they would make living better and easier at a material level.
None of it guarantees an end to isolation. You could live in an environment optimized for human connection and still find yourself emotionally distant from other people. It’s ironic on its face that those with means seem determined to live away from community; so much money is corrosive to empathy, sure, but they still have a much greater ability to find socially connected leisure than most of us. Reportedly they fear the overall collapse of society. This current public health dilemma seems connected to the broader sense, shared by many of my peers, shared apparently by those profiting off my peers, that our conditions will not change for the better.
Originally I was going to write more about the film All of Us Strangers, in which an isolated fortysomething orphan resurrects his parents in his mind, seemingly just to have very ordinary conversations with them. He also falls in love after so many years resisting that kind of deeper connection; grief has left him stagnant.
The film does include some forward motion on the part of the protagonist, but we follow his point of view and he does not progress quickly. In skimming reviews on Letterboxd, I found one that claims the movie lingers in grief because grief does not require growth. I liked this line quite a bit, though art loves a lonely figure. And it should: There’s a lot to be mined from moments in Richard Siken’s Crush, for instance; from the opening scenes in Lost in Translation; from the closing scenes of The Remains of the Day.
Good works move beyond a single major pervasive sentiment, though. I can understand finding the movie to be bogged down in its themes, but maybe I value depictions of grief and loneliness more than most. A lot of writing on the very wealthy has a literary quality to me, in part because billionaires strike me as tragic figures, gaining power as they lose what makes us human. Conversely I think about Annie Ernaux, in her Nobel speech, addressing the power of writing as helping “to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed, and enable beings to reimagine themselves.”
It’s humbling to read and find that the feelings you’ve been stewing in have been felt before, and by others, and that your problems are in fact shared. There are even books out there now that detail the experience of being hooked on your phone. Nobody is alone in that, either. In these representations characters manage to break free of these addictions, and thankfully so; the second half of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This is vastly more invigorating than the first, as it deals in fundamental questions of health and death and family rather than the stasis that comes from scrolling. It enables reimagination.
Two nights before I graduated college my university was holding a gathering for seniors in the library; there were small bites and beer and wine and everyone was entitled to two drinks, which could be redeemed via some sort of wristband and ticket situation. After enough generic white wine my friend and I ran into some other friends, who were determined to venture down into the underground steam tunnels that had been mythologized to us for four years.
We ran around these for a while. They were a cool space in the way that any illicit area is when you're twenty-two years old. After so much time—I wasn't watching the clock—we were joined by a pair who suggested we go skinny dipping in the president’s fountain, a common bucket list item for students.
I don’t remember where we emerged from the tunnels, but I remember walking to the fountain, scanning the area for anyone who would catch us. Finding nobody, we all stripped and went into the water. It was shallower and cooler than expected. We didn’t stay long. After dressing again we walked past the familiar brick-and-marble buildings, down the familiar stretch of grass in front of the library.
In the days after this I felt new and fresh and alive, experiencing something akin to a psychedelic afterglow. I was indiscriminately in love; every face I saw was beautiful, and everyone I encountered had something shiny and interesting about them. Originally I thought I would end the night by returning from the event and eating leftover takeout. I’m sure that this would have been quite nice, but a less compelling narrative. I hadn’t begun college as someone who’d risk swimming naked at midnight, in public, but people change. For a long time I thought that I would never start a substack. I had certain fears, and then one day I decided that even if these worries come to fruition it wouldn't matter very much. You're checking on yourself before anyone else is. Single decisions rarely alter much, but a shift in perspective makes a difference: you can find religion, or leave religion; start drinking; stop drinking; quit your job; move cities; move countries. You can try to swim in a stranger’s fountain and find that the bottom is not so deep that you can’t stand up. You can be somebody new.