Okay, so on Tuesday we talked about loneliness and social media. But now I want to go back to my husband’s original comment: “Loneliness is the endemic disease of our time.” Specifically, I want to explore how loneliness now is different than it’s been in the past.First off, I imagine that there have been lonely people and lonely moments in all times. I don’t want to invalidate this truth, merely turn the spotlight onto the last century or so, when American society has undergone what I’m guessing is a fairly radical shift.
Once upon a time, people didn’t move around as much as they do now. It was normal to spend your whole life in the same town, or if not the same town, then the same region. As a result (and possibly also as a cause), families tended to stick together and consist of many generations and branches. Also as a result, people grew up together and had an easier time staying in touch as adults. If you lived in “Small Town America”, you might know most or even all of the people who lived in your town, at least by sight. Between these geographically close family units and towns (and add in churches to make society even more close-knit), many social needs were met.
What changed? My husband tells me that many families split apart during the Great Depression, when people had to move to find work. This is when the idea of the nuclear family (parents and their children) emerged. More people moved to big cities, in which it is easy to find anonymity (even if you don’t want it). More people began to go away to college, and only some would return to their hometowns afterwards; the rest would go where the jobs and opportunities were, or follow their romantic partners (either back to their hometowns or to where they had a good job). In 1937, 73% of Americans said they were members of a church, as opposed to between 63-65% now. But estimates are that in the past few years, as few as 20% of Americans actually attend church every Sunday (40% is the high end of the range); regular attendance does, of course, provide the strongest community ties.
So this is our new reality. None of my extended family lives in my local area, and as a result I’ve never gotten to know them particularly well. I don’t belong to a church that gives me a social safety net. I live about 60 miles from where I grew up, which is just far enough away to make in-personal social interactions difficult (especially since so many other people have moved away). I live about 40 miles from where I went to college, and many of my college friends moved into the same area, which is one reason I ended up settling here. I hear complaints all the time from people in their 20s and 30s who share how difficult it is for them to meet people and make friends now that they’re out of school (not to mention the dating problem). Plus, at least here in Silicon Valley, it is fashionable (or maybe just reality) that everyone is extremely busy almost all the time, making personal interaction even more challenging due to scheduling difficulties.
Meanwhile, many of my friends live elsewhere: in Southern California, Arizona, Chicago, the Denver area, Arkansas, Texas, Toronto, and even Australia.
Taking all of this into account, it’s not surprising that people might be experiencing a greater sense of isolation, is it?
Into this void, we’ve seen first e-mail, then cell phones with no extra fees for long distance calls, and then social media, internet dating, and Skype emerge. And thank goodness, because I think that we as a society needed something that would make connecting feasible again, that would allow us both to maintain far-flung friendships and to meet new friends. Social media has become as popular as it is because it fills our need for community. Even huddled alone in our separate suburban houses (or city apartments, or the sparsely populated countryside), we can still be a part of something bigger than ourselves.
Of course, for writers (who work alone so much of the time) and people who work from home (an expanding group), possessing some means through which to connect becomes even more critical.
Is loneliness really the endemic disease of our time? We’ve certainly seen a shift to a more isolated social model, but now we’re using technology to try to alleviate this problem. I certainly notice the difference in my day-to-day interactions, if I compare now with five years ago. What about you? How has your life changed?
I’ve certainly seen all of this. I’ve also noticed a change in the way we treat those physically close to us; my parents always knew their neighbors, while I’ve rarely known any of mine. Simple spatial proximity no longer seems like it can form the basis of any kind of relationship — and I’m not sure what lead to that change.
Another thought on the church issue: Mega-churches are a growing phenomenon, and while I don’t have the numbers handy, I’m fairly certain that a considerable fraction of the people who do attend services regularly attend those. The social experience of membership in a 10,000-person organization is very different from the experience of membership in a 50-person organization; it’s more like being at a big university, where you have to find your own groups of friends within that.
Of course, this has pros and cons. The ability to reinvent oneself is also a consequence of this disconnection — in worlds which have much more robust social links, it’s hard to sever existing ones, and even more so it’s hard to forge new ones if one packs up and moves elsewhere. And I do think that this ability has become very fundamental to American self-identity. (Which is now manifesting as a problem in social networks, because the persistence of electronic memory suddenly makes it much harder to eliminate one’s past or disconnect from one’s other personae; we often view this as a privacy issue, but really it’s also an issue of the right to forget one’s past)
There’s also the problem of forging new relationships in a world where you need to do this routinely. Consider the old joke about two 19th-century English gentlemen shipwrecked, trapped on a desert island for twenty years until their rescue. Their rescuers were shocked to discover that neither man had spoken a word in all this time; when asked why, one simply explained, “We hadn’t been introduced.” The rules for how and when you can start to talk to someone, or forge a relationship with them, need to change and evolve to reflect the increased need for doing so in our modern world. Social networks have played a big role in this; I think that a lot of the success of Facebook, Twitter and so on has come from the fact that these are places in which it is acceptable, and even normal, to start speaking to people.
And so, despite all of their problems, I think that social networks have become so successful because our society is suffering from a plague of loneliness, and they help satisfy some of the deep needs which this creates: the ability to persist relationships despite distance and difference in daily lives, the creation of a space in which norms permit the creation of new relationships easily, and the creation of a virtual location in which people can interact with their friends even during their busy, post-industrial workdays.
Although this does bring up the question: Are all societies suffering from this? For example, the nuclear family issue certainly isn’t one in most of the world, but I do suspect that there is still a problem of loneliness. I wonder how much of the problem is an effect of our times, and how much is simply innate in humanity.
I’m not sure if I agree with you that spacial proximity has completely gone out window as a factor in relationships. I know I’ve had friends who I was quite close to while we lived in the same town who I drifted away from once one of us had moved away. I think this is a common experience, and convenience does still matter, even with Facebook and Twitter around.
I do think that’s an interesting juxtapostiion you’re talking about – the give and take of the ability to recreate yourself or start over at the price of a certain amount of isolation and possible loneliness. And of course, different people are going to want differing ratios of reinvention of self vs. connection.
Yes, you’re right. I should have said that proximity is much less of a factor than it used to be, not necessarily enough to create a relationship in and of itself.
I’m still not sure why that’s the case, though. I wish I knew.
Well, I think this is why we’re seeing such a boom in social media. Facebook was a killer app not because people really wanted to click LIKE over and over again. It moved the social experience online, because the real world social experience was unraveling.
Good point. Clicking “Like” isn’t such an inherently great experience. It reminds me of the time when people were campaigning for a “Dislike” button as well. I understand why Facebook didn’t give it to them though — trying to emphasize the positivity that people find attractive.
I enjoyed both Amy’s post and Yoni’s response. It is almost impossible to avoid the thought that our generation is witnessing an extraordinary social transformation, and much of it has to do with lonliness. As an historian, however, I think that we tend to overstate the uniquness of our epoch. For one, intellectuals have always been confident that they were witnessing a social or cultural rapture of some sort (usually anticipating som kind of an apocalypse), or that their times were essentially different from their fathers’. Scores of Greek, British, German, Chinese, Ottoman and Arab intellectuals who lived in the past centuries wrote scores of grim texts about “the human condition”. This way or another, they all touched upon the issue of lonliness, and alienation from other people and even from things (good old Marx took it to the extreme, turning it into a full-fledged economic theory). We- our generation that is- are not that different. We may experience lonliness in different ways (and I’m not sure about that either) but I don’t think we are more or less lonely than our ancestors. There is a new song in Hebrew by a great Israeli pop singer called Danny Sanderson, and one of its lines says: “you are alone, rolling along the way, you are not alone, others are alone with you.” I guess this was always the case, and suspect it would always be. In other words, perhaps lonliness is not the endemic disease of our time, but rather, it’s endemic to our human condition.
I don’t know if I’d say it’s an extraordinary transformation, and perhaps I overstated by even calling it “fairly radical”. You’re right, it’s an easy trap to fall into. Ultimately I think I agree with you that loneliness is part of the state of being human, and its existence is the driving force behind certain trends that are happening now (just as perhaps it’s been a driving force in the past).
I will venture to say, though, that our time does seem to have the uniqueness of the increase of communication channels (whether we’re talking about the telephone, cell phone, internet and everything it now encompasses, etc., not to mention faster and more accessible travel options). So I guess in some ways we are *less* isolated than we’ve been the in the past because of this, as opposed to more. It is my understanding (which may be flawed, in which case please set me right!) that many of the more impactful changes in history have been because of changes in technology, which could be what we’re seeing now. This technology perhaps gives us different ways to deal with or even express a loneliness that has remained the same over the history of the human race.
Perhaps it’s made us aware of types of loneliness which in the past were simply taken for granted. I’m thinking of people living in areas which still have very dense relationship networks, but who in some way are “different,” or simply not in-tune with what that local network wants. Today such a person can meet other similar people through the Net. The availability of new networks may have simply revealed a very deep pool of existing loneliness, which for the first time has a relief.
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There’s a famous book about this, Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. He describes a slow but sure decline in membership in social organizations since the 50s or 60s. Full of tons of graphs. Americans way before the net started losing touch with broad social support groups and focusing on personal friends.
I also have it from a psychiatrist that judging by her patients’ complaints, Silicon Valley specifically is horrible for meeting people and syncing up social lives.
I’m currently reading Putnam’s American Grace, about the changes in religion. Turns out church makes you more active in social organizations in proportion to the number of friends you have in church (your actual religious beliefs don’t matter). BTW the Saddleback megachurch (in OC) is super-focused on getting people together in small groups, usually people who live close together. They use the actual sermon as a feeder into all their social groups. It’s extremely sophisticated, I almost want to play tourist.
Oh, I have all kinds of theories about Silicon Valley. I’m sure only some of them are true. 🙂
That makes a lot of sense that the super churches have a focus on forming smaller groups so that people can have more intimate contact with one another.
Thanks so much for the great resources!
This trend is an automatic outcome of capitalism in its maturing phase. If you isolate people then you can charge them to connect…Subjects (humans) become objects in need of exchange. We’ve become alienated from our social contexts (family, friends etc.) by technology. Try talking to people on the street when they are always on the cell phone.
You can see this a lot on the subway, too. Everyone is busy doing their own thing, and it is considered to be rude to speak to one another.