Only the lonely

A little over a year ago, early in our state’s lockdown, I watched one of my children crumble into a million pieces. They’d held up okay until then. We’d done a lot of family walks, and my kids were still enjoying the novelty of the puppy we’d adopted shortly before Covid became more than a passing mention in the U.S. news. But it was never going to last. “I miss her so much,” said my kid of the friend we’d been talking about. It was almost like I could see every emotional retaining wall break inside them. Being a serious introvert, I hadn’t fully appreciated until that moment what the day-to-day emotional need for friends really meant to my kid. This was not just missing friends, not just needing the regular social interaction that school brought. This was an absolute need, like food, water, and hugs. I should have known better. I read a lot about loneliness while researching walking—because the loss of walkable, connected communities has contributed to epidemics of loneliness in several countries, especially among teens and the elderly—and I talk with people about it a lot, about what regular human interaction really looks like, about what it feels like to experience true connection as opposed to just “not alone,” about the litany of poor health consequences that result from chronic loneliness. And yet, I hadn’t understood that for my own kids, simply having their family and beloved new dog nearby all day wasn’t enough. I knew enough to know better, but I’d missed it. Earlier on in the pandemic, I was wary of bringing up loneliness for fear of it being weaponized by “the cure is worse than the disease” hardliners. But a year later it’s still not being treated as the priority it should be. We now have decades of research on loneliness and its related health consequences. The physical damage of chronic loneliness is comparable to the effects of high blood pressure, obesity, or smoking. John Cacioppo, a lead researcher on this subject for years, wrote in his book Loneliness that “the pain of loneliness is a deeply disruptive hurt.” It can, for example, undermine our ability to take care of our physical health: “Going for a run might feel good when you’re finished, but for most of us, getting out the door in the first place requires an act of willpower. The executive control required for such discipline is compromised by loneliness, and loneliness also tends to lower self-esteem. If you perceive that others see you as worthless, you are more likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors and less likely to take good care of yourself.”  This relationship is a deep part of our evolution, an internal signal that developed to tell us when we’d roamed too far from the tribe—and kept us from acting selfishly within tribal life in the first place. Selfish behavior could lead to ostracism or exile, which in tribal days could be deadly. There was no such thing as rugged individualism; we evolved to need other people because . . . well, we needed other people. “For social behavior, the warmth of connection is the carrot; the pain of feeling isolated, also known as loneliness, is the stick,” wrote Cacioppo. Division, mistrust, hate, and tribalism are certainly part of human nature, he wrote. But so equally, or perhaps more, are cooperation and community. Addressing the oft-quoted Thomas Hobbes line about life being nasty, brutish, and short (which was written at a time that England had experienced civil war, the beheading of a king, and enormous religious strife—realities that had defined all of Hobbes’s own life), Cacioppo wrote that,  “The point which the Hobbesian analysis misses is that, if such ruthlessness were, in fact, the defining essence of human nature, we would have never evolved our way out of the rain forest, much less the grasslands of eastern Africa. . . . The driving force of our advance as a species has not been our tendency to be brutally self-interested, but our ability to be socially cooperative.” What is loneliness, this strange creature, this nebulous beast that can topple us into depression, isolation, and shame? Cacioppo has probably the best descriptions: Loneliness is an evolved response that developed in order to protect us from danger. We needed our tribe in order to survive; feeling lonely was our mind-body’s way of telling us that we were alone or isolated enough to put ourselves at risk. That doesn’t mean we can never be alone. As, again, a serious introvert, I have about the same reaction to lacking time alone as my younger kid does to lacking time with friends. Worse, actually. I don’t just fall apart. I get cranky and short-tempered. I’ve told my spouse regularly for over twenty years that I need time alone as badly as I need sleep. Alone-deprivation and sleep-deprivation feel almost the same to me. But needing time alone is not the same as loneliness. It might take more to get me feeling lonely, or it might take different situations. I left my colleg...