Mark Manson did a good newsletter this morning (link) on loneliness in modernity, which I’ve covered off on a few times as well: I actually wrote this post right when I was getting divorced three+ years ago, and I once exhorted us to stop ignoring loneliness as a topic. Episode 43 of this podcast I do, with my old Teach for America friend Dave, talked a lot about male loneliness in your mid-30s, and I’ve covered off on that in terms of males getting depressed too.
There are a lot of angles to loneliness, and we should discuss it all more. 3 in 5 Americans report being lonely, and it’s fairly common in “individualism” societies, i.e. Europe. If you’ve ever dabbled in Blue Zones, which I have a little bit, most of the places where people live the longest are focused on building in-person community, as opposed to digital community (common these days, especially around “hustlers”). We’re social animals and we need that, but we seem to sometimes forget that. More on that in a second.
The more interesting point is about the rise of the partisan world and “the fringe” and its ties to loneliness.
Let’s investigate the fringe and loneliness
This is all relatively logical, but from Manson’s newsletter:
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality. [The reasoning] which “seizes you as in a vise” appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon. It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradiction that seems to confirm a man’s identity outside the relationships with others.”
That’s from Hannah Arendt.
Now Manson bangs it together on social media and this above context:
And perhaps this is the real threat of social media: it does not necessarily make us lonelier or angrier or more selfish or more spiteful — it simply enables the lonely and angry and selfish and spiteful to self-organize and be heard like never before. It used to be that if you were a radical Marxist who wished for violent revolution or if you were a quack who thought Bill Gates was implanting microchips in millions of African children, you kinda had to keep that shit to yourself. You’d cause a lot of awkward silences and shifty side-glances until you’d realized you weren’t being invited to kids’ birthday parties anymore.
See also:
The fringe comes about because lonely people find forums, channels, and avenues where they are less lonely — listen to Rabbit Hole podcast on how QAnon scaled — and that amplifies their feeling of connection, even though digital connection is like the saccharine/Diet Soda form of human interaction.
So now the lonely feel less lonely, which is good, and they want to keep going to those channels and avenues and forums, which is good for the people that founded them but maybe not for broader society, and because the fringe believes they are on a quest for truth that’s really a quest for connection, they keep going harder and harder, and those founders don’t regulate anything in the name of the First Amendment or some other reason, and we all circle the drain digitally in some respect.
We often think that “OMG, those people are crazy!” drives the fringe and partisan rhetoric. It’s really just loneliness and lack of connection.
On work, housing, and Amazon
White-collar work right now is obviously very isolated, but even in “normal” times it was isolated, even if we don’t admit it. People sit in cubicles and offices (walls), and they generally interact with just their silo (more walls), with terrifying repercussions if they try to cross silos. It boxes you in. “Open-offices?” Those are trifling jokes and most of us realize that by now. You get fake connection, but you also get about 45% less done.
Housing? Multi-family (apartments) is cool, but as you get older, it’s “gauche” and you “need to buy.” (This is becoming increasingly less of a reality, however.) Even in apartments, where I lived for decades, neighbors don’t talk that much. I had one hallway I lived on where the neighbors were very close, and I have a few friends that live on such hallways, but I wouldn’t call it normative. Once you get to a house, there are fence lines and property boundaries and we concern ourselves with those things. You might wave at neighbors as you walk a dog, or do yard work, and periodically you drink wine with them, but are most neighborhoods super close? Again, not necessarily. There are stats where only 28% of their people know neighbors.
Now throw in Amazon. You want something, it’s ordered, and it comes to your property, your stoop, with your doorbell to see if someone violates that (Ring!). There’s no real incentive to get out there and interact, interplay, connect, bump into people in stores, etc.
All these things scale loneliness. And inside our walls and boxes, we have these phones and laptops that connect us to a broader world that makes us feel less lonely … and we find those who relate to us there, as opposed to in day-to-day reality. And then we wonder why everything gets such partisan, fringe-y, and cringe-y?
