Atomization & the Loneliness Epidemic

Stepping in the footsteps of Rousseau, the focus on the “inner sentiment,” the awareness and importance of the inner experience, as a guide for our goals steadily increased. With no stable identity embedded in our transcendental, family, and community life, the fragile remains of modern identity have sanctified the inner experience as our highest virtue: …

Is loneliness truly an epidemic?

When most people think of an epidemic, contagious diseases come to mind. But what if one of the biggest epidemics of this time is a cultural one instead of a medical one? I am, of course, talking about the loneliness epidemic. But can you call the spread of loneliness a “true epidemic”? An epidemic is defined as “the rapid spread of disease to a large number of people in a given population.”

Let’s first look at the numbers to see if loneliness is such a big problem. Globally, 24% of people over the age of 15 felt regularly lonely. Additionally, loneliness has become especially a big problem in the Western world, with numbers of social isolation in Southern and Eastern Europe reaching nearly 40% in some countries. Moreover, nearly half of Americans feel alone, left out, or isolated from others. 54% of Americans also suggested that nobody knew them well. 40% also felt that they do not have meaningful relationships and 31% had difficulty making friends.

Now that we have established that loneliness frequently occurs, especially in the West, we should look at the negative effects of loneliness to see if we can truly classify it as a “cultural disease.” Bad news for those who frequently feel socially isolated or lonely, as this has been repeatedly associated with heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, depression, anxiety, addictions, suicidality, self-harming behavior, increased medical costs up to 50%, dementia, and earlier death. Therefore, it could be argued that loneliness can indeed be classified as a “cultural epidemic.”

Luckily, policy makers are waking up to the alarming signs, but sadly, much of the policy changes and money spending has yet had to have a tremendous effect. Therefore, the important question to solve the loneliness epidemic, is to understand why this epidemic started to begin with. This might give us some insight in what we should do to combat it more effectively, instead of throwing solutions at it and seeing what sticks.

The sociological background of the loneliness epidemic

Most of the time, loneliness has been, understandably so, described because of the important sociological changes that happened in the early 20th century.

Before that time, only 5% of Western people consisted of one-person households. Yet, due to urbanization, the decline in birth rates, and the replacement of the extended family by the nuclear family, the rate of one-person households had already almost doubled by 1950. Furthermore, the past half-century has seen an unprecedented social change wherein one-person households have increased to historically high numbers due to increased divorce rates, decreased birth rates, and longer lifespans.

While these sociological shifts have been highly impactful and, therefore, rightfully so, the attention of policymakers, much of the answer has been to either aim to magically undo the sociological shifts of modernity by focusing on increased marriage rates and birth rates or deny their significance altogether.

In that sense, it would be great if social structures could be reinvented to revive social institutions. Still, one crucial fact seems to be forgotten: not only did the sociological compound of society change, but so did the psyche of men in it. Consequently, before sociological changes can be impactful and self-sustaining, a psychological shift in the mindset of modern man is necessary.

With that in mind, we should consider how modernity has changed the Western psyche.

How the age of Reason Has Made loneliness a Cultural Commonality in the West

The modern world is primarily considered the “the Age of Reason.” To give the devil his due, this “rational approach” has, on a positive note, led to accomplishments such as the formalization in the separation of power, food abundance, and a rapidly increasing number of people being lifted out of absolute poverty. On the other hand, experimentation with “anything that is rationally possible” has led countries to embrace totalitarian ideologies like fascism, national socialism, and communism.

This paradox symbolizes many of the psychological struggles of modern man. On the one hand, Western man does have an increasing number of opportunities, both in professional life as well as in the ways of connecting with other people to form social communities, for example, via the internet. Still, on the other, if anything is possible, and everything is reduced to a rational belief based on a set of axioms chosen out of a (near) an infinite number of possible axioms, the individual can get crushed in the lack of stable structure.

We see this happening in the modern world, even in the most benign decisions we must make, such as which soap to buy in the supermarket. With dozens of options all promising the absolute best, how can someone make “the best” decision with limited information and time?

This is just a small example of how absolute rationalization and maximalization do not always benefit individuals’ psychology. With even more important decisions, such as choosing one’s spouse, people can get crushed under the seemingly endless options even more.

But back to the loneliness epidemic, here we find one of the two primary psychological problems leading to a cultural sustaining of loneliness.

The social structures of the past provided both a direction and therefore limited the options to the realm of graspable opportunities as well as provided people with sustaining meaning in the form of family and community.

With modernity decreasing the normative function of social structures in the name of “unlimited freedom,” people have had to come up with their own structures and meaning. While one might argue that for a small group of people, this has worked out alright, for most people, no meaningful sustaining social structure has emerged.

This is understandable, as the previous social structures proved to be reliable, stable, and prosperous over countless generations. To disconnect from this biologically and psychologically hard-wired reality means that one must believe that they, as an individual, have enough wisdom, knowledge, and means to create a whole new society that can outcompete with generations of trial and error.

With these attempts mostly failing, loneliness has taken its place. And when loneliness settles in, and man cannot provide for one of his fundamental needs of connecting to others in family and community, the importance of rationality takes a much darker turn. Some of these paths have been displayed in the (pseudo-) scientific arguments defending the likes of Marxism and Nazism.

As shown, rationality has brought great things to society, but it cannot function as a mere replacement of the deep social needs of mankind. When left unattended, great sorrow is the path that society tends to take.

The post-romantic focus on self-centered empathy: being alone together 

If too much reductionistic rationality is not good, how has the role of emotions and feelings evolved during modernity?

First, let’s distinguish between the two. Emotions are sensations that you feel in your body, such as pain when someone hits you or sweetness when you eat a piece of cake. Feelings, on the other hand, are the psychological interpretation of emotions. So, how do we feel after someone hits us? That depends on how we think about it. We can think that this person is stronger than us and feel fear, or we can think how unjust it is that we get hit and get aggressive.

In modern times, how we look at emotions and feelings has seen unprecedented changes. Due to secularization and a humanist worldview with humanity as the psychological center of the universe, individuals have slowly become more detached from transcendental meaning.

The disconnection from aims bigger than oneself (in particular, from family and community) that followed has forced people to find “modern meaning.” For many reasons, this is doomed to fail, as modern man has focused on his own happiness as his supplement of modern meaning.

Stepping in the footsteps of Rousseau, the focus on the “inner sentiment,” the awareness and importance of the inner experience, as a guide for our goals steadily increased. With no stable identity embedded in our transcendental, family, and community life, the fragile remains of modern identity have sanctified the inner experience as our highest virtue: to feel happy is to be successful.

This conflicts with our hardwired cognition and makes every contradiction or pushback found in the ever-changing self-identity a mortal threat. This makes people less resilient and, moreover, unable to cope with people with different beliefs, identities, or behaviors. This means that one is increasingly unable to deal with other people, as we all, to a lesser or bigger extent, are different from each other.

Therefore, to protect the pursuit of happiness, people have increasingly detached from social life, and surprise, surprise, and loneliness have found themselves once more back into the conversation. Ironically, as social creatures, this contradicts the pursuit of true happiness as this cannot be reduced to constant emotions or feelings of pure happiness.

Moreover, according to evolutionary psychology, human beings are biased towards negative stimuli as these provide crucial information to survive potential threats.

This means that when the inner experience is emphasized too much, it may lead to a stronger experience of negative feelings. Ironically, this makes people even more focused on their own experience, and therefore, a negative feedback loop emerges, which pushes people to isolate themselves from others.

Nowadays, the development of certain technologies, such as social media, has taken advantage of this human proclivity, resulting in people becoming even more stuck into a loop that feeds negative feelings and creates increasingly self-centered people.

This does not only cause social polarization, as we have evidently seen in society, but the negative emotional loop also creates more self-centered people which makes creating meaningful and long-lasting relationships more difficult. No wonder that people have more social media “friends” but less actual friends nowadays.

Self-focus vs. other-focus: how to reconnect people

Now that we have come to the realization that both reason and feelings need to be embedded in a social structure to create connected people, we also have found a fundamental cause of the loneliness epidemic. As always, the devil is in the details, and this is easier said than done.

Let’s look at the overarching psychological phenomenon which regulates the relation between feelings and rationality on the one hand and the ability to connect to others on the other hand: the point on which we focus our attention.

By focusing our mind excessively on that which our reason gives to us or what we emotionally desire, modern man takes away part of its cognitive ability to understand others’ thoughts and feelings from the perspective of the other person.

This has become increasingly difficult for many people as putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is uncomfortable and energy consuming, especially for those that are not used to release their attention from their own thoughts and feelings. You could compare this to a muscle. The less you train it, the more effort it will take you. Thus, if man peruses their own short-term happiness excessively, the discomfort and self-centered focus remains.

This is where the psychological mechanism of focus kicks in. Instead of attempting to put oneself in the shoes of the other (other-focus), self-centered people tend to imagine oneself in the situation of the other (self-focus). You might ask yourself, what is the big deal? The answer might surprise you. Self-focus generally, besides empathy, tends to generate negative thoughts and feelings of distress like experiencing threats and pain.

Other-focus, on the other hand, tends to generate empathy, sympathy, and concern for the other without accompanying negative thoughts and feelings of personal distress. In this context, it makes sense that it is harder for people with a self-focus to connect to others as this may bring a great deal of discomfort for people, especially in the context of conflict, as other-focus-oriented people tend to bond better with others in conflictive situations.

Going back to the loneliness epidemic, we see that between 1979 and 2009, there has been a steep decline in other focused empathy at the same rate as mental health problems and loneliness have increased, especially among adolescents. To demonstrate how far this self-focus has gone, even the most severe forms of self-focus, usually seen in narcissistic personality disorders, have increased during the same period.

How do we fight against the loneliness epidemic?

In short, to truly combat important sociological issues underlying loneliness, such as low marriage and birth rates, we must understand that the sociological state of the past cannot be achieved. At the same time, the psychological focus remains the same.

To re-embed people in social relationships, we must foster a culture in which people can truly connect to others. The modern cultural dominance of unbalanced rational and emotional states outside social structures, therefore, cannot be reversed until we raise people to take a more other-focused approach to life.

It is not only up to policymakers to combat the loneliness epidemic. Every individual can, in the conservative tradition, take responsibility in their own hand to be a little bit less self-centered and stimulate this in your surroundings. That way, we can look upon a connected future full of shared adventures and meaningful relations. A future worth striving for and which we are not alone.

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