A Biography of Loneliness summary

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “lonely” dates back to the sixteenth century, and has two meanings: first, meaning sad because of a lack of company, and second, referring to a remote place. But only the second of those meanings was widely used before the nineteenth century. And the related term “loneliness” only started to be widely used around that same time.

This is more than just a change in language: it relates to the birth of a whole new concept.

Loneliness isn’t just experienced by those who are physically cut off from others. It can be experienced even by those who lead active social lives, such as the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath, who experienced it while at college. Her letters and journal entries paint a portrait of someone experiencing chronic loneliness, despite making friends and seeking out romantic relationships. 

Part of the reason it’s so easy to feel alone even in company is the emphasis placed on finding our “soulmate” – the one person with whom we’re meant to spend our lives. Plath’s college journals show that she felt this need keenly, especially as a woman trying to balance societal expectations with her literary ambitions.

Finding a partner can be hard, but losing one is horribly tough – and a common cause of loneliness. Widows and widowers face living in an environment filled with material reminders of their loved one: the objects and clothes that they used every day may spark feelings of nostalgia and hurt.

However, the experience of widowhood or widowerhood is another thing that has changed since our contemporary concept of loneliness has evolved. Two examples – one from before this modern concept, and one from after – show that shift in action. They also show how loss is a kind of equalizer, affecting everyone from monarchs to tradesmen.

Today’s “epidemic” of loneliness doesn’t just affect the old. In fact, a 2018 survey by the UK’s Office for National Statistics found that the age group most likely to report feelings of loneliness was young adults. And among this millennial generation, it’s commonly assumed that social media is responsible. But is social media really the cause of millennial loneliness? Or is it merely a symptom of it?

Certainly, it can play its part, as the contemporary term FOMO – fear of missing out – makes clear. In a 2012 survey, almost three in four young adults reported feeling FOMO, which is frequently a result of seeing other people’s social media posts depicting glamorous lifestyles. More studies support the idea that social media can have a profound effect on our emotions. An experiment conducted by Facebook itself in 2014 showed that the emotions a user observes in posts can affect their own emotions, creating an effect that ripples through vast groups.

It’s no secret that loneliness is a particular problem in old age. According to recent estimates, a surprisingly low 5 to 16 percent of older people say that they are lonely – but that figure increases sharply to 50 percent for those aged 80 or older. Given the well-known fact that the population in Western nations is aging, this is a problem that is likely to worsen over time, and it’s no wonder that the aging population is often called a “ticking time bomb.”

This is a particular problem because, as already mentioned, loneliness is not just an emotional state. Even though it’s highly subjective, it can lead to serious medical consequences. Evidence suggests that loneliness is even an indicator of one’s likelihood of developing dementia.

As the previous blinks have shown, loneliness is not easy to generalize about: it can be experienced by people from all walks of life, at all life stages, and it affects everybody in unique ways. The different cultural expectations of men and women mean that it’s a gendered issue, as well. Consider, for instance, the contrasting connotations of “spinster” and “bachelor” – two profoundly different ways to indicate singlehood.

It’s additionally important to remember that loneliness isn’t experienced purely by the mind: it’s also a physical experience.

The shift from oneliness to loneliness hasn’t happened in isolation from all the other changes that have occurred in the last 200 years or so. Society today, as we have seen, is very differently configured to how it was in the past, and changes to the traditional family unit in particular have gone hand in hand with an increased focus on individualism.

One thinker who inadvertently exerted a huge influence on changing perceptions of loneliness is Charles Darwin. The concept of the survival of the fittest didn’t just change how we thought about biology: it came to have a much broader application to society at large, often referred to as social Darwinism. Social Darwinism maps the principle of evolution onto human life more generally, in fields like economics and politics, and elevates the concept of competition to something fundamental to any form of success.