Splintered Selves: A Look at Loneliness and Loss of Community in the 21st Century

By Alex Lauder

It’s loneliness.

What I’m feeling. What I’ve been feeling.

Not wine-drunk-crying-over-a-boy-after-a-night-out loneliness, nor is it new-city-anonymity-everyone-is-having-fun-but-me loneliness. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve felt those. But I know that is not what this is.

It’s 21st century loneliness. And you’re probably feeling it too.

Oslo airport is huge. 13km of liminal space and tarmac, it connects 26 domestic and 158 international destinations. I’ve always had an affinity for airports. So, my six-hour layover in Oslo was more than welcome. There is no other place you are more simultaneously connected and dislocated than in an airport. Apart from the obligatory Nordic knits and troll ornaments lining duty free, I could have been anywhere, anyone. I stuck to perusing the bookshelves. It was there, in the carefully curated English language section, that I came across Noreena Hertz’s The Lonely Century.

From a $40 an hour Rent-a-Friend service in New York to a nursing home in Japan where residents knit bonnets for their robot caregivers, the book explores one dystopian manifestation of loneliness after another. It asks: how did we end up here?

Informed by over a decade of research, Hertz tells a global story of loneliness, and from it forges a terrifying, if not life-affirming, definition of loneliness for the 21st century. The book outlines how our increasing dependence on technology, radical changes to the workplace and decades of policies that have placed self-interest above the collective good have damaged our communities and made us more isolated than ever before.

The unprecedented scale of this loneliness marks traditional definitions void, and leads Hertz to re-define loneliness in the 21st century as: ‘feeling unsupported and uncared for by our fellow citizens, our employers, our community, our government. It is about feeling disconnected not only from those we are meant to feel intimate with, but also from ourselves. It’s about not only lacking support in social or familial context but feeling politically and economically excluded as well.’

I want to recite every stat, story, and sentence in this book. I’ve told anyone that will listen to me about it. And I actually hate when people recommend books. I’m not a big reader. But fuck that, I’m recommending you this book.

I want you to know about Siato-san. A widowed mother of two, who – after living in financial turmoil, bereft of support – felt so alone that she made the active life choice to be incarcerated in Tochigi prison. She is just one of many elderly Japanese citizens who have made this choice. In Japan, crimes committed by people over the age of 65 have quadrupled in the past two decades, with 70% of this age group reoffending within five years. Her fellow inmates describe prison as an ‘oasis’ with a sense of community fulfilment that is painfully absent outside its walls.

You should also know Rusty. A 40-something blue-collar worker from eastern Tennessee’s McMinn County. He felt betrayed by his democratic party; Obama-era regulations not only saw him loose his industry and income, but with it a sense of belonging and brotherhood. Left feeling unseen and unheard, Rusty and many others across the United States turned to the only person they felt was listening – Trump. And so, a new community was found. Pseudo-religious in form, Trump’s rallies saw multiple generations of family in attendance, with a ‘red cap’ dress code. Songs, chants and applause rendered them seen, heard and in sync with thousands of others.

I want you to know about all the lonely lives in this book. And I want you to think about your own. About how micro interactions – quite literally making small talk with your barista – has quantifiable effects on your happiness levels. About the fact that loneliness is incredibly damaging to your health. It triggers a lingering and cumulative stress response in the body, hampering our immune systems, increasing our risk of heart disease, stroke and dementia, and making us almost 30% more likely to die prematurely.

Think about how you most likely live in a city. One of ‘hostile architecture’ designed to deter everyday interactions; with Airbnb buyers who breed rootless neighbours; and policies of austerity that are actively destroying libraries, public parks, playgrounds, youth clubs, and community centres – the very infrastructure of community. And about how, through all of this, we pacify ourselves, isolated further by our screens. You don’t even need to be on your phone for it to have a measurable effect. Research shows merely having your phone out on the table reduces connection levels, leading to a ‘splintered self’.

This is what I’m feeling. What I’ve been feeling.

Oslo airport is huge.

Simultaneously connected and dislocated, but

No longer confined to the airport, this is now my perpetual state

In an airport this feeling takes sanctuary

Intrinsically rootless, an anonymous passing place – accepted as so

There, there is sense to this feeling, and permission to acknowledge the dizziness of its confliction

But on my street, where my Lego key chain hits my front door every day, where my bed sits up two flights of stairs from the pavement, where my head rests restlessly every night

I feel it here too now

Simultaneously connected and dislocated, but

Here, there is no permission to acknowledge it

Even now, it’s easier to voice in a somewhat juvenile poetic form. My hand wrapped firmly around Hertz’s book – cracked spine, dogeared pages – yet I am still uneasy with its words. Or word. Loneliness.

But this is the problem. We have been underestimating loneliness due to failing definitions, and twice over due to stigma, believing loneliness to suggest a personal failure rather than a consequence of life circumstance or a reflection of our society.

21st century loneliness is not so much about the emotional ache we call loneliness as it is about the fragmentation of community. Here loneliness is synonymous with connection, or the desire for it. This is what Hertz has helped me understand. I know now.

It’s loneliness.

But what is more, it is a yearning for community – in every capacity.

And there’s hope in that.