About This Loneliness Situation

ways I'm thinking of it; what seems to work

The main social problem I find myself thinking about all the time is that people are lonely, that we are living through this “loneliness epidemic” thing. It has been pointed out that this is a weird metaphor, given that epidemics spread socially, but something about it feels right to me. Probably what feels right about it is that the reasons for the loneliness epidemic have spread socially, and parasocially, through new instruments of so-called sociality that many of us are struggling not to be dominated, coerced, or attentionally overwhelmed by.

I call it the main problem only as a manner of speaking, because so many other apparently main problems seem downstream of it. You probably can’t collaborate well on complex issues like climate change without reasonably strong social bonds at various levels of organization. More deeply, it’s hard to care about complex issues or become cognitively adept enough to grasp them if you don’t first have a small group of people to love you and provide a basic holding environment for your development. You can’t do very much if you feel bad all the time, and loneliness tends to feel pretty terrible. Loneliness seems to be our word, our euphemistic and insufficient word, for the hydra-headed absence many of us feel around a richness of social context that for most of history was just the way things were. I’m also calling it the main problem, though, because it seems like one that’s possible to work on.

Loneliness is not aloneness: it’s possible to be lonely with a full social calendar, lonely in a room full of friends, lonely in a romantic relationship. If aloneness were the main problem, and if everyone felt it viscerally as a problem, then the problem would presumably solve itself fairly fast—people would just move toward each other until more of us were inhabiting the same space. But physical proximity is not the problem, though it is of course related to the problem. I live in a house with seven other people, and have a lot of good friends who I see often, and I still experience loneliness with some regularity.

Loneliness may have something to do with the absence of what the Game B folks call coherence, which I’m interpreting as, a foundation of shared meaning and priorities such that communication, understanding, collaboration, and surprise are possible. Coherence is deeper than ideology: it’s more complex and alive, like a collective form of what John Vervaeke calls relevance landscaping. Coherence is not a set of propositional agreements about reality, but a shared sense of what constitutes reality in the first place: what kinds of entities it’s carved up into, what constitutes personhood, what moves are available in the space. I experience coherence with my neighbor not just by agreeing that the river is higher than it was last year, but by agreeing that the river exists and is worth talking about.

The big risk I see posed by current social media patterns is not exactly that our relevance realization is mistuned (disinformation) but that it establishes competing tunings shared by individuals across vast distances in such a way that local physical space gets downgraded. For instance, I experience much more coherence with the average person in my online meditation community than I do with most of my housemates, which is in part a function of the fact that each of my housemates has their own memetic frequency band to escape into, each with its own sense of what’s important, of what’s good and bad, and perhaps of the ways that those outside the fold are brainwashed and ignorant of what’s really going on in the world.

It seems to be increasingly possible to live in the same space as someone without genuinely sharing experience. And this points pretty closely to what I’d call loneliness. Probably there are some fairly hardcoded evolutionary alarm bells that go off when the people around us don’t recognize basic aspects of our reality, and I think that a lot of people now are hearing the screech of those alarms for much of their waking lives. Peter Limberg has pointed out the significance of the rise of gaslighting, a term for the experience of having one’s basic reality denied, as a marker of our era’s fragmenting reality-space.

There is at least one time-honored general solution to this, which due to various historical accidents has fallen out of use. It’s rooted in ritual, and involves simply creating shared experiences, experiences which up the relevance of particular aspects of reality and serve as a basis of shared relevance realization moving forward. These can be pretty simple, like Let’s all sing songs about the sun now, or, Let’s sit in the same room once a week and talk about how great kindness is. Rituals provide not only shared experience and relevance-tuning, but over time, rich social context itself. They form containers for events, which over time weave themselves into stories. (The inward turn of much American fiction in the last few decades is very much related to the decline of ritual, without which life is less eventful.) Consider how much easier it can be to make a friend, or court a potential partner, when you’re both members of a group that you can gossip about and define yourselves against. Consider the sense of “maintenance” even a very enjoyable friendship can take on outside of that context. (I’m pretty sure the increase in contextless friendships accounts for the rise of the depressing and anti-social term “emotional labor.”)

But this solution begs the question: in order to build or rebuild the kinds of rituals that might solve our loneliness problems, we would seem to need to agree about what’s important enough to build rituals around. And the whole problem was that we don’t. The authorities and institutions, like churches and civil service groups, that for a while performed this reorienting function—not without conflict, not without terrorism, not without absurdity—seem to have almost fully lost their hold in the new information sphere, where the message of the medium is that the responsibility and power of reality- and ritual-shaping can and should belong to the individual, every individual, somehow all at once. Very few of us, myself included, have caught up with the mind-shaping power we’ve been given in the curation of our own private information feeds. For many of us, myself included, most of the rituals we experience are small, brief, and solitary. We call them habits, and a lot of energy is devoted to getting them right.

I don’t know if this is a problem the human race “figures out” at any grand scale. I suspect that grand-scale solutions may not be what’s called for, anyway—but mainly, I don’t know. What I have at the moment are a few rough anti-loneliness heuristics I’ve been learning and thinking through, which I’ll offer now.

Going back to experience

If you can’t connect with people at the level of concepts, or if you suspect concepts are separating you, try getting more basic, more sensory, more warm-data-y. Something I’m learning by hosting meditations at my house is that if you can convince people to sit in a room for half an hour without talking, just being in the room, the group will very likely come out of this stretch of “empty” time with more conversational material than it has time to explore. You will find yourself talking about the ambulance that went by ten minutes ago, or the weave of a rug, or the problem you couldn’t stop thinking about, or the color of a color. This is an argument for spiritual practices as part of a solution to the loneliness problem. But also, this level of conversation is always available. One may worry about sounding stonerish, but in my experience gesturing at the “dumbest” parts of shared experience, in an unscripted and curious way, often allows people to remove their social masks and connect differently. The fear of dumbness is one of the ways salience landscapes preserve themselves, and allowing for some dumbness in communication is often the beginning of a new shared understanding. Besides, the idea that some topics are inherently better or more interesting than others is stultifying and deserves to be murdered. Talking is what’s interesting, not topics.

Dropping what one knows is true

Although we can’t control the realities other people perceive, we do have a surprising amount of choice about the frames we choose to take on at any given moment. One solution to mimetic rivalry or “talking past each other” is just to drop your end of the rivalry and temporarily take on the other person’s worldview—a move Ngakpa Chogyam Rinpoche calls “giving up territory.” This might require first understanding the other person’s view better than you thought you did, a project which could itself lead to a different kind of conversation. No view can ever be completely false (at least if you accept nondualism as true), so you will at least see something differently than you have before.

Finding the others

The above two heuristics are cool and good, let me now play the “no view is completely false” idea by contradicting them. The unfortunate reality does often seem to be that many people, perhaps most (?), do not consciously or reflectively attach a very high value to things like community or friendship, and/or are not particularly interested in doing the thinking and planning and participating required to reconstitute a less lonely life. Some knowledge of history may be required to think present circumstances are unusual, for example. And I mean, most people don’t seem to genuinely like other people that much. That’s okay, there are lots of ways to spend one’s time. But also, these people are brainwashed and ignorant of what’s really going on in the world. If you really want more than a set of free-floating friendships, and you’re consistently not finding that, you may be better served by changing tact: looking for the people who also find community and coherence centrally important and are actively trying to make more of them, and finding ways to be near them. The best environments may be those that subtly turn off or exclude people who aren’t really interested in participating or who are just surfing for cultural capital. They may not advertise, they may not seem excessively cool, but the people will laugh easily and ask curious questions, and you’ll leave the thing wondering why you feel so good.

Loneliness is a symptom of delayed gratification

I recently went on a retreat where I did a fair amount of structured eye-gazing, something I’d never tried before. It was astonishingly intense, more mind-altering than many psychedelic trips I’ve taken. I experienced joy, confusion, love, and absolute terror; the person’s face would seem like my face, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then the face of an ancient statue—and then we would switch partners and it would all unfold again in a completely new and novel combination. What eye-gazing drove home for me, better than anything else could have, was the way in which I habitually delay and attenuate deep connection with others, out of a fairly confused sense that it’s something I have to work toward and will achieve later, once I’ve done all the right things. Eye-gazing short-circuited this so effectively because it was extremely obvious that the thing I was looking for was now happening, that I was now experiencing “it,” despite not having done anything in particular to deserve it—so my typical justification for avoidance folded in on itself. I feel like I still haven’t fully integrated this learning; it feels massive. But maybe the takeaway I’d pull out is that “solving” the loneliness epidemic may require, at various levels, dropping the idea that togetherness is this big, mysterious, inaccessible Eden we have to claw our way back into through complicated social-engineering schemes. Maybe it’s more about eye contact. This brings me to my final point.

Starting anything is easier than starting a community

I used to daydream about starting a community, to solve the loneliness problem I saw in myself and others. I recently realized this was a self-defeatingly high bar, at least for me. Building a community sounds hard and like a huge personal responsibility, and somehow never gets around to happening. Much easier just to find a few things I want to do, or better, already do, invite a few people to do them with me, and try to bake in consistency. The world is not exactly starving for people who want to slide into the center of a handcrafted social scene where they make the rules. The world is however starving for thoughtful invitations to activities that are enjoyable and good for the soul, and which the inviter is willing to host despite having had a stressful week.

So for now I am trying that.