Considering the World Loneliness Epidemic

For the past while, I’ve been dogged by a real sense of loneliness. I’m still single in middle age, by circumstance rather than choice, and my 14-year-old son has recently started the natural phase of individuation, or pulling away, which has been a huge adjustment for me. After we eat dinner together, he will typically slink into the basement to play video games with his buddies, leaving me to spend quiet evenings on my own. 

While I realize that his wanting to spend more time with friends and less time with me is a totally natural and normal part of growing up, it is still hard not to take it personally or to feel it as a personal rejection. I find myself in the odd situation of needing to be at home with him (he’s still just 14, after all), but feeling very much alone in my own home. Looking around at the coupled people in my suburban neighborhood and workplace--who form the vast majority–I often think to myself, it must just be me. I’m the odd person out.

Little did I know just how wrong I was! 

In May of 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy put out an 85-page advisory describing loneliness as a public health emergency. In his “Letter from the Surgeon General,” he writes about how when he first became the Surgeon General in 2014, he “didn’t view loneliness as a public health concern,” but that that view changed dramatically upon traveling across the country and listening to people’s stories. He discovered that a significant segment of people felt “isolated,” “invisible,” or “insignificant”--in other words, lonely. Equally concerning to him was the correlation he found between loneliness and an increase in health problems; believe it or not, being socially disconnected is just as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes a day!  

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), this epidemic of loneliness doesn’t only affect Americans; it affects “people across all age groups and regions of the world”; it affects people in high-income countries as well as those in low-income countries. Loneliness doesn’t discriminate. Why, then, if loneliness is so common, such a universal human experience, is it still so heavily stigmatized?

In her fascinating, graphic nonfiction book Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (2021), Kristen Radtke writes that “a hallmark of loneliness is shame: since childhood, there are few things more humiliating than being left out. Loneliness implies a flaw in us like no other longing or sadness does. ‘I’m lonely’ translates to ‘I’m unlovable’ or ‘Nobody likes me’” (70). What I admire so much about authors like Radtke and Olivia Laing (author of The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone) is their willingness to dig into and try to understand the dark, “taboo” emotions that so many people experience but cover up for fear of social stigma. If we, as a world, are going to try to remedy social ills such as loneliness and isolation, then the first step needs to be an honest acknowledgment of their existence. Not covering up. Not hiding. Not ignoring. We need to be able to say, “I’m feeling lonely,” without fear of being judged or ostracized.

A discussion of loneliness would be incomplete without a mention of the iconic novel Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, one of my favorite novels of all time. Obsessed with science and playing God, Victor Frankenstein brings an incredible “monster” to life, a creature bigger and stronger than any human being. Upon giving him life, however, he brutally deserts him, horrified at what he has done. This poor, pitiful creature, left to his own devices, struggles to survive in a world that no one helps him to understand. He struggles to find food, to find shelter, and to learn how to communicate on his own. More than anything, the lonely monster craves companionship. 

When he comes across a lovely family in the forest–old man de Lacey, his son Felix, his daughter Agatha, and Felix’s fiancée, Safie–the monster is enchanted and does everything in his power to help this struggling family, performing many good deeds for them without revealing his identity. He begins to believe that if he can only talk to the elder de Lacey, who is blind and wouldn’t be able to see the monster’s hideousness, he might be accepted by them and brought into their family unit. Sadly, it does not work out this way at all. Felix, spying the horrifying “monster” with his father, thinks the worst of him and attacks him, driving him away. 

The monster, devastated by his treatment by humankind and plagued by loneliness, entreats Victor Frankenstein, his creator–or father, in a sense–to take pity on him and create a female monster of his kind to assuage his loneliness. He beseeches him, “What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing.” 

Every time I reread this passage, I feel such pathos, or compassion, for this poor creature who was brought to life and then brutally abandoned, who only wants to find companionship with another of his kind. 

Instead of thinking of lonely individuals as “pathetic,” in the negative sense–in the sense of lack or flaw–we should approach lonely individuals with kindness and compassion. There are many people in our world who could be saved by a friendly hand reaching out to them. 

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