On loneliness -- a NYT story

My thoughts on a story about loneliness we never get around to talking about as apes deeply interconnected to all other living beings.

an excerpt

If the loneliness “epidemic” today feels uniquely profound, Klinenberg believes, it is only because the current dislocation is occurring at an unprecedented scale. “We’re the first people in the history of the earth to see the conditions of social life change in this way,” he says. “And they’ve changed dramatically.” Political dysfunction, global warming, a waterfall of mental health crises — and on top of it all, a transformation, in the internet, in the way we communicate.

The easiest way to respond to these dislocations, and to try to account for the loneliness they elicit, is to wish them away — to try to jam the genie back in the bottle. Weissbourd calls it a “palpable nostalgia for old modes of closeness,” and it’s everywhere in the responses to his and Batanova’s follow-up survey, from earlier this year, in which subjects were asked if Americans today are lonelier than they were in decades past and if so, why. “Previous generations,” one respondent writes, “weren’t as self-centered and helped each other more.” Another speaks of a time when individuals “lived in closer proximity” and “relied on family members to a greater extent.” “It took a community,” a third says, “to survive.”