Why Is Lonliness?

My three brief guesses.

It seems like almost every month or so, a major news outlet will run a high-profile feature piece that laments the surge in loneliness in American culture. As far as mainstream media dreck is concerned, this genre of society, man articles is not the most deranged or anxious type of thinkpiece you’ll find on a New York Times home page, but they are representative. The authors of these pieces plainly believe that they are doing their job, which is revealing some devastating truth. They’ll contain revelatory and even interesting bits of information, but they all circle around the same analysis: An examination of the symptoms of capitalism while avoiding the underlying problem.

This sort of discussion is pushed down my timeline by the sort of discourse that I have been into, even if I do my best to avoid it—albeit, since I’m writing about it, I am clearly failing. Now, I can tell you what all this loneliness means, or anyway what I think is causing it. The short answer is our Neoliberal Hellscape, but it is important to understand all the offshoots stemming from an economic philosophy and system that not only abhors the idea of a collective good and collective action, but is also actively hostile to any kind of cooperation. Every national illness recedes from there; beneath the thin surface of jingoistic Americana is just a writing mess of individuals making their own choices, for their own reasons, on their own individual behalf. And there is, more broadly, an unspoken bipartisan consensus that holds that allowing millions of citizens to toil under easily preventable suffering is just the pragmatic choice if the alternative involves cutting into the profits of multinationals and billionaires, or just making people think differently about how they fit into the broader collective reality of our national life.

The result is a desperate and deluded optimism that a critical mass of sufficiently responsible individual decisions might make up for the absolute and unconscionable absence of anything like concerted collective action. Everyone is jostled everywhere by the heedless elbows-out rush of variously aggrieved political parties that prioritize riling fear and deflecting blame over solving problems; it is not rampant cannibalistic capitalism that is the issue, of course, but instead, we just need either based patriots or a diverse enough group of technocrats to pull the levers. Nothing about these rationalizations seems to be spoken about in earnest at all. This moment in which we all find ourselves now, not quite together, is a jangle of discordant signifiers.

In the absence of anything more cohesive or more ennobling, if I were to diagnose the extent to which America has become a crueler and meaner place over the last several decades, I would point to three core issues.

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#1: The War on Terror and the Invasion of Iraq

The U.S. military killed over a million people for no reason and we as a society never dealt with this. This violence and hatred and misery has tainted us and poisoned the soul of this country.

It has also provided our population with a moral example of:

• What America stands for.

• The public values we profess.

• What is ultimately rewarded.

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#2: Declining capitalism

There is no longer a fantasy that we have any relationship with anybody else other than one that is relentlessly competitive. We live in an artificially zero-sum world.

This system punishes us for not being selfish and rewards sociopaths and assholes who understand their narrow, short-term self-interest in terms of pure material acquisition.

Incompetent cretins and nepotistic putzes fail upward and fall with a golden parachute.

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#3: Social Media

In our leisure hours, we are subjected to the most advanced gamification of all human communication solely to harvest our data for advertising.

Every relationship is subject to hierarchy. We have to fight for attention to assert our existence with every other person online.

Under this context, there can be no collaboration, there can be no respect, there can be no good faith.

This is where millions of Americans spend most of their time forming relationships with what is happening in the world around us and what to expect from other people we might encounter in real life.

This dynamic sharpens the distinctions that we imagine that exists between us and everybody else, which makes us more tribal and hostile.

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