Who is afraid of a h i g h ?

There is a Week Against Loneliness. Loneliness is not new, but that we look at it as a threat to public health is. Also new: the collective fear it instills. That fear says a lot about the times we live in.

There is a Twitter account with over half a million followers that

Find the Faces in Things Twitter account here.
‘Faces in Things’

is called. Once in a while it posts photos of objects – security cameras, buildings, clouds, plants, moving boxes – that have suspiciously human traits.

Skylights become eyes, a half-opened zipper a sullen mouth, the handle of a discarded jerry can turns into a dainty nose.

The photos invariably get thousands of likes, sometimes tens of thousands.

I thought of Faces in Things when I read about a study conducted a decade ago by researchers at Harvard and the University of Chicago on the link between loneliness and anthropomorphism – attributing human characteristics to non-humans.

What turned out: subjects who were lonely – or who, in the name of science, had been made temporarily lonely – were more likely to discern human traits in clocks, battery chargers, air purifiers and pillows than were non-lonely subjects.

They also believed more strongly in the existence of supernatural forces and were more likely to attribute human emotions and intentions to their pets. And in abstract drawings, solitary subjects, more often than their non-solitary counterparts, disclaimed a face.

Those who are lonely, the scientists concluded, see the world
differently.
Who sees a world in which battery chargers have intentions, dogs are like people, and random pencil scratches

can be read as eyes, ears and mouths.

Who sees Faces in Things.

Loneliness: a problem for all of us

“Loneliness,” wrote American sociologist Robert S. Weiss in 1973, “is discussed more by songwriters than by social scientists.

He saw this lack of scientific attention as professional negligence: loneliness, for those who experienced it, was so distressing, disruptive and sad that psychiatrists, psychologists and sociologists should do everything in their power to understand it. Weiss’ book


Read more about Loneliness by Robert S. Weiss on the MIT Press site.
Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation


was intended to help his professional colleagues do just that.

Forty years later, things are very different. All over the world, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists do,
See, for example, this article on the genetics behind loneliness.geneticists
and neuroscientists are researching the prevalence, causes and consequences of loneliness.

On the heels of that scientific interest, a social and cultural fascination with solitude has also emerged, as evidenced by the steady stream of See, for example, this report: The Many Sides of Loneliness (2017).reports, See, for example, this newspaper report, “Who are the 80,000 ‘severely lonely’ Amsterdammers?media reports, See, for example, this book: The Lonely City (2016).books and See, for example, this BBC documentary: The Age of Loneliness (2016).movies devoted to it.

The collective fear of loneliness says a lot about the times we live in

Loneliness is nothing new, of course: God already didn’t like the idea of Adam going through life alone, and we haven’t stopped talking about it since. Thinkers of
Adam Smith
to
Hannah Arendt
have addressed it, there are
novels written about it
and the history of pop music is, indeed, partly a history of loneliness.

(I often think of Sting who, with a mixture of anger, despair and amazement endlessly repeating the two-word chorus of

The Police: So Lonely (1978).So Lonely

repeats).

What is new is the way we look at loneliness – as a public health threat, and therefore, as a problem for all of us. Also new is the collective fear instilled by the phenomenon. That fear says a lot about the times we live in.

Social pain

But first: what is loneliness? It is not the same as social isolation, not the same as being alone, and not the same as isolation. Unlike those more or less objective states, loneliness is a subjective experience – it is “the discrepancy between the social relationships a person would like, and the social relationships

that he or she has.

Unlike isolation, which you can also experience as pleasant, solitude is never pleasant: “it is gnawing rather than ennobling, a chronic distress without redeeming features, ” in the words of Robert S. Weiss.

There is a distinction between social loneliness – the lack of a group to which you belong – and emotional loneliness – the lack of an intimate connection with another.

Loneliness can be caused by circumstances outside yourself, such as a move or the death of a partner, but it can also be related to your emotional and cognitive predisposition. There are people who live solitary lives and rarely feel lonely; you can also have many friends and close family ties, and still be lonely.

For about fifteen years there has been an evolutionary explanation for loneliness

And, and this is important: although when we think of loneliness we often think of the elderly,
it affects all ages
– although the likelihood of loneliness does increase for people

aged 75 and older.

Other “at risk” groups include immigrants, people with health problems, and people with financial problems.

For about fifteen years now, there has been an evolutionary explanation for loneliness, as for quite a few modern plagues.

The idea: humans are social creatures, and our chances of surviving and passing on our genes are greater when we work together. When our ancestors were still wandering in small groups across that eternally recurring savannah, being alone was life-threatening, and so evolution has equipped us with mechanisms that make us perceive a lack of social contact as unpleasant: those who feel lonely try to counteract that feeling by connecting with others, and increase This recent article on Quanta clearly explains the evolutionary theory of loneliness.Thus its chances of survival.

So John T. Cacioppo, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago and one of the pivotal figures in contemporary loneliness studies, compares loneliness to pain or to hunger: a sign that something is wrong, and a spur John T. Cacioppo has written a public book explaining these findings: read more about it here.To do something about it.

Why chronic loneliness is unhealthy

Loneliness can be temporary,
mild or moderate or severe;
it can also be chronic. The latter in particular is
bad news.
It is this severe, long-term variety that we are talking about when we talk about loneliness as a public health threat.

Because for those who are too severely lonely for too long, the condition turns from adaptive to self-destructive. This has psychological consequences – as British writer Olivia Laing aptly describes it in her book The Lonely City , loneliness is something that “comes up cold as ice and clear as glass to surround and swallow you.

But there are also physical consequences: for example, lonely people appear to exercise less and sleep worse than non-lonely people.

Lonely people also have higher blood pressure and a more active stress-response system; their immune system functions less well, they are more likely to suffer from dementia and are more likely
of dying prematurely.
Now correlation is not always the same as causation, but that doesn’t make the findings any less

sad.

Loneliness is as bad for you as smoking and obesity

A meta-analysis of seventy studies on the health effects of loneliness and social isolation concluded two years ago that loneliness is as bad for you as smoking and obesity and should be understood

as a public health issue.

It will be: in addition to scientists, governments, civil society organizations and even
Read here, for example, about a report recently released by Deloitte on the cost of loneliness.international consultants
are working on the subject. Loneliness is the new smoking, the latest disease of affluence, the latest collective enemy that we must all fight together.

‘It is indeed a bit of a hype at the moment,’ said VU professor Theo van Tilburg, who has been researching loneliness for nearly four decades now – and who, incidentally, can only

applaud.

Van Tilburg attributes the discovery of loneliness as a policy issue in part to the accumulating scientific insights

surrounding the phenomenon.

For about a decade now, he says, it has been percolating “that lonely people are not just a little unhappy, but less healthy. So they make greater demands on the health care system, and therefore there is more interest in control and prevention. And then you also had the discovery that someone had been dead for ten years.
That was discovered in Rotterdam.in her home
– that greatly increased awareness, even among administrators.’

And so last summer, Amsterdam appointed a “director” to tackle loneliness in the city
That director was first responsible for fighting obesity in Amsterdam.reduction,
and also led Rotterdam’s “fight against loneliness

Arminius will soon host a debate on “Loneliness, the Rotterdam approach.
proclaimed.

And in the rest of the Netherlands, this year’s ‘Week Against Loneliness’ is experiencing Read more about the Week Against Loneliness here.its eighth edition.

Loneliness makes one lonely

Not that it is an easy struggle. Indeed, loneliness – the severe, chronic variety – tends to be self-sustaining. This is because lonely people see the world differently – and the least sad manifestation of this is the unearthing of faces in things .

Study after study shows that those who feel lonely are also relatively more alert to social threats, more sensitive to
negative social cues,
and more self-centered than those

is not lonely.

It is easy to guess that all of these traits mainly get in the way of making meaningful social contact. Long-term loners, according to John T. Cacioppo, fall into a “defensive posture,” in which they repel rather than attract others, and thus become even more lonely.

Or, in Olivia Laing’s words, “Loneliness encapsulates you and grows around you like a fungus or fur, a protective layer that makes contact impossible, no matter how much you want that contact.

That makes tackling loneliness a difficult task, Van Tilburg said. Attempts by organizations and volunteers to address loneliness “focus primarily on providing contact opportunities. But for lonely people it is precisely not easy

to respond to that.

‘Loneliness grows coat around you, a protective layer that makes contact impossible, no matter how much you want that contact’

Illustrative was the music festival Forever Young, held last summer in Grootebroek: the organizer hoped to bring lonely elderly people out of their isolation. However, the NOS reporter walking around there just couldn’t manage to find a lonely elderly person Watch the NOS report on Forever Young back here.to speak to, And that is not surprising: those who are really lonely are not likely to get on a bus with unknown peers and stroll around a festival terrain mooching.

‘Only people who are not lonely,’ Robert Weiss wrote in 1973, ‘think you can cure loneliness by putting an end to being alone.’

A 2011 meta-study
compared four ways loneliness is typically combated: creating opportunities for social contact, increasing social support, improving social skills and “social cognition” approaches.

The latter method in particular, for example in the form of cognitive behavioral therapy or a course, addresses the subjective nature of loneliness and the way chronically lonely people interpret social situations – and also showed the most promise In this Guardian interview, Cacioppo talks more about the individual approach to loneliness.from the bus.

It sounds logical: loneliness is an individual issue, so the approach should be too. Or, as Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen puts it in his recently published

You can read more about A Philosophy of Loneliness at the University of Chicago Press site.A Philosophy of Loneliness:

‘Loneliness can strike at any time. It is a loneliness for which you yourself must take responsibility. Because at the end of the day, it’s still your loneliness.

Sounds logical, but also a bit lonely.

But are they even with more?

Most Dutch people, surveys show, think that loneliness is
is a growing problem
– and terms such as “loneliness epidemic” and “age of loneliness” pop up regularly in the media. Yet it remains to be seen whether loneliness is actually a bigger problem than, say,

twenty or thirty years ago.

According to Theo van Tilburg, who with the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam has been researching people aged 55 and older for 25 years, although the absolute number of lonely older people has increased – for the simple reason that we are all getting older – the individual probability of becoming lonely remained constant, and for some age groups even decreased slightly.

There are a lot more studies on loneliness among the elderly than among the young, but also among students and schoolchildren, recent American

research,

loneliness had declined rather than

increased.

And according to loneliness figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics, even in the Netherlands the number of severely lonely people in all age groups has remained
remained more or less constant in recent years.
(However, among Dutch people between the ages of 25 and 35, the proportion of “somewhat lonely” grew by a few percent between 2012 and 2015.)

Either way, we tend to overestimate the problem: where most measurements come out at about 4 to 8 percent of “severely lonely” Dutch people, we think the percentage is much higher – viz.

at well over 30 percent.

Therefore, if there is an epidemic of loneliness at all, writes philosopher Lars Svendsen, it plays out primarily in the media – and in our heads. It is the attention that has grown, not necessarily

the phenomenon itself.

Why we think loneliness is on the rise

This growing attention is not surprising. After all, many of the social and technological developments of recent times promise connectedness and freedom, only to in reality throw us mostly back to ourselves – an uncomfortable development that in any case fuels the fear of loneliness.

Go figure: the performance society demands that each one go for her own career first and foremost, and in the meantime draws a trail of burned-out, jaded, and depressed couch potatoes –
all lonely souls
who can no longer keep up with the rest.

The participation society reduces rather than increases mutual solidarity by sending the message that people should first look to themselves and their immediate environment before turning to the state for help.

Many technological advances promise connectedness, but throw us back on ourselves

And while social media connects us more than ever, at the same time it makes it much easier for us to retreat into our own cocoons – Read more about Alone Together on Sherry Turkle’s website.Alone Together, as the widely read book by MIT professor Sherry Turkle described it a few years ago.

We follow, like and retweet Faces in Things, but meanwhile fear losing face-to-face contact with neighbors, cashiers and even friends. And those who are on social media a lot, you often hear, become self-absorbed, mirror the purely positive and social images posted by others, and feel

The Atlantic: Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?
feeling even lonelier.

Research on the link between loneliness and social media use is scarce, and what there is is quite nuanced: people with a good offline social network seem to benefit, people who were already lonely

precisely not.

No matter: no one who has ever spent a Saturday night alone on Facebook, wandering through the enviable social lives of others, will be able to deny the feeling that this connection exists.

The common fight against loneliness

Viewed in this way, the fear of loneliness is perhaps a reflection of a greater fear – fear of the consequences of a pervasive individualization, of a techno-capitalist logic that presents us all with our own reality. Fear, then, of the evaporation of all that binds and the bubbling up of bubbles that isolate us from each other.

You could call it cultural pessimism: the fear of loneliness is the fear of who we are in danger of becoming, or perhaps already are. And the “fight against loneliness” so fanatically proclaimed is thus at the same time a fight for a different kind of society.

‘Together against loneliness.’ That is the tagline of Coalitie Erbij, which organizes the Week Against Loneliness. Those first two words – ‘together against’ – are as telling as ‘loneliness’: after all, there is little as fraternizing as a common enemy, little as good for a sense of belonging, as participation in a collective action.

We fear the evaporation of all that binds and the bubbling up of bubbles that isolate us from each other

And then again, eliminating (severe, chronic) loneliness is something virtually no one can oppose: after all, unlike, say, smoking or too little exercise, it no longer has much to do with freedom of choice or an alternative lifestyle.

Loneliness is the flag under which society can pull together, the threat from which we flee like a herd.

I was once taught by an American sociologist who had been at the forefront of the student protest movement in his younger days. We talked about Occupy, and the accusation that that movement had “done nothing.

Not true, he said: for the people who had participated in it, he said, who had thrown their bodies into battle, slept in the cold, walked in protest marches, it had made all the difference. They had experienced what it means to commit yourself, along with thousands of others, to something – to something bigger than yourself.

Perhaps solitude – not the experience of solitude, but solitude as a symbol – does the same for us. Shivering with fear of the monster called loneliness, we crawled against each other – and that was exactly where we wanted to be.

With thanks to
Annette Spithoven
for leading the way in the world of loneliness studies.

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