The Lonely Hunter, page 2
That evening started a ripple effect in my life, one that would tow me along on its undercurrents all the way back to dating, even back to falling in love; as a result of that dinner, I began to steer the next year of my life out of where it had run aground on the shoals. And when I reached the open waters, it became evident that my situation was indicative of something much more expansive.
One single woman at a dinner party full of couples might feel like a misfit, but if we pull back further, the balance between my circumstance and those of my relationship-blessed friends shifted. Earlier that same year, Rebecca Traister published her opus on the rise of single women and their influence on humankind, All the Single Ladies. One of the key points of the book is that in 2009, for perhaps the first time ever in the history of the United States there were more unmarried women than married, as much as it might have felt otherwise to me. There was nothing so unusual about my being single at all.
Singleness, as any peppy self-help book will tell you, does not equate to loneliness. Yet they’re words often used synonymously. In an editorial for The Washington Post, author Bella DePaulo, who has written a number of books on the bias against single people, pointed out that this conflation promotes this bias, painting singles as isolated and even self-centered. If you think of “single” as synonymous with “lonely,” it assigns negativity to a single person, or a negative value to being single. But it’s unlikely every single person thinks of themselves as lonely, or that loneliness doesn’t find its way into relationships.
Another reason people conflate the two terms may be because finding a partner is still considered the antidote to not only singleness but loneliness. We’re considered somehow incomplete, missing that special something, the final piece to fulfillment as long as we’re outside of a relationship. How could loneliness plague someone who is satisfied by romantic love?
But loneliness, feeling the ache of solitude instead of its pleasures, is a biological response, like thirst. There was a time in human evolution when refusing to participate in society was as perilous as refusing to drink when you’re thirsty, and this innate psychological alarm bell pushed us back into the crowd. That’s important: loneliness pushes us back to other people, not to a monogamous romantic relationship. That development came much, much later, under the pressures of social forces, rather than chemical ones.
In recent years, it seems that chronic loneliness is beginning to be understood better as something outside of dating or marriage, in part because so many more people are openly admitting that they’re suffering from it. In 2017, a report from the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness said over nine million people in the UK often or always felt lonely. Loneliness was declared an “epidemic” and by 2018, the country appointed its very first minister of loneliness. By 2020, the UK had gone through three of these ministers, each ordering new studies that tried to gather more information on how many people were lonely and to then implement programs to alleviate some of that loneliness. They introduced projects like paying younger people to work with older people on digital technology, and public health campaigns to reduce stigma around the issue.
In a New York Times opinion piece, Going Solo author Eric Klinenberg responded to the UK’s rush to declare loneliness a catching disease, warning that it was actually the poor, the disenfranchised, the elderly, people without access to medical or in-home care, who would be those most likely forgotten in the ministry’s approach to “solving” loneliness. Klinenberg argued that it’s a positive thing that loneliness is getting the attention it’s currently receiving—it is a huge issue connected to a variety of social ills. He then pointed out that the “epidemic” label is based on faulty, overly general data. “When Britain announced its new ministry, officials insisted that everyone, young or old, was at risk of loneliness,” he writes. “Yet the research tells us something more specific. In places like the United States and Britain, it’s the poor, unemployed, displaced and migrant populations that stand to suffer most from loneliness and isolation. Their lives are unstable, and so are their relationships. When they get lonely, they are the least able to get adequate social or medical support.”
What Klinenberg is saying is that loneliness can’t just be treated as an individual failing. It has to be seen in the context of society, as a result of decisions being actively made. Being alone is a state that is pushed on some people far more than others.
When Brigham Young University psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a leading researcher on loneliness, addressed the 125th annual convention of the American Psychological Association in 2017, she presented evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality. “The magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators,” she said. “With an increasing aging population, the effect on public health is only anticipated to increase. Indeed, many nations now suggest we are facing a ‘loneliness epidemic.’ The challenge we face now is what can be done about it.”
The research paper Holt-Lunstad was presenting to the APA is regularly cited in aggregated articles on loneliness, which often boil it down to a report on potential health effects; one of the paper’s most repeated talking points is that loneliness can have a greater negative effect on your health than obesity. Actually, Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues emphasize the same thing Klinenberg did, which is that people most at risk are the elderly and socially isolated, who may already be suffering from various mental and physical ailments that can’t always be meaningfully distinguished from health problems caused by loneliness itself. The phrase “loneliness epidemic” caught on anyway.
Making societal loneliness into an illness is dangerous in that it obfuscates larger problems, even if chronic loneliness can be considered a mental health issue, even if being alone correlates to or causes physical illness. It’s almost too convenient. Most illness is treated as a personal problem rather than a systemic one, despite the massive influence that everything from geographic location to access to food and basic medical care can have on health. Describing lonely people as being “sick” in some way means pushing lifestyle changes instead of alleviating larger economic and social problems. It also puts it into people’s heads that loneliness is catching, which can only compound the problem for those experiencing it.
Being single was definitely my personal problem as far as my friends were concerned. Many of the single ladies shifting the U.S. census numbers that Rebecca Traister analyzed would likely marry eventually, holding to the expectation that they do something about being alone. So might I, because life is long and full of surprises. But if not, where would I turn as I aged and statistically became more exposed to the social isolation Holt-Lunstad warned about?
Many people depend on children to function as a safety net in their old age, but the number of babies is declining, too. In 2017, federal data from the CDC showed that the U.S. fertility rate was at its lowest point ever. For every thousand women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, there were only 59.8 babies. For comparison, the 1950s baby boom had a birth rate that was twice as high. When people do start families these days, they’re also considerably older. Forty years ago, the average age for a woman to give birth was twenty-one. In 2000, it was around twenty-four. In 2017, it was about twenty-six, edging toward twenty-seven.
Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrell Bricker wrote in their 2019 book, Empty Planet, that the lowering birth rate is actually a planet-wide phenomenon, which they largely attribute to the increased access to knowledge via smart phones. An increase in education will often lead to a decrease in family size.
That might be interpreted as a reflection of women pursuing careers instead of raising kids; however, it seems to me that anyone with an awareness of their own economic precarity would be hesitant to have children. In the United States, the expense of having a child in a hospital could ruin a family before it’s even begun. Affordable childcare is practically nonexistent, which often draws women out of the workforce as the simplest solution. Public services like education (public school being the closest thing to universal childcare in the United States), are being defunded in nearly every state, and to extend this list of potential expenses as far as college, the cost of a degree for the next generation is staggering. And if you are particularly grim about what’s ahead (clearly, I was on that autumn night of the dinner party), the looming disaster of climate destruction must make potential parents think about what they’re promising a child born right now.
With fewer children being born, there’s a huge care gap ahead that may quickly mount to a crisis as seniors find themselves without supporting family. It’s currently estimated by the Institute for Public Policy Research that by 2030, the number of elderly adults in the UK who need care will have doubled since 2012. That’s two million people without adult children to care for them, and potentially with no backup plan. That’s also a shortage of young people in the workforce who might be available to care for elderly communities as a career.
In Going Solo, Klinenberg doesn’t advocate for people to pursue coupledom and make a baby to avoid the isolation of age. That’s because he found in his research that most people do die alone, even people who get married or have kids. Many elderly people live completely alone because they can’t afford some form of assisted living. Furthermore, in the United States, nursing homes can be not only prohibitively expensive but poorly run and dangerous for occupants. Klinenberg suggests that the solution for an aging and increasingly lonely population could be found in state-sponsored assisted living facilities that bring safety and dignity to aging. But this is a suggestion, not an existing option. Aging without family care is a form of loneliness anyone can face, whatever choices they’ve made, but the myth persists that coupledom and children will save you from social isolation. Once again, a major gap in public services becomes an individual’s problem.
There are so many ways in which people’s choices are policed, and it’s so we can point to where they went wrong rather than where they were failed. The stereotype of the career woman who refuses to settle down and then regrets waiting too long haunts popular culture. This characterization implies that there is a choice in the matter, as though the breadwinner model of household division is a manageable option for most people. Delaying settling down is more often a survival tactic than an attempt to buck traditional values. For millennials like myself, graduating into the crash of 2009, a full-time job with healthcare, benefits, and stability felt as out of reach as winning the lottery—or meeting someone willing to support me as I cared for our home. Even if I was never financially in a place to support myself and a child, the stigma of “waiting too long” would follow me.
When I first started thinking about these issues in 2016, I had no idea what was coming only four years later. It is still too early to tell how COVID-19, prolonged quarantines, and the restructuring of social behavior around “social distancing” will affect family structures in the long term, but the data is not looking good.
By the spring of 2021, many studies reported a significant drop in the already falling birth rate. The BBC reported that the United States was experiencing its greatest slump in birth rates in almost a century, and it was even worse in Europe. Some people admitted in a survey that they had chosen to delay having a child in 2020, but in Italy, one of the hardest hit places early in the pandemic, 37 percent of people said coronavirus had changed their plans to have a baby altogether. This doesn’t even account for the people who may have been hoping to meet someone to start a family with before quarantine rules were put into effect, limiting socializing—and certainly making it nearly inconceivable to try to meet new people—for nearly a year. Many single folks ended up completely isolated, separated not only from human interaction but from the dream of meeting someone new.
The pandemic put into stark relief so many of the issues affecting the lives of single people, the isolated, and the lonely. Among younger people, loneliness skyrocketed. In November of 2020, Viviana Horigian from the University of Miami in Coral Gables told Medical News Today that in a survey of 1,008 people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, 80 percent reported significant depressive symptoms. These are people in an age range that is supposed to be the prime of their social lives. Many of the older ones might have been living alone or with a few roommates, but most college-aged people ended up returning to their parent’s homes to go to Zoom University. Others lost their jobs and returned to live with their families out of necessity, compounding economic setbacks with social ones.
Psychologist Richard Weissbourd told the Harvard Gazette that this disruption could have long-reaching consequences for people at an age of transition from their “inherited families to their chosen families,” which are supposed to become “critical guardrails against loneliness.” There is now a whole generation with a gap in their experience of bonding with others as growing adults.
These shifts are a continuation of trends in loneliness created by economic insecurity. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the gradual disruption in full-time employment options on a massive scale has been changing general socialization for years. Financial instability and the gig economy might be ruinous for your bank account, but what’s more rarely discussed is how they annihilate the social advantages that come with having a steady job. We get to know the people we work with. Co-workers can come with all sorts of personality issues, sure, but they also fulfill the very important function of widening the circle of people we exchange daily greetings with. When people are constantly circulating from one gig to the next, those social circles are upended again and again. After a while, you might stop trying to create those workplace relationships.
With many forms of gig employment—and again, after many companies pivoted to full-time remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—working outside of a traditional office setting has become the norm. As someone who has worked from home for years, I can attest to what a significant shift this is in the daily pattern of life. There are no shared lunches, chats in the break room, after-work drinks, or basic familiarity outside of the text and thumbnails on your screen.
There has been some acknowledgment of this disconnect in the design of offices—for instance, those in the infamous WeWork co-working spaces. WeWork was heralded as the perfect solution for small businesses that sought an open environment with the potential for networking. It offered a kind of cheap simulacrum of a Silicon Valley start-up, with millennial-targeted wallpaper prints, pop music playing in the toilets, a beanbag room, shiny snack displays, and beer on tap. In 2017, Forbes reported that the company was valued at $20 billion. In May of 2019, Vox said it was valued at $47 billion. By late 2019, WeWork was collapsing due to mismanagement and a whole host of accusations against its CEO, Adam Neumann. Before its collapse, though, many social scientists applauded the company for its attempts to encourage people to socialize, and Neumann’s CEO mantras like “Make a life and not just a living.”
But the rooms of WeWork’s spaces were cleaned and restocked by a workforce who frequently striked and protested against working conditions under the WeWork banner. Union-busting and underpaying staff are antilife, because what actually makes a life is the ability to cultivate one when you’re not at work and earning a living wage when you are.
The plush lifestyle of white-collar workers is often facilitated by unprotected minimum-wage employees, but the balance of work and home life has been gradually degraded in every department. Snacks and other perks might make office life feel friendlier, but they’re usually just ploys to keep people at work longer, shorten their lunch breaks, and make them more willing to take jobs that pay less on a permalancing basis. WeWork might be one of the most spectacular rises and falls in the exploitative co-working membership game, but plenty of other companies consider community design flow before they consider employee welfare. A company that wants you to have a lounge but no healthcare is not a company that supports a thriving community.
And WeWork was probably one of the more generous of the “sharing” economy models when compared to gig monoliths like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, or delivery services like DoorDash, Instacart, or any of a number of apps designed to keep millions of workers on call with no guarantees. The sharing economy is more like a middle-management economy, inserting itself into every aspect of life and draining money off its workers and the consumers. Work is no longer a place to reliably build community outside of family, nor is it a place that supports healthy family life.
This shift in work culture and the relationships within it has largely been facilitated by technology, though that’s not the first thing people usually think of when connecting the dots between loneliness and their phones. That would be the negative influence of social media on people’s perception of themselves and others. Social media is not a replacement for love, family, or a fulfilling work life, but it is frequently asked to fill the gap in all those things for people who are feeling disconnected. While doing that, social media finds so many ways to drive wedges in real relationships via political disinformation campaigns, conspiracy group message boards, constant argumentative discourse, and simple FOMO.
This isn’t at all to say digital culture is uniformly bad. The rush to blame smartphones and the Internet for loneliness has been as suspicious to me as the promise of a Happily Ever After. There are a million ways in which I could say access to the World Wide Web and social networking were a boon to communities everywhere, but in 2016, the pressure of the election made many of us more nakedly aware of the rancor present in humanity via Twitter and Facebook. There was this unrelenting imposition social media seemed to have on daily thoughts. Even if you wanted to look away, it felt dangerous to try, like you’d miss World War III being announced under Twitter’s trending topics. The political divisiveness there led to an even greater sense of separateness, a rift that could not be healed.
One single woman at a dinner party full of couples might feel like a misfit, but if we pull back further, the balance between my circumstance and those of my relationship-blessed friends shifted. Earlier that same year, Rebecca Traister published her opus on the rise of single women and their influence on humankind, All the Single Ladies. One of the key points of the book is that in 2009, for perhaps the first time ever in the history of the United States there were more unmarried women than married, as much as it might have felt otherwise to me. There was nothing so unusual about my being single at all.
Singleness, as any peppy self-help book will tell you, does not equate to loneliness. Yet they’re words often used synonymously. In an editorial for The Washington Post, author Bella DePaulo, who has written a number of books on the bias against single people, pointed out that this conflation promotes this bias, painting singles as isolated and even self-centered. If you think of “single” as synonymous with “lonely,” it assigns negativity to a single person, or a negative value to being single. But it’s unlikely every single person thinks of themselves as lonely, or that loneliness doesn’t find its way into relationships.
Another reason people conflate the two terms may be because finding a partner is still considered the antidote to not only singleness but loneliness. We’re considered somehow incomplete, missing that special something, the final piece to fulfillment as long as we’re outside of a relationship. How could loneliness plague someone who is satisfied by romantic love?
But loneliness, feeling the ache of solitude instead of its pleasures, is a biological response, like thirst. There was a time in human evolution when refusing to participate in society was as perilous as refusing to drink when you’re thirsty, and this innate psychological alarm bell pushed us back into the crowd. That’s important: loneliness pushes us back to other people, not to a monogamous romantic relationship. That development came much, much later, under the pressures of social forces, rather than chemical ones.
In recent years, it seems that chronic loneliness is beginning to be understood better as something outside of dating or marriage, in part because so many more people are openly admitting that they’re suffering from it. In 2017, a report from the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness said over nine million people in the UK often or always felt lonely. Loneliness was declared an “epidemic” and by 2018, the country appointed its very first minister of loneliness. By 2020, the UK had gone through three of these ministers, each ordering new studies that tried to gather more information on how many people were lonely and to then implement programs to alleviate some of that loneliness. They introduced projects like paying younger people to work with older people on digital technology, and public health campaigns to reduce stigma around the issue.
In a New York Times opinion piece, Going Solo author Eric Klinenberg responded to the UK’s rush to declare loneliness a catching disease, warning that it was actually the poor, the disenfranchised, the elderly, people without access to medical or in-home care, who would be those most likely forgotten in the ministry’s approach to “solving” loneliness. Klinenberg argued that it’s a positive thing that loneliness is getting the attention it’s currently receiving—it is a huge issue connected to a variety of social ills. He then pointed out that the “epidemic” label is based on faulty, overly general data. “When Britain announced its new ministry, officials insisted that everyone, young or old, was at risk of loneliness,” he writes. “Yet the research tells us something more specific. In places like the United States and Britain, it’s the poor, unemployed, displaced and migrant populations that stand to suffer most from loneliness and isolation. Their lives are unstable, and so are their relationships. When they get lonely, they are the least able to get adequate social or medical support.”
What Klinenberg is saying is that loneliness can’t just be treated as an individual failing. It has to be seen in the context of society, as a result of decisions being actively made. Being alone is a state that is pushed on some people far more than others.
When Brigham Young University psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a leading researcher on loneliness, addressed the 125th annual convention of the American Psychological Association in 2017, she presented evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality. “The magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators,” she said. “With an increasing aging population, the effect on public health is only anticipated to increase. Indeed, many nations now suggest we are facing a ‘loneliness epidemic.’ The challenge we face now is what can be done about it.”
The research paper Holt-Lunstad was presenting to the APA is regularly cited in aggregated articles on loneliness, which often boil it down to a report on potential health effects; one of the paper’s most repeated talking points is that loneliness can have a greater negative effect on your health than obesity. Actually, Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues emphasize the same thing Klinenberg did, which is that people most at risk are the elderly and socially isolated, who may already be suffering from various mental and physical ailments that can’t always be meaningfully distinguished from health problems caused by loneliness itself. The phrase “loneliness epidemic” caught on anyway.
Making societal loneliness into an illness is dangerous in that it obfuscates larger problems, even if chronic loneliness can be considered a mental health issue, even if being alone correlates to or causes physical illness. It’s almost too convenient. Most illness is treated as a personal problem rather than a systemic one, despite the massive influence that everything from geographic location to access to food and basic medical care can have on health. Describing lonely people as being “sick” in some way means pushing lifestyle changes instead of alleviating larger economic and social problems. It also puts it into people’s heads that loneliness is catching, which can only compound the problem for those experiencing it.
Being single was definitely my personal problem as far as my friends were concerned. Many of the single ladies shifting the U.S. census numbers that Rebecca Traister analyzed would likely marry eventually, holding to the expectation that they do something about being alone. So might I, because life is long and full of surprises. But if not, where would I turn as I aged and statistically became more exposed to the social isolation Holt-Lunstad warned about?
Many people depend on children to function as a safety net in their old age, but the number of babies is declining, too. In 2017, federal data from the CDC showed that the U.S. fertility rate was at its lowest point ever. For every thousand women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, there were only 59.8 babies. For comparison, the 1950s baby boom had a birth rate that was twice as high. When people do start families these days, they’re also considerably older. Forty years ago, the average age for a woman to give birth was twenty-one. In 2000, it was around twenty-four. In 2017, it was about twenty-six, edging toward twenty-seven.
Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrell Bricker wrote in their 2019 book, Empty Planet, that the lowering birth rate is actually a planet-wide phenomenon, which they largely attribute to the increased access to knowledge via smart phones. An increase in education will often lead to a decrease in family size.
That might be interpreted as a reflection of women pursuing careers instead of raising kids; however, it seems to me that anyone with an awareness of their own economic precarity would be hesitant to have children. In the United States, the expense of having a child in a hospital could ruin a family before it’s even begun. Affordable childcare is practically nonexistent, which often draws women out of the workforce as the simplest solution. Public services like education (public school being the closest thing to universal childcare in the United States), are being defunded in nearly every state, and to extend this list of potential expenses as far as college, the cost of a degree for the next generation is staggering. And if you are particularly grim about what’s ahead (clearly, I was on that autumn night of the dinner party), the looming disaster of climate destruction must make potential parents think about what they’re promising a child born right now.
With fewer children being born, there’s a huge care gap ahead that may quickly mount to a crisis as seniors find themselves without supporting family. It’s currently estimated by the Institute for Public Policy Research that by 2030, the number of elderly adults in the UK who need care will have doubled since 2012. That’s two million people without adult children to care for them, and potentially with no backup plan. That’s also a shortage of young people in the workforce who might be available to care for elderly communities as a career.
In Going Solo, Klinenberg doesn’t advocate for people to pursue coupledom and make a baby to avoid the isolation of age. That’s because he found in his research that most people do die alone, even people who get married or have kids. Many elderly people live completely alone because they can’t afford some form of assisted living. Furthermore, in the United States, nursing homes can be not only prohibitively expensive but poorly run and dangerous for occupants. Klinenberg suggests that the solution for an aging and increasingly lonely population could be found in state-sponsored assisted living facilities that bring safety and dignity to aging. But this is a suggestion, not an existing option. Aging without family care is a form of loneliness anyone can face, whatever choices they’ve made, but the myth persists that coupledom and children will save you from social isolation. Once again, a major gap in public services becomes an individual’s problem.
There are so many ways in which people’s choices are policed, and it’s so we can point to where they went wrong rather than where they were failed. The stereotype of the career woman who refuses to settle down and then regrets waiting too long haunts popular culture. This characterization implies that there is a choice in the matter, as though the breadwinner model of household division is a manageable option for most people. Delaying settling down is more often a survival tactic than an attempt to buck traditional values. For millennials like myself, graduating into the crash of 2009, a full-time job with healthcare, benefits, and stability felt as out of reach as winning the lottery—or meeting someone willing to support me as I cared for our home. Even if I was never financially in a place to support myself and a child, the stigma of “waiting too long” would follow me.
When I first started thinking about these issues in 2016, I had no idea what was coming only four years later. It is still too early to tell how COVID-19, prolonged quarantines, and the restructuring of social behavior around “social distancing” will affect family structures in the long term, but the data is not looking good.
By the spring of 2021, many studies reported a significant drop in the already falling birth rate. The BBC reported that the United States was experiencing its greatest slump in birth rates in almost a century, and it was even worse in Europe. Some people admitted in a survey that they had chosen to delay having a child in 2020, but in Italy, one of the hardest hit places early in the pandemic, 37 percent of people said coronavirus had changed their plans to have a baby altogether. This doesn’t even account for the people who may have been hoping to meet someone to start a family with before quarantine rules were put into effect, limiting socializing—and certainly making it nearly inconceivable to try to meet new people—for nearly a year. Many single folks ended up completely isolated, separated not only from human interaction but from the dream of meeting someone new.
The pandemic put into stark relief so many of the issues affecting the lives of single people, the isolated, and the lonely. Among younger people, loneliness skyrocketed. In November of 2020, Viviana Horigian from the University of Miami in Coral Gables told Medical News Today that in a survey of 1,008 people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, 80 percent reported significant depressive symptoms. These are people in an age range that is supposed to be the prime of their social lives. Many of the older ones might have been living alone or with a few roommates, but most college-aged people ended up returning to their parent’s homes to go to Zoom University. Others lost their jobs and returned to live with their families out of necessity, compounding economic setbacks with social ones.
Psychologist Richard Weissbourd told the Harvard Gazette that this disruption could have long-reaching consequences for people at an age of transition from their “inherited families to their chosen families,” which are supposed to become “critical guardrails against loneliness.” There is now a whole generation with a gap in their experience of bonding with others as growing adults.
These shifts are a continuation of trends in loneliness created by economic insecurity. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the gradual disruption in full-time employment options on a massive scale has been changing general socialization for years. Financial instability and the gig economy might be ruinous for your bank account, but what’s more rarely discussed is how they annihilate the social advantages that come with having a steady job. We get to know the people we work with. Co-workers can come with all sorts of personality issues, sure, but they also fulfill the very important function of widening the circle of people we exchange daily greetings with. When people are constantly circulating from one gig to the next, those social circles are upended again and again. After a while, you might stop trying to create those workplace relationships.
With many forms of gig employment—and again, after many companies pivoted to full-time remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—working outside of a traditional office setting has become the norm. As someone who has worked from home for years, I can attest to what a significant shift this is in the daily pattern of life. There are no shared lunches, chats in the break room, after-work drinks, or basic familiarity outside of the text and thumbnails on your screen.
There has been some acknowledgment of this disconnect in the design of offices—for instance, those in the infamous WeWork co-working spaces. WeWork was heralded as the perfect solution for small businesses that sought an open environment with the potential for networking. It offered a kind of cheap simulacrum of a Silicon Valley start-up, with millennial-targeted wallpaper prints, pop music playing in the toilets, a beanbag room, shiny snack displays, and beer on tap. In 2017, Forbes reported that the company was valued at $20 billion. In May of 2019, Vox said it was valued at $47 billion. By late 2019, WeWork was collapsing due to mismanagement and a whole host of accusations against its CEO, Adam Neumann. Before its collapse, though, many social scientists applauded the company for its attempts to encourage people to socialize, and Neumann’s CEO mantras like “Make a life and not just a living.”
But the rooms of WeWork’s spaces were cleaned and restocked by a workforce who frequently striked and protested against working conditions under the WeWork banner. Union-busting and underpaying staff are antilife, because what actually makes a life is the ability to cultivate one when you’re not at work and earning a living wage when you are.
The plush lifestyle of white-collar workers is often facilitated by unprotected minimum-wage employees, but the balance of work and home life has been gradually degraded in every department. Snacks and other perks might make office life feel friendlier, but they’re usually just ploys to keep people at work longer, shorten their lunch breaks, and make them more willing to take jobs that pay less on a permalancing basis. WeWork might be one of the most spectacular rises and falls in the exploitative co-working membership game, but plenty of other companies consider community design flow before they consider employee welfare. A company that wants you to have a lounge but no healthcare is not a company that supports a thriving community.
And WeWork was probably one of the more generous of the “sharing” economy models when compared to gig monoliths like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, or delivery services like DoorDash, Instacart, or any of a number of apps designed to keep millions of workers on call with no guarantees. The sharing economy is more like a middle-management economy, inserting itself into every aspect of life and draining money off its workers and the consumers. Work is no longer a place to reliably build community outside of family, nor is it a place that supports healthy family life.
This shift in work culture and the relationships within it has largely been facilitated by technology, though that’s not the first thing people usually think of when connecting the dots between loneliness and their phones. That would be the negative influence of social media on people’s perception of themselves and others. Social media is not a replacement for love, family, or a fulfilling work life, but it is frequently asked to fill the gap in all those things for people who are feeling disconnected. While doing that, social media finds so many ways to drive wedges in real relationships via political disinformation campaigns, conspiracy group message boards, constant argumentative discourse, and simple FOMO.
This isn’t at all to say digital culture is uniformly bad. The rush to blame smartphones and the Internet for loneliness has been as suspicious to me as the promise of a Happily Ever After. There are a million ways in which I could say access to the World Wide Web and social networking were a boon to communities everywhere, but in 2016, the pressure of the election made many of us more nakedly aware of the rancor present in humanity via Twitter and Facebook. There was this unrelenting imposition social media seemed to have on daily thoughts. Even if you wanted to look away, it felt dangerous to try, like you’d miss World War III being announced under Twitter’s trending topics. The political divisiveness there led to an even greater sense of separateness, a rift that could not be healed.
