Shucking Oysters: Are You Lonesome Tonight?
By Alex Allen
I’ve always appreciated my times spent alone since childhood. But I also enjoyed hanging out with my friends as well. Today, I barely want to leave the house. When the telephone rings I’m startled. Having a conversation at the local grocery store can be challenging. Even dinner parties have disappeared. And I’m not alone. What happened?
One conversation I did have at the grocery store was on how much we enjoyed not going out and staying at home with our partners. They attested this to getting old. I’m more inclined to point to the great reset of the pandemic. Jo Ellison wrote in the Financial Times that the pandemic “helped extinguish the last bastions of casual interaction: the pop-rounds, the call-bys and cup-of-tea-catch-ups.” Remember those knocks on the door? Now it’s either a scheduled delivery or gawd forbid something “weird.”
I used to call myself a social loner, having traits of both an extrovert and an introvert. Not so much now. Colin DeYoung, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota explains that one reason introverts need alone time is related to how they respond to rewards. For adults, rewards can be things like money, social status, social connections, sex, and food. Introverts are wired differently and are simply less motivated and energized by those rewards. It’s as if “extroverts see big, juicy steaks everywhere, while introverts often see overcooked hamburgers.”
In a series by the New York Times reflecting on how American lives have changed in the years since the pandemic, the most striking details are those things that have not gone back to what they were before. People returned to airports and hair salons, but restaurants and bars are still feeling the negative effects. We’re spending much more time at home, both working and at leisure. According to one study, the time spent with others has fallen to less than 35 minutes on an average day since 2021.
These small shifts are playing out in the long term. We’re finding it harder to connect with people. We have to practise “making friends.” For some Ellison wrote, “the creeping isolation has ushered another pandemic: loneliness.” For others, the ease of social media has seen many of our interactions move and stay online. In entertainment, as in dining, “modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.”
Derek Thompson wrote an article in the Atlantic calling our times the “anti-social century.” An invisible enemy is causing us to spend more and more time in our homes, “consolidated as refuges of comfort and leisure.” This has reinforced two types of human connections: the closest ones with our family and a couple of friends and the most distant ones, the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of human beings with whom we interact randomly on social media.
American men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her dog Piper than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their immediate family has declined by more than a third.
In 2023, Joe Biden’s surgeon general published an 81-page warning about America’s “epidemic of loneliness,” claiming that its negative health effects were equal to tobacco use and obesity. A growing number of public-health officials seem to regard loneliness as a critical public-health issue. The United Kingdom has a minister for loneliness and social connection. So does Japan.
But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg noted. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, “the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people.” Good news for us islanders, a study by the University of Minnesota showed that people in rural areas experience less loneliness than those living in cities.
Smartphones and computers have made solitude more crowded than ever but the crowds are more solitary. Our social time as Thompson wrote is “haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.” The always-open window to the outside world makes recharging much harder, “leaving many people chronically depleted, a walking battery that is always stuck in the red zone.” In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that biological cue: I’m alone; I should make plans to visit someone. But we live in a “sideways world, where easy home entertainment, oversharing online, and stunted social skills spark a strangely popular response” that I’m alone, but hooray they cancelled our play date.
One study found that solitude’s effects on well-being may depend on how it is balanced alongside social activities: too little solitude deprives individuals of time to relax and reconnect with their selves; too much can be isolating and lonely. Another study reported that people with high incomes spend more time alone instead of socializing, but are less lonely than those with lower incomes – spending time alone does not necessarily equate to feeling lonely. On the same note, another study linked lower income to loneliness and social isolation.
Maybe it does have something to do with getting older. Our circle becomes smaller and we become more particular about who we spend our time with. Even my odd random conversations with strangers seems to be enough most of the time. As Jean-Paul Sartre said: “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
