As I write I’m sitting in a cafe in Vancouver. It’s pouring and I’m on my own and extremely tired. I’m in town for a wedding and friends are starting to appear, but for the last week I’ve been toute seule, on my own.
I flew from London to San Francisco and then to Portland, Oregon, where I stayed for two nights, eating on my own, and pootling around on a bicycle for eight hours — on my own. I took a solitary trip to the Portland Art Museum, then headed up the coast to Seattle, where I — solo, of course — made my way, heavy suitcase splitting, to my hotel.
Sleep is not my friend right now, and though I had quite a sleepless in Seattle experience (sleepless in Vancouver is also about right), I still managed to explore the Puget Sound, eat very good sushi and see all manner of American Indian art.
I’ve made friends too: The Vancouver businessman at the Korean restaurant in Portland; the young sociologist in the queue for hipster pastries in San Francisco; and ... well, unfortunately Seattle was not a friendly place. (For example my joke about “aquarium chic” apparel at the Seattle Aquarium gift shop, where I bought an octopus-themed top, didn’t raise so much as a smile — imagine!)
Among other emotions, including some positive ones (honest, guv), in the last week I’ve felt desperately tired, at times frustrated (should I go to this or that craft brewery?) and annoyed (the incessant expectation of tips). But the one thing I haven’t felt for one second is lonely.
So I noted with interest a major study about loneliness by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), widely presented in terms of a crisis moment, and a sign of the deep alienation afflicting citizens of the technological age — and particularly its youth. The study found that 10 per cent of those aged between 16 and 24 were “always or often lonely” — the highest percentage of any age group. The figures, of course, don’t make much of the 90 per cent who aren’t particularly lonely. Nor does the ONS delve too probingly into the reasons for the current rates of gloomy aloneness. Predictably, noises are being made about young people being on the internet all the time, and therefore failing to connect to people offline.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that if young people prefer to communicate in two-line messages and emojis they will lose the art of conversation altogether. One can already see them struggling to converse when in each other’s physical company — I can’t actually remember the last time I saw two young millennials sitting and actually talking about something without their phones in constant use.
But this merits closer attention, as the loneliness figures are the tip of the rather complicated iceberg that is digital life. For, in a sense, social media follows one everywhere with the doggedness of a stalker. It’s always there, pulsing away, hundreds or thousands of other people’s connectedness visible to you wherever you are in the world.
Whether I was in a brewery in Portland, a quaint shop in the Seattle harbour or my Vancouver Airbnb, I could (and did) message my friends, wherever they were, whether it was in London or Sydney or New York, and I could receive instant replies from them.
This sense of swarming connectivity, of everyone always being there, hanging in the ether, is very different from the long, boring, melancholy but also peaceful stretches of time that characterised my teenage years. Those solitary, boring hours were hugely important. They were my thinking, reading and feeling hours. They taught me that life isn’t always a whizz-bang spectacle of fun and instant gratification. Most importantly, though I didn’t realise it at the time, those periods when there was nobody about to be with, ensured that me and my peers had to learn how to be on our own and to take pleasure in things other than the endless social feedback loop.
Of course, we love to blame the internet for everything. But loneliness is hardly a new cause for concern in Britain. Divorce and other factors meant that many people began living alone for the first time in the 1970s, a spate of hand-wringing studies and books about it also appeared back then. These in turn were merely an update on similar writings from the late 19th century, when the aftermath of the industrial revolution created a new, rootless “clerk class”, seen to be floating about the city on their own, worryingly disconnected from their communities and troublingly single.
Given that we’ve been lonely since long before the internet, then, perhaps it’s time to simply accept that loneliness is a part of being, as much as it is a product of bewildering social changes.
We’ve been lonely before and we’ll be lonely again. It will all be OK.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2018
Zoe Strimpel is a journalist, writer, and historian of gender and relationships in modern Britain.
