Americans in the twenty-first century devote more technology
to staying connected than any society in history, yet somehow
the devices fail us: studies show that we feel increasingly alone.
Our lives are spent in a tug-of-war between conflicting desires—
we want to stay connected, and we want to be free. We lurch back
and forth, reaching for both, and are surprised by our sadness
when one side actually wins. How much of one should we give up
in order to have more of the other? How do we know when we’ve
got it right?
This argument probably began as soon as language made it
possible for groups to argue, but it is also a particularly American
controversy. Over the last decade, the debate about freedom
and connection in the United States has leaped from rarely read
doctoral dissertations to front-page national news. What caught
people’s attention was a series of alarms, given in the form of
data-driven studies, suggesting that our society is in the midst
of a dramatic and progressive slide toward disconnection. Robert
Putnam’s Bowling Alone
was the loudest alarm, combining extensive
data on the fraying of social connections with a powerful thesis
demonstrating the importance of social networks to a healthy
democracy. The book struck a chord and seemingly endless pub-lic
debate about whether or not Putnam was ignoring new forms
of connection that were every bit as effective as the waning old
forms. Questions ranged from the trivial (don’t burgeoning youthsoccer
leagues matter as much as disappearing bowling leagues?)
to the technological (what about the Internet and cell phones?).
These issues were brought into sharp focus recently by two
major studies. In the first, using data from the General Social Survey
(GSS), a group headed by Duke University researcher Miller
McPherson found that between 1985 and 2004, the number of
people with whom the average American discussed “important
matters” dropped from three to two. Even more stunning, the
number of people who said there was no one
with whom they discussed
important matters tripled: in 2004, individuals without a
single confidant now made up nearly a quarter of those surveyed.1
Our country is now filled with them. For readers who remain
skeptical, it is worth noting that the authors of the study themselves
were skeptics. They were surprised by their own results;
they had expected to prove Putnam wrong.
The second study was the 2000 U.S. census. One of the most
remarkable facts to emerge from this census is that one out of
every four households consists of one person only. The number
of one-person households has been increasing steadily since 1940,
when they accounted for roughly 7 percent of households; today,
there are more people living alone than at any point in U.S. history.
2 Placing the census data and the General Social Survey side
by side, the evidence that this country is in the midst of a major social
change is overwhelming.
The significance of this increased aloneness is amplified by a
very different body of research. There is now a clear consensus
among medical researchers that social connection has powerful
effects on health. Socially connected people live longer, respond
better to stress, have more robust immune systems, and do better
at fighting a variety of specific illnesses. These medical benefits
derive directly from the social connection itself, not just from
lifestyle improvements, such as better diet, more exercise, and better
medical care, that might go along with it. Putnam argues that
social connection is good for the country. Medical research has
clearly demonstrated that social connection is good for individual
health. Yet people in this country continue to drift apart. We want
to understand why.
In 1970, the sociologist Philip Slater published a powerful
book called The Pursuit of Loneliness.
We seek a private house, a private means of transportation,
a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and
do-it-yourself skills of every kind. An enormous technology
seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary
for one human being ever to ask anything of another
in the course of going about his daily business. Even within
the family Americans are unique in their feeling that each
member should have a separate room, and even a separate
telephone, television, and car when economically possible.
We seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more
alienated and lonely when we get it.3
When Slater looked at the America of his day, he saw people who
actively sought the very things that made them unhappy and bitter.
He also asked why, but his answer got stuck in its particular
historical moment. He wrote at the height of the Vietnam War, a
time of increasingly intense confrontation between a mix of countercultural
student radicals and hippies and what Slater labeled the
“old culture.” Much of the book is a brilliant rant against the dominant
culture by a writer who believed that society was poised on
the brink of cataclysmic transformation. His subtitle was American Culture at the Breaking Point,
but after more than four decades,
nothing has broken. What we have instead is more of the same—
more isolation (and more objective data on that isolation), more
longing for connection, and more technology that promises better
connections but never quite delivers. It is time to revisit Slater’s
questions and seek answers for our own time.
We came, and still come, to these questions as psychiatrists.
Our first concern was the welfare of our patients: we began to
notice how much of their suffering was bound up in isolation
and loneliness, whatever other diagnostic labels might be applied
to them. We began to notice how hard it was for our patients
to talk about their isolation, which seemed to fill them with deep
shame. We began to notice that most of our patients were more
comfortable saying they were depressed
than saying they were lonely.
Somehow, while our culture has successfully destigmatized
mental illness (at least a little), it has restigmatized an ordinary human
emotion. Finally, we began to notice versions of the same suffering
around us in friends, family, and acquaintances, and, again,
what puzzled us more than the disconnection itself was an almost
reflexive denial that it mattered. Someone would talk at length
and with great sadness about losing contact with formerly close
family members and friends, and then the whole subject would be
shrugged off as if it were just a minor inconvenience in a typically
busy life. The word lonely
was determinedly avoided, yet the denial
of loneliness is horribly self-defeating. Health and happiness,
the two things we all say matter most, are certifiably linked to social
Excerpted from The Lonely American by Jacqueline Olds, MD. Copyright © 2010 by Jacqueline Olds, MD. Excerpted by permission of Beacon Press, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.