About twenty years ago, not long after I got into hiking, I decided to try a quick snowshoe to Opal Falls. The initial 5KM was along a highway that had been closed for the season, which made the trail ridiculously easy to follow. I could see quite a few tracks in the metre-deep snow, but the weather was terrible, with low-lying clouds scattering a bit of snow about and mild winds that took full advantage of the open spaces to nibble on you. Those tracks must have been old, as the further I shoe’d along the more obvious it became I was the only person braving these conditions.
I burned a few more kilometres to actually find the Falls, but eventually I was treated to a small rock canyon with some ice falls cascading down them. I was surprised to see some climbing gear at the base; was an ice climber getting a bit of practice in? I couldn’t see nor hear them, even though the skies had cleared roughly when I arrived. Given how isolated the area was, I wouldn’t be surprised if they left their gear behind between climbing attempts.
I followed the climber’s old snowshoe trail down the canyon, back to the main road. The bright winter Sun made the -15C or so temperatures almost pleasant, and after a quick break and some adjustments I took a step down the road… only for my right leg to immediately sink down to the pavement. I looked back to see the corresponding snowshoe idly sitting on top of the snow, missing the second of two critical rivets. Ha! This was a comically disastrous moment to have an equipment failure. After chuckling a bit over my terrible luck, I extracted my leg out of the nearly hip-deep snow with some struggle and tried again. I was young and in great shape, with plenty of stamina left in my tank, and the car was only 5KM away. Did I really need that snowshoe to make it back, given how thick and bulky the snow was?
I hopped forward with my left foot, and this time I ever-so-gently set my right foot down onto the trail others had packed down. It ever-so-gently sunk down until I was again nearly hip-deep. I struggled it loose again, hopped my left forward, and tried another packed area. Same results. I did a bit of mental math, and realized I’d run out of stamina well before I reached the car. I tested the effort it took to hop along on my left leg, and at that point all the humour drained out of me.
If someone else was on this “trail,” I should have spotted them heading back by now. I did not have a way to replace one of those two rivets. I had no way to make a phone call. Building an emergency snow shelter would take more effort than heading back to the car, and at any rate I had only vague theories about how to build one. Even that potential ice climber was a kilometre away, through deep snow, and if there were no ice climbers the next nearest person was likely tens of kilometres away.
If I didn’t discover a way back to my car, there was a good chance I’d die out there, alone, under that bright but chilly sky.
I’m sure you’ve all heard the standard story about loneliness by now.
This article connects two current debates: the rise of single-person households or of ‘solitaries’, and the so-called ‘loneliness epidemic’. It raises questions about how these are associated, via social-science literature on loneliness as a social, contextual and subjective experience, and findings in that literature about the relevance of lone-person households. … It documents [a] dramatic rise across many countries in single-person households during the twentieth century, notably since the 1960s. Many pre-industrial settlements had no single-person households, and the average was around 5 percent of households. The current western proportions of such households (e.g. 31 percent in the UK) are wholly unprecedented historically, even reaching to 60 percent or more of households in some modern European and North American cities. The discussion examines this trend – which has very wide ramifications – and raises issues about its relevance for modern problems of loneliness as a social and welfare concern.
Snell, K. D. M. (2017). The rise of living alone and loneliness in history. Social History, 42(1), 2–28.
If you’ve spent any time around the social sciences, though, you know that “it’s more complicated than that” is practically their motto. Take this paper from Fay Bound Alberti, which contains a critique of the prior one:
The unstated presumption of such narratives is the emotional impact of the transition from a medieval agrarian, face-to-face society in which multiple generations lived within the same household, social mobility was low, and few people moved outside the boundaries of the village where they had been born (…). But a rise in living alone need not be correlated with loneliness. Olivia Laing’s recent book The Lonely City (2016) identifies the urban revolution, and single dwelling, as having exacerbated loneliness. Yet she also notes how it is the illusion of collective living that compounds the feeling of being alone. Sharing a physical space is not the same as sharing an emotional space.
Fay Bound Alberti, “This ‘Modern Epidemic’: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions,” Emotion Review 10, no. 3 (July 2018): 242–54.
“Loneliness” has the same sort of problems that the term “transgender” has: while there must be historical precedents for each, both terms were defined relatively recently (in the 1800’s for “loneliness”) and have shifted in meaning over time, which makes pointing to any one specific situation in the past and saying “see, they weren’t as lonely as us!” problematic.
As such, I suggest that loneliness is not a single emotion, but a feeling state or “emotion cluster,” a term I find useful in describing experiences that incorporate many separate and even competing emotions and that enables us to traverse the complex, often contradictory history of emotion concepts (…).
It is this characteristic of loneliness — as a feeling state or cluster — that also helps explain its historiographical neglect. Loneliness does not feature in the “big six” or the “big eight” that continue to be widely discussed as basic emotions, usually on the basis of identified facial expressions (…). Ekman’s reductionist biological model has been criticised by more nuanced theorists who demonstrate that rather than being universal, emotions are developed within complex power relations, and through the lenses of disciplinary classifications that are themselves historically specific (…). Recent work within one of those disciplines, neuroscience, suggests that the very notion of boundaried emotions, like anger, or sadness, or fear is incorrect (…). Ibid.
As they imply above, loneliness is also a political project anchored to a specific time and place. Alberti points to two important shifts in how the term was used, the first being the medicalization of loneliness.
Too much solitude, like too much exercise, could deplete the spirits; too little exercise or companionship made them sluggish and induced melancholia. There was no discussion of the absence of solitude in medical literature (physicians did not recommend more time alone, specifically, as far as I have noted, though they recommended less study and a change of air, food, habits of the body, and the passions). Yet, excessive solitude had long been linked by medical writers to mental afflictions, worry, and self-doubt. In Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621/1971), the Oxford cleric enumerated all the different causes of melancholia and depression, from which he had long suffered. He did not use the term “loneliness” or even “solitude,” but he used multiple references to the state of being “alone,” which was linked to overthinking and an excess of imagination or fantastical thinking. Ibid.
The second being a connection between the state and sociability. While Alberti doesn’t explicitly say this, I think there’s a connection between sociability and nationalism as well.
John Mullan has explored the ways in which the rise of the novel from the mid-18th century was entangled with
the rise of a particular kind of “public sphere” sentimentalism, and the emergence of literary sensitivity and empathy as part of the development of civil society (…). In some ways this approach is reminiscent of William Reddy’s claim that a particular kind of affect emerged in French postrevolutionary society, as one form of emotional regime was replaced by another (…). In terms of what Bourdieu would term everyday practice, both contexts saw rituals of sociability and emotion being used to define and perpetuate those regimes (…). Demonstrating sociability through public gatherings and collective participation was one of the means by which civil society was manifested and reinforced. And this meant, as emotion theorists have argued, a prevalence of emotional language linked to gender, empathy, and moral and ethical responsibility towards others (…). Ibid.
Alberti took the state/sociability relation much further afield than I expected, leading to a passage I simply have to quote:
Until the 17th century, God had provided the most common explanation for the origin of the soul and the movement of the body and the spirits, as well as providing a constant paternalistic presence. And how could one be emotionally lonely when He was always there? The birth of Enlightenment humanism, the privileging of reason and the rise of alternative ways of viewing the mind–body relationship allowed for the possibility of a secular world (…). I am not suggesting that religion disappeared, or that modern life became irreversibly secular. Rather, I am identifying a philosophical and civic trend by which the perception of
loneliness depended on the “self” being externally developed and sustained in relation to peer groups and communities that shared, and outwardly performed, rituals of belonging (…). Some of these rituals, around art, literature, and other 18th-century forms of cultural production, have been neatly explored by John Brewer (1997). Ibid.
Those shifts didn’t stop there, either. Alberti points out that industrialization led authors to shift the definition of loneliness to be more of a byproduct of the mechanization and exploitation of workers, a nostalgia for “the old ways” of living. The rise of psychiatry shifted the meaning again, towards “a dysfunctional, negative part of the human psyche, caused by the onset of modernisation and a profound disconnect between self and world.” In more modern times we’ve add a physical dimension to “loneliness,” claiming that social media and remote interaction via screens isolate us from each other. They also discuss the gendered nature of “loneliness” at length, which I only mention to encourage you to search out the paper and read it for yourself.
Unfortunately, all of this historical baggage doesn’t just warp our understanding of what “loneliness” is. Since defining a problem also maps out its solution, it also warps our solutions to it. Critics of LLMs can smuggle in an assumption that interacting via text is inferior to being physically present. But given the choice between reading my tale of a time I might have died, or never learning of it unless we happened to be in the same room and the subject naturally came up during conversation, I bet you’d happily choose the former even if you thought that the written word was inferior.
Conversely, if you think of loneliness as merely a lack of social interaction, you might think you’ve solved the problem by providing everyone with an artificial interactive friend. But given a choice between interacting with a toxic “friend” or never interacting with them at all, I’ve always chosen non-interaction. The quality of the social interaction matters, and I’d rather be alone than be forced to put up with other people’s gaslighting.
Sorry to ruin the suspense, but I made it back to my car. Back then I stuffed my backpack with everything but the kitchen sink, and one bit of advice I’d been gifted was “always carry some straps or rope with you.” I dug out a half-dozen nylon straps, each strong enough to lift me off the ground, and tried to find some way to tie that right snowshoe to my right shoe. It didn’t help that these are plastic snowshoes with metal runners along the bottom, so I was paranoid I’d cut through all my straps before I got back to the car.
My first attempt fell apart after a step or two; I’ve always been terrible at knots. The second lasted maybe a dozen. I think it was the fourth attempt that finally held, though since I was constantly checking and tweaking my work there were no well-defined “attempts.” I made it back with plenty of daylight, and added “purchase a snowshoe repair kit” to my mental TODO list.
As implied by the use of present tense, I still own those snowshoes. Took’m for a spin two weeks ago with a family member, in fact, on a fun but much-too-short romp to a different frozen waterfall. I kept my heart rate up by jogging down the well-trod trail in those shoes, or ignoring the trail and crashing through the underbrush and over fallen logs instead.
I’ve got no idea where I put that repair kit, alas.