Is it possible that loneliness is worse for you — and a harder habit to break — than smoking?
Maybe. The only way health and science experts could make the health crisis surrounding chronic loneliness more urgent would be to announce that loneliness makes Americans look fat, especially from behind.
The U.S. Surgeon General issued a report in 1964 making it clear to Americans that “cigarette smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate.” In response, many smokers starting putting down their butts.
You know what’s been proven to contribute substantially to mortality from specific diseases and to the overall death rate in 2019? Loneliness. The figure most often reported is that chronic loneliness has the same effect as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So why, in response, aren’t more of us getting off our butts and running out to hug our neighbors? Some of you will explain, quietly and calmly, that you’re introverts who value time alone and that this doesn’t apply to you. You’re entirely correct. Unlike chronic loneliness, a consciously chosen solitary life can be both satisfying and healthy.
Philosopher Paul Tillich made what I believe is the most concise distinction between loneliness and solitude when he wrote: “Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.”
Unwilling loneliness, in contrast to solitude, is disorienting. Loneliness is where we cannot be who we really are. Instead, we lose perspective, lose our balance and no longer intuit where, precisely, the boundaries lie between the world and ourselves.
It’s as if we become unwitting mimes, slapping against invisible walls that are imperceptible to everyone else but impossible for us to shatter.
One of the oldest findings on loneliness involved children who were kept in an orphanage, without any adult touch or attention apart from being fed and kept clean. Their caretakers thought they were keeping the children from catching deadly infectious diseases but were surprised when the children died anyway. They lost the infants not to a familiar infection but from what became known as a “failure to thrive.”
And I believe what’s now being called an “epidemic of loneliness” is an adult version of the failure to thrive. Chronically lonely people at any age suffer from acute physical, psychological, intellectual and emotional deprivations.
For all our Facebooking and messaging, we are in greater need of “likes” than we’d imagined. Attachment theories aren’t metaphorical; human beings — actually, most higher mammals — need touch and closeness as much we need sleep.
So let’s celebrate independence while understanding it doesn’t mean alienation. Our survival depends on offering and accepting tenderness, which is the world’s best offer to pass along a light.
Gina Barreca is a board of trustees distinguished professor of English literature at University of Connecticut. She can be reached at www.ginabarreca.com.
