The New Yorker - The History of Loneliness

The History of Loneliness
Until a century or so ago, almost no one lived alone; now many

endure shutdowns and lockdowns on their own. How did modern
life get so lonely?
By Jill Lepore
March 30, 2020
Solitude and seclusion are different from loneliness, a state of profound distress
The female chimpanzee at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden died of

complications from a cold early in the morning of December 27,
1878. “Miss Chimpanzee,” according to news reports, died “while
receiving the attentions of her companion.” Both she and that
companion, a four-year-old male, had been born near the Gabon
River, in West Africa; they had arrived in Philadelphia in April,
together. “These Apes can be captured only when young,” the zoo
superintendent, Arthur E. Brown, explained, and they are generally
taken only one or two at a time. In the wild, “they live together in
small bands of half a dozen and build platforms among the branches,
out of boughs and leaves, on which they sleep.” But in Philadelphia,
in the monkey house, where it was just the two of them, they had
become “accustomed to sleep at night in each other’s arms on a
blanket on the floor,” clutching each other, desperately, achingly,
through the long, cold night.
The Philadelphia Zoological Garden was the first zoo in the United
States. It opened in 1874, two years after Charles Darwin published
“The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” in which he
related what he had learned about the social attachments of primates
from Abraham Bartlett, the superintendent of the Zoological Society
of London:
Many kinds of monkeys, as I am assured by the keepers in the Zoological Gardens,

delight in fondling and being fondled by each other, and by persons to whom they
are attached. Mr. Bartlett has described to me the behavior of two chimpanzees,
rather older animals than those generally imported into this country, when they
were first brought together. They sat opposite, touching each other with their much
protruded lips; and the one put his hand on the shoulder of the other. They then
mutually folded each other in their arms. Afterwards they stood up, each with one
arm on the shoulder of the other, lifted up their heads, opened their mouths, and
yelled with delight.
Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the

coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. and Miss Chimpanzee, in Philadelphia, were two of only four

chimpanzees in America, and when she died human observers
mourned her loss, but, above all, they remarked on the behavior of her
companion. For a long time, they reported, he tried in vain to rouse
her. Then he “went into a frenzy of grief.” This paroxysm accorded
entirely with what Darwin had described in humans: “Persons
suffering from excessive grief often seek relief by violent and almost
frantic movements.” The bereaved chimpanzee began to pull out the
hair from his head. He wailed, making a sound the zookeeper had
never heard before: Hah-ah-ah-ah-ah. “His cries were heard over the
entire garden. He dashed himself against the bars of the cage and
butted his head upon the hard-wood bottom, and when this burst of
grief was ended he poked his head under the straw in one corner and
moaned as if his heart would break.”
Nothing quite like this had ever been recorded. Superintendent Brown
prepared a scholarly article, “Grief in the Chimpanzee.” Even long
after the death of the female, Brown reported, the male “invariably
slept on a cross-beam at the top of the cage, returning to inherited
habit, and showing, probably, that the apprehension of unseen dangers
has been heightened by his sense of loneliness.”
Loneliness is grief, distended. People are primates, and even more

sociable than chimpanzees. We hunger for intimacy. We wither
without it. And yet, long before the present pandemic, with its forced
isolation and social distancing, humans had begun building their own
monkey houses. Before modern times, very few human beings lived
alone. Slowly, beginning not much more than a century ago, that
changed. In the United States, more than one in four people now lives
alone; in some parts of the country, especially big cities, that
percentage is much higher. You can live alone without being lonely,
and you can be lonely without living alone, but the two are closely
tied together, which makes lockdowns, sheltering in place, that much
harder to bear. Loneliness, it seems unnecessary to say, is terrible for
your health. In 2017 and 2018, the former U.S. Surgeon General
Vivek H. Murthy declared an “epidemic of loneliness,” and the U.K.
appointed a Minister of Loneliness. To diagnose this condition,
doctors at U.C.L.A. devised a Loneliness Scale. Do you often,
sometimes, rarely, or never feel these ways?
I am unhappy doing so many things alone.

I have nobody to talk to.
I cannot tolerate being so alone.
I feel as if nobody really understands me.
I am no longer close to anyone.
There is no one I can turn to.
I feel isolated from others.
In the age of quarantine, does one disease produce another?
“Loneliness” is a vogue term, and like all vogue terms it’s a cover for
all sorts of things most people would rather not name and have no
idea how to fix. Plenty of people like to be alone. I myself love to be
alone. But solitude and seclusion, which are the things I love, are
different from loneliness, which is a thing I hate. Loneliness is a state
of profound distress. Neuroscientists identify loneliness as a state of
hypervigilance whose origins lie among our primate ancestors and in
our own hunter-gatherer past. Much of the research in this field was
led by John Cacioppo, at the Center for Cognitive and Social
Neuroscience, at the University of Chicago. Cacioppo, who died in
2018, was known as Dr. Loneliness. In the new book “Together: The
Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World”
(Harper Wave), Murthy explains how Cacioppo’s evolutionary theory
of loneliness has been tested by anthropologists at the University of
Oxford, who have traced its origins back fifty-two million years, to
the very first primates. Primates need to belong to an intimate social
group, a family or a band, in order to survive; this is especially true
for humans (humans you don’t know might very well kill you, which
is a problem not shared by most other primates). Separated from the
group—either finding yourself alone or finding yourself among a
group of people who do not know and understand you—triggers a
fight-or-flight response. Cacioppo argued that your body understands
being alone, or being with strangers, as an emergency. “Over
millennia, this hypervigilance in response to isolation became
embedded in our nervous system to produce the anxiety we associate
with loneliness,” Murthy writes. We breathe fast, our heart races, our
blood pressure rises, we don’t sleep. We act fearful, defensive, and
self-involved, all of which drive away people who might actually
want to help, and tend to stop lonely people from doing what would
benefit them most: reaching out to others.
The loneliness epidemic, in this sense, is rather like the obesity

epidemic. Evolutionarily speaking, panicking while being alone, like
finding high-calorie foods irresistible, is highly adaptive, but, more
recently, in a world where laws (mostly) prevent us from killing one
another, we need to work with strangers every day, and the problem is
more likely to be too much high-calorie food rather than too little.
These drives backfire.
Loneliness, Murthy argues, lies behind a host of problems—anxiety,

violence, trauma, crime, suicide, depression, political apathy, and
even political polarization. Murthy writes with compassion, but his
everything-can-be-reduced-to-loneliness argument is hard to swallow,
not least because much of what he has to say about loneliness was
said about homelessness in the nineteen-eighties, when
“homelessness” was the vogue term—a word somehow easier to say
than “poverty”—and saying it didn’t help. (Since then, the number of
homeless Americans has increased.) Curiously, Murthy often
conflates the two, explaining loneliness as feeling homeless. To
belong is to feel at home. “To be at home is to be known,” he writes.
Home can be anywhere. Human societies are so intricate that people
have meaningful, intimate ties of all kinds, with all sorts of groups of
other people, even across distances. You can feel at home with
friends, or at work, or in a college dining hall, or at church, or in
Yankee Stadium, or at your neighborhood bar. Loneliness is the
feeling that no place is home. “In community after community,”
Murthy writes, “I met lonely people who felt homeless even though
they had a roof over their heads.” Maybe what people experiencing
loneliness and people experiencing homelessness both need are
homes with other humans who love them and need them, and to know
they are needed by them in societies that care about them. That’s not a
policy agenda. That’s an indictment of modern life.
In “A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion” (Oxford),

the British historian Fay Bound Alberti defines loneliness as “a
conscious, cognitive feeling of estrangement or social separation from
meaningful others,” and she objects to the idea that it’s universal,
transhistorical, and the source of all that ails us. She argues that the
condition really didn’t exist before the nineteenth century, at least not
in a chronic form. It’s not that people—widows and widowers, in
particular, and the very poor, the sick, and the outcast—weren’t
lonely; it’s that, since it wasn’t possible to survive without living
among other people, and without being bonded to other people, by
ties of affection and loyalty and obligation, loneliness was a passing
experience. Monarchs probably were lonely, chronically. (Hey, it’s
lonely at the top!) But, for most ordinary people, daily living involved
such intricate webs of dependence and exchange—and shared shelter
—that to be chronically or desperately lonely was to be dying. The
word “loneliness” very seldom appears in English before about
1800. Robinson Crusoe was alone, but never lonely. One exception is
“Hamlet”: Ophelia suffers from “loneliness”; then she drowns herself.
Modern loneliness, in Alberti’s view, is the child of capitalism and

secularism. “Many of the divisions and hierarchies that have
developed since the eighteenth century—between self and world,
individual and community, public and private—have been naturalized
through the politics and philosophy of individualism,” she writes. “Is
it any coincidence that a language of loneliness emerged at the same
time?” It is not a coincidence. The rise of privacy, itself a product of
market capitalism—privacy being something that you buy—is a
driver of loneliness. So is individualism, which you also have to pay
for.

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The History of Loneliness

Until a century or so ago, almost no one lived alone; now many

March 30, 2020

The female chimpanzee at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden died of

Many kinds of monkeys, as I am assured by the keepers in the Zoological Gardens,

Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the

Mr. and Miss Chimpanzee, in Philadelphia, were two of only four

Loneliness is grief, distended. People are primates, and even more

I am unhappy doing so many things alone.

In the age of quarantine, does one disease produce another?

The loneliness epidemic, in this sense, is rather like the obesity

Loneliness, Murthy argues, lies behind a host of problems—anxiety,

In “A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion” (Oxford),

Modern loneliness, in Alberti’s view, is the child of capitalism and

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