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The New Yorker - The History of Loneliness
The New Yorker - The History of Loneliness
Solitude and seclusion are different from loneliness, a state of profound distress
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:
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 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.