Are You Lonely?

For as long as I've been living in New York, I've assumed that the narrative of lonely, urban alienation is true. I've used (several times) in my sermons the statistic that New York is the single most single place in the world (1 out of every 2 dwellings here is inhabited by a single person).

According to a new school of thought, though, the time-honored story of the lonely single New Yorker isn't as true as previously assumed. Jennifer Senior wrote a feature piece in New York magazine about loneliness to challenge the myth.

Senior distills the argument like this: we have a lot of friends here--our social networks are denser; we have a wider variety of connections, strong and weak; the simple act of walking down the street in New York is "warmer" than it has perhaps ever been. Basically, while many of us live alone, we don't feel lonely.

Ever since I read Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone in college, I've presumed that American society is on an atomizing trajectory--that social connections are disintegrating and that we're choosing less public, more private lives. Putnam's thesis (based on extensive statistical analysis of American living patterns) is that social life in the United States is deteriorating, causing potentially great harm to our common life (politics, education, parks, the arts, etc). But current sociologists are arguing that even though "traditional" social networks are breaking down (such as bowling leagues, like Putnam says), people are busy creating new ways of communing with one another--ways that may not be registering on the data-gathering tools used by Putnam and others. Senior writes in her article:

[I]n the sunshiny, low-crime New York of 2008, Grand Central [Station] feels much more like a village green than the melancholy nowhereland of Sondheim’s vision (or worse, Travis Bickle’s open-air asylum). There are tourists asking other tourists to take pictures of them; cops kibitzing with passersby; friends meeting friends to go for drinks. “All these transient connections were forming,” [Sociologist John] Cacioppo marvels. “These people weren’t even conscious of the many ways they were forming.”

In cities, Cacioppo (and others) argue, we just have more relationships. We may be single, many of us, but, for example, we take comfort in being around more single people. We commune with co-workers more frequently. We form informal connections and relationships (with the gal at the coffee counter or the deli, with the dry cleaning guy, with a doorman or super). In the end, these relationships can do as much for our peace of mind--and our health--as being in a committed relationship or being married. One of the most telling parts of the Senior essay was this paragraph on the positive health effects of informal connections:

“In our data,” adds Lisa Berkman, the Harvard epidemiologist who discovered the importance of social networks to heart patients, “friends substitute perfectly well for family.” This finding is important. It may be true that marriage prolongs life. But so, in Berkman’s view, does friendship—and considering how important friendship is to New Yorkers (home of Friends, after all), where so many of us live on our own, this finding is blissfully reassuring. In fact, Berkman has consistently found that living alone poses no health risk, whether she’s looking at 20,000 gas and electricity workers in France or a random sample of almost 7,000 men and women in Alameda, California, so long as her subjects have intimate ties of some kind as well as a variety of weaker ones. Those who are married but don’t have any civic ties or close friends or relatives, for instance, face greater health risks than those who live alone but have lots of friends and regularly volunteer at the local soup kitchen. “Any one connection doesn’t really protect you,” she says. “You need relationships that provide love and intimacy and you need relationships that help you feel like you’re participating in society in some way.”

Brian Lehrer's show had a nice summary of the story, here, interviewing Senior and Cacioppo. Cacioppo says that we should not presume that loneliness is a default condition or an inevitability--loneliness is not a necessary consequence of being alone. Instead, it's an evolutionary adaptation that functions as a "trigger," like hunger or thirst, forcing us out of isolating situations. It's not about whether we live alone that determines whether we're lonely, but it's instead gauged by how we "fit" into our environment. Do we connect with the people around us, with nature, with the rhythms of life? How do we deal with being alone? What do we do with our alone time and how does that time stand in balance with our sociability?

My own experience is that New York is a bit of a yo-yo of aloneness and togetherness. I usually seem to go in anywhere from 2-6 week cycles when I'll feel great and like I'm really "fitting" in the city, and then I'll hit a funk in which I feel very alone and like I don't fit (this has been true as a single person and even still as a married person).

From a church perspective, it's interesting to think a bit about how we address loneliness (or whether we even should try) as a theological issue. Studies have shown that people who attend church regularly live longer--but that's not much of a theological rationale for church-going. The notion that people who are connected to others (as church people generally are) are happier and feel less lonely is something we should promote, I guess. Church-going makes your life longer and happier... OK, that's all good.

But I do wonder whether the "loneliness" that these folks are studying is the same thing as existential loneliness. I mean, I could have lots of weak and strong ties, but still feel adrift in life... right? The solitary human being without social ties seems to pose a slightly different challenge than the solitary human being facing, say, her own mortality... or her own reason for being.

This is where the question of "fitting" into an environment seems to me to still require religious stories. Our "world" is larger than our physical world and the people who inhabit it. The feeling of "loneliness" encompasses a reality bigger than whether or not we have social ties. To me, it's an issue of fitting into a greater story--a narrative that weaves together self, family, others, nation, world, history. What is the directedness of the human experience? If I don't have a sense of that--and that I share a vision of life's directedness with others--I'm still likely to feel off-kilter... and might describe that feeling as "loneliness."

Or maybe that's "anxiety." Maybe what we should be asking is not whether New Yorkers are lonelier than others... but are more anxious?