...some potent forces: the gradual withering of longstanding institutions, decreased engagement with churches, the fraying bonds of extended families. When you add recent stressors — the rise of social media and virtual life, post-9/11 polarization and the way COVID-19 interrupted existence...
I have long argued that 9/11 fundamentally altered the souls of America from the pursuit of happiness to a collapsed star: we became, or became more, inward-looking, frightened, pessimistic. The metaphor for me was the welcoming torch of the Statue of Liberty turned into a search light. Ted Anthony, the author, employs words unusually and meaningfully. COVID-19 "interrupted existence." It did, didn't it. It interrupted "EXISTENCE." Never thought of it that way, but it did, it "interrupted our very existence."
...as far back as the early 19th century, when the word “loneliness” began to be used in its current context in American life...
That's a remarkable fact. We hardly existed in the early 19th c, we had just been born, but even that close to our birth "loneliness" had taken on a peculiarly American meaning.
...some were already asking the question: Do the contours of American society — that emphasis on individualism, that spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape — encourage isolation and alienation?
“They [Americans] acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone...Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors...
Makes man forget his own personal past. Those who came to America were "starting over", it didn't matter what they had been, they could reinvent themselves and--reinvent their past. The first truly American novel, Huckleberry Finn, has characters who pass themselves off as the lost heirs of European royalty. And Americans reinvent themselves within our borders: We were forever going West searching for personal El Dorado.
Look at this:
In the age before democracy, for better and for worse, “People weren’t lonely. They were tied up in a web of connections. ...Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.
And this, from our founding document, the Declaration of Independence.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another...
“There’s this idea that going out into those vast spaces and connecting with the wilderness and escaping the past was precisely what made us Americans,” Woodard says.
Yes, indeed.
Fueled in part by pandemic distrust, a latter-day strain of individual-over-community sentiment often paired with invocations of liberty and freedom occupies a significant chunk of the national conversation these days — to the point where advocacy about community thinking is sometimes met with accusations of socialism.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Liberty: “The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behaviour, or political views.”-Oxford dictionary. Freedom: “The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants.” Freedom is "power", a weapon; Liberty is a condition where no power is a weapon against you, Liberty is a shield.
The ways Americans perceive themselves as solitary (whether or not it’s true) can be seen in their art.
One of the nation’s early art movements, the mid-19th-century Hudson River School,
made people tiny parts of outsized landscapes, implying both that the land dwarfed humans and that they were being summoned to tame it. From that, you can draw a line straight to Hollywood and director John Ford’s Westerns, which used vast landscapes to isolate and motivate humans for the purposes of telling big stories. Same with music, where both the blues and the “ high lonesome sound ”
helped shape later genres.
In the suburbs, Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking “ The Feminine Mystique ” helped give voice to a generation of lonely women. In the city, Edward Hopper’s work...channeled urban loneliness.
At around the same time, the emergence of film noir — crime and decay in the American city its frequent subject — helped shape the figure of the lonely man alone in a crowd who might be a protagonist, might be an antagonist, might be both.
Today, loneliness plays out on streaming TV all the time in the forms of shows like “Severance,” “Shrinking,” “Beef” and, most prominently, the earnest “Ted Lasso,” a show about an American in Britain who — despite being known and celebrated by many — is consistently and obviously lonely.
In March, the show’s creator and star, Jason Sudeikis, appeared with his cast at the White House to talk about the issue that the show is, in its final season, more about than ever: mental health. “We all know someone who has, or have been that someone ourselves actually, that’s struggled, that’s felt isolated, that’s felt anxious, that has felt alone,” Sudeikis said.
Solitude and isolation do not automatically equal loneliness. ✋But they all live in the same part of town.😏During the pandemic, [Surgeon General Vivek] Murthy’s report found, people tightened their groups of friends and cut time spent with them. According to the report, Americans spent 20 minutes a day with friends in 2020 — down from an hour daily two decades ago. Granted, that was during peak COVID. The trend, though, is clear — particularly among young people ages 15 to 24.
An "interrupted existence."
Perhaps many Americans are alone in a crowd...
That has always been my dream existence since I left Barnesboro to live in cities, first Pittsburgh. I never watched the TV show "Cheers" but I knew the theme song. I heard it as affirming my dream existence: "I want to go where nobody knows my name." Honest to God.
..awash in a sea of voices both physical and virtual yet by themselves much of the time, seeking community but suspicious of it.
The first clause: me; the second: not me. I like the liberty of being alone and unbothered with the freedom to walk to a restaurant, to interact with people when I wish. I could not have either that liberty or that freedom in a small town or rural area.
Some of the modernizing forces that stitched the United States together in the first place — commerce, communication, roads — are, in their current forms, part of what isolates people today. There’s a lot of space between the general store and Amazon deliveries to your door, between mailing a letter and navigating virtual worlds, between roads that connect towns and freeways that overrun them.
