“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal
As a writer, I love to uncover strange historical facts. It’s part of the way I get creative, and recently, I found out that the term “lonely” was once part of a rare compendium of words.
No, really. It was a word that was actually rare.
In the year 1674, a man by the name of John Ray added the word “loneliness” into a book of rarely-used words. The word “lonely” was also added. He was right. If you take a look at old literature, “loneliness” just doesn’t show up.
The only real time that you will see the word “loneliness” in classic literature is in Hamlet, when Ophelia suffers from it and then later dies as a result of madness. It was also featured in the epic poem “Paradise Lost.”
An article in The New Yorker backs this up, noting, “The word “loneliness” very seldom appears in English before about 1800. Robinson Crusoe was alone, but never lonely.”
It seems like loneliness may be a part of the human condition, but it’s clear that it’s a far more pervasive issue today. But, how is this possible? The world is more populated now than it ever was before!
As someone who grew up lonely, it’s hard to imagine loneliness as a modern issue…but it is.
How often is it that you feel lonely? If you feel a pang of loneliness on a regular basis, congrats. You’re like at least half of the population’s youth. (61 percent of young Americans feel lonely on a regular basis.)
When I was younger, I always felt like loneliness was just a thing that was part of life. You either were blessed with the friends and popularity that came from having the right family, right looks, and right income or you just weren’t.
I thought that was how it always was. I mean, I read books about how strict Victorian culture was. I’ve read The Scarlet Letter and that one book about how shunned women of “ill repute” were in society.
Considering everything, one would think it’s normal to feel lonely. As it turns out, we are actually the loneliest we’ve ever been.
Why are we so lonely these days?
I want to say it’s because of the pandemic, changing social standards, as well as the way that corporations wrecked online dating. While we often point to these issues, they are not the only reasons why.
Truthfully, there are far deeper conditions that make it hard for us to bond the way we once did.
In the past, humanity had to rely on each other much harder to survive.
I don’t think we fully appreciate how easy life is today. We have massive corporate farms that large-scale produce our food. We have technology to offer irrigation, pest control, and even artificial lighting for indoor plant growth.
Every single country has infrastructure that makes travel across the world a cinch. You can actually get mail in any part of the country that you wish and you don’t have to deliver it yourself.
Hell, you can also access the world’s entire vast wealth of knowledge by pressing a button on your phone. That’s incredible!
It was not always this way.
For most of humanity’s history, everything from food to shelter was precarious. There wasn’t always enough food to go around. Disease was rife. Sanitation was sketchy, and many people died very young.
Food, in particular, was not easy to come by or ship long distances. The advent of canning helped, but it wasn’t a panacea. What I’m saying is that most food production was fairly local or traded by sea.
If people didn’t work together, we’d have died out. Even hunter-gatherer societies have to work together just to keep themselves fed. This is one of the reasons we humans instinctively feel exclusion as a serious injury. If you were excluded in the past, you were going to die in the cold.
Our species’ survival required us to work together and get along. The more dire the situation, the more cooperation has to happen. With cooperation comes interaction and bonding. That’s why societies were not as lonely.
How do I know this? Simple: I’ve been homeless in New York City. I’ve been in circles where things were always dire. The funny thing is, those circles are never lonely. They have way bigger issues to worry about.