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LONELINESS

According to Wikipedia the existentialists believe that loneliness is the essence of being. ‘Each human comes into the world alone, travels through life as a separate person, and ultimately dies alone. Coping with this, accepting it, and learning how to direct our own lives with some degree of grace and satisfaction is the human condition’.

David Vincent in his ‘History of Solitude’  adds that ‘In the 19th century, only 1% of the British population lived on their own; in 2011 it was 31%, or some 8 million people. Yet as urbanisation and large families pitched people together, the anonymous world of industrial capitalism also split them apart. Rural life may have been rough, but at least you knew who lived next door.’ In her ‘Biography of Loneliness’ Fay Alberti argues that “loneliness was invented around 1800 and Vincent believes that ‘lonely’ becomes a negative emotion around this time’.

Alberti also argues that “lonely people are 30% more likely to die earlier than less lonely ones, the poor are lonelier than the well-off and the young are the loneliest of all.”The Wikipedia entry reinforces this and goes on to add that ‘one consistent finding has been that loneliness is not evenly distributed across a nation's population. It tends to be concentrated among vulnerable sub groups; for example the poor, the unemployed, and immigrants. Some of the most severe loneliness tends to be found among international students from countries in Asia with a collective culture, when they come to study in countries that are more individualist’.

Sources Wikipedia and Guardian book reviews by Terry Eagleton