An Industry For Loneliness
Solitude, They Say, Makes You Sick
When you start reading about loneliness, the warnings come fast. You’ll be told that being alone isn’t just unpleasant—it’s downright dangerous.
Solitude, they say, makes you sick; it supposedly shortens your life, and is “worse than smoking”.
Experts will quickly list all the falling dominoes: heart disease, depression, dementia, addiction, suicide.
Then, in the next breath, you’ll be reassured—ironically—that “you’re not alone in being lonely”.
This is the tone of our time: a blend of statistical terror and sentimental reassurance.
To be human, we are told, is to be a social animal—dependent on groups for survival. Yet the statement always hides its sleight of hand.
“As far as we can trace human history,” the experts say, “we have always lived in groups.”
How far can we trace it? To Sumer, perhaps—six thousand years, if we’re generous. A mere flicker in the two-million-year lifespan of the genus Homo.
What of the hundreds of millennia before writing, before agriculture, before the counting of populations? Did the scattered hunter, the quiet gatherer, the solitary wanderer—did they perish of loneliness? Or did they die, as everything living must, of hunger, disease, or time?
The record is silent. But silence is not proof of absence; it is absence of proof.
The truth is that loneliness, as a diagnostic concept, is barely a century old. It emerged not from the campfire or the cave, but from the laboratory and the ledger. Once the economy of wellness was established, aloneness became a market. Measurable. Monetisable. Manageable.
Solitude transformed into pathology
Surveys and studies transform solitude into pathology. A few thousand respondents answer a questionnaire—“How many friends do you have?” “How often do you feel left out?”—and their answers are extrapolated to millions.
From these numbers emerge declarations of crisis, followed by calls for funding, policy, and intervention. Each step confirms the fiction that to be solitary is to be unwell.
But not all connection heals, and not all solitude harms. There is a difference between isolation and stillness, between being cut off and being complete.
The man who can sit quietly with himself, content in his own presence, is often far less lonely than the man surrounded by company yet hollow within.
Drowning, not waving, in noise
The ancient assumption that humans must live in groups to survive is partly true, but survival is not the same as peace. Survival requires numbers; peace requires awareness. One is external, the other internal. A tribe may protect your body, but only you can companion your own mind.
Life expectancy in earlier times was brief, yes—but not necessarily impoverished. To imagine that a thirty-year-old in prehistory felt “lonely” is to mistake our modern categories for timeless truths. The language of loneliness presupposes leisure, comparison, and reflection—luxuries of societies no longer struggling for food.
We are not dying of loneliness; we are drowning in noise. We mistake disconnection from ourselves for disconnection from others. We seek more contact when what we need is clearer presence.
The so-called epidemic of loneliness is not evidence of mass illness but of a civilisation that cannot sit still. It is the panic of a species that has forgotten how to be alone without anxiety.
To be alone is not to be unwell. It is to be undistracted. When silence is no longer treated as a symptom, it becomes a sanctuary.
