Ballin' Alone: A Rationalist Guide To Our Age Of Loneliness

Alternate Title: The Ice(olation) Age

Intro: That time I made a war veteran cry in the middle of the ice cream aisle

Late 2023 I found myself in the back of a grocery store, frantically searching for the last tub of Ben and Jerry’s Caramel ice cream. Before I could into a full night of gourmet degeneracy, however, I heard a voice calling out from behind me.

“What’s up with all this Keto ice cream stuff? Back in my day you just got fat or burned it off the next day."

Apparently this person — a rather dumpy gentleman in his mid 70s —  was talking to me. I initially didn't give him any response besides a nervous head nod, although that didn’t stop him from holding me as his captive audience as he professed his opinions about frozen dairy products and their relative merits over the next several minutes. I was effectively forced to listen as this man started meandering aimlessly from one subject to the next.

But then he began to elaborate on the more personal aspects of his life. At some point in his ramblings he became more somber, eventually telling me:

1. He had been a soldier who had been deployed to France several decades prior.

2. He had met a woman there, and convinced her to come back to North America with him to get married.

3. His wife was really good with taxes, and always kept neat paperwork while he was away at one military base or another. She was also a poet, who liked to write in three different languages.

4. His wife had passed away during the pandemic, leaving him with nobody to talk to; his war veteran buddies had all passed away and he was effectively estranged from his children.

5. He was a chainsmoker, and while he initially tried to quit, he no longer saw the point — he now had cancer. At this point, the cancer was a relief.

After going on for about ten straight minutes, he was on the verge of tears. It was clear that he had been holding all of these thoughts for several weeks, probably longer, just searching for someone who would finally listen to him. At the end of these ten minutes, however, he had this moment of realization, as if suddenly becoming aware of how much he had confessed to a total stranger. All at once he became incredibly embarrassed, and he practically sprinted away, leaving me in the middle of the aisle with a half melted tub of ice cream in hand.

This man had served his country for the better part of four decades, and the only person who listened to him was some random guy searching for Ben and Jerry’s at 10:30PM on a Thursday.

So when was V-COV day again?

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be in Edenborough castle on Armistice Day, and so I got to watch a large procession of soldiers march out to one of the smaller keeps to commemorate the end of World War One. Later that night I went to Glasgow, and saw the entire city lit up with lights and poppies.

No doubt there are similar commemorations for World War 2 — but as far as I can tell there is no universal "V-COV" day — the definite end point to the COVID. Some shirtless guy in a Viking helmet that stormed a building where politicians pretend to represent for the people, and everyone just decided that COVID was no longer top priority. We just kind of forgot about it — the same way Daenerys Targaryen just kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet in season eight of Game of Thrones.

In a very real sense, the pandemic never ended. The New Normal™  and all that. But more than any virus, the lingering social effects have never really left us. We've been "Bowling Alone" for the longest time, but now we find ourselves the only one at the alley.

Loneliness: The Data

• The Survey Center on American Life published finding that male friendlessness has increased 500% for men, and nearly 1000% for women over the last 30 years.

• 100 years ago the average number of close friends somebody had was three. Now the most frequent response is zero.

• A meta analysis reveals that chronic loneliness is as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s a spurious comparison at best, but for now we can generalize and say that chronic isolation leads to a noticeable shortening of lifespan.

• Gen Z in America are hit particularly hard, with 73% of them reporting they feel lonely at least some of the time. Once again I have some issues with the vagueness of the word  "some" — but we can safely assume the trend is in the wrong direction.

• Japan and South Korea have similar problems, with growing numbers of isolated youth quite literally never leaving their rooms, called "Hikikomori". Currently the number of Hikikomori is around 1.2 million.

• Robert D Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone which highlighted the issue of growing isolation and hyper individualism.

• Putnam wrote the book back in 2000, and since then the problem has only become exponentially worse — and no small part due to the presence of social media. It is a psychological experiment we have collectively (and mostly involuntarily) signed ourselves up for.

• More recently, Vivek Murthy (Surgeon General of the U.S.) wrote a similar book called Together, highlighting how this issue has become a health emergency.

The Neuroscience of Loneliness

The journal of neuropsychopharmacology published an aggregated analysis of loneliness and the effects on the brain, systematically reviewing 41 different studies with over 16,000 participants in total. They found the following:

• Cortical structures (associated with inhibition and executive reasoning) exhibit significantly less activation in lonely people. This means that means lonely people have a harder time regulating their own emotions, resisting base impulses, and empathizing with other people.

• The dentate gyrus of the hippocampus shows up to a 7% reduction in neurons. This means that people who are chronically lonely cannot remember things at a normal capacity.

• Lonely people have an increased activation in the amygdala, which is responsible for fear and threat detection. Every stranger is treated as a potential enemy by default.

• Lonely people tend to exhibit decrease release of serotonin and oxytocin, as well as chronically elevated levels of cortisol.

None of these findings are particularly revolutionary or counterintuitive; anybody with a basic understanding of neurobiology might have guessed these outcomes.

The one finding which I do find interesting, however, comes from this journal, which highlights the link between loneliness and idiosyncratic neural processing.

To explain this by way of example:

I know a couple of people who like to show they're engaged in conversation by trying to guess what the end of my sentence is going to be. For example, I'll say something like, "One of the things I find really interesting about reading Marcus Aurelius is —"

And they will cut me off and say, "What a good writer he is!"

Getting cut off like this is annoying, but it's especially irritating because I'll have to answer,  "No, I was going to say how dejected and somber Marcus Aurelius comes across in his private reflections. For an emperor, he seemed almost grumpy."

When two people “click“ with one another, it means that they are exhibiting similar brainwave patterns. They are able to correctly guess each other’s sentences, so to speak. Conversely, processing the world around you in a different way from everybody else can be just as isolating as any physical separation.

Mainstream coverage of the issue only scratches the surface.

The issue of chronic isolation is starting to gain some traction in the mainstream media. For example, the New York Times published this article, suggesting that the cure to (male) loneliness comes in the form of pickleball courts. If nothing else, it has arguably one of the most majestic banner pictures I've ever seen in my life:

Yet the majority of the discourse only scratches the surface. They unwittingly were intentionally neglect would I like to call the “four uncomfortable truths” of loneliness.

Uncomfortable truth 1: Loneliness is a housing issue

This article on The Housing Theory of Everything makes a pretty compelling case on the majority of issues in the modern world are ultimately downstream of housing issues. The article itself focusses on climate change, obesity, fertility, and economic productivity, but we can throw loneliness and isolation into the mix.

It’s a fairly straightforward line to draw; if people can’t afford to move around, they can't interact with new people, which means they are restricted to whatever local population they already happened to be a part of. Even people in high density areas might not have the privilege of meeting others, considering the majority of them won’t have any discretionary income beyond basic rent and utilities.

This issue magnifies further considering people in North America are increasingly clustering in a select few cities, further driving up the housing prices in these areas while hollowing out any potential growth and innovation in secondary markets. It’s effectively a societal level gentrification.

Uncomfortable truth 2: Yes, you still need to be taught how to use a can opener.

In my article "you needed to be taught how to use a can opener" I posited that even the most rudimentary tasks require an orienting framework in order to actually learn it. The example I used was a kid who had never used a manual can opener.

It has to do with the curse of knowledge. Without getting too technical, it’s the reason why most Gen Z kids don’t know how to repair their car (or even drive one, for that matter). It’s also the reason why extremely old people have trouble opening a PDF. If you don’t learn it, you won’t know it, no matter how obvious it looks from the outside.

To apply that idea to this context, it’s clear that the hyper individualism of society has isolated a disproportional number of youths, to the extent that many of them have not gained an even rudimentary understanding of how to socialize. This is not their fault; they simply don't know how to use the “can opener.” But in this case the consequences are a great deal more devastating.

Uncomfortable truth 3: The incentive to profit off the rot

One of the more disconcerting aspects about this issue lies in one of the potential solutions: AI companions.

Aside from reading articles like this and occasionally hearing about it on podcasts, I didn’t give the subject much consideration, but as I continued to go to rationalist meet ups and started discussing the issue of loneliness with various friend groups, I became increasingly disconcerted by the amount of people who believed AI companionship would become the inevitable solution — or at least the default solution.

Considering I myself have been harping on about the power of incentive structures for several articles now, it’s clear that the incentives to make a profit don’t exactly align with our overall health. It’s one thing to create slow and long-term solutions to help foster community; it’s far more profitable to create some sort of technological simulation of companionship, however unsatisfying it ultimately proves to be.

It is already happening. Caryn Marjorie has created an AI companion which generated $75,000 in the first week, and is projected to net millions per month. Combine this with technologies such as the Apple Vision Pro, and iterate a few times, and a Blade Runner 2049 future doesn’t seem entirely out of the question.

Uncomfortable truth 4: Neither sex has a monopoly on this issue

Without getting overly culture war, one of the bigger problems around the discourse is that, like many other aspects of society, it's quickly turning into a man versus woman thing. Women feel invalidated when they bring up their own loneliness because most guys have a hard time believing that they can, in fact, be lonely. Men feel invalidated because if they express their dissatisfaction with their relationships, romantic or platonic, it becomes an easy opportunity for people online (usually on the progressive side of the political spectrum) to call them incels or losers.

My sophisticated pundit take is this: This is not helping.

Naturally I am exposed to one side of the issue more frequently, and in that sense it's disappointing to see the double standard in ideology. People on the progressive side of the political spectrum usually have little trouble in believing in the systemic inequities. For example, if a man points out that he is having trouble finding a job because of his black sounding name, progressives will have a little trouble believing this. If that same person points out that he faces a similar issue on his dating profile, they will turn into the libertarians they normally deride.

Clearly he needs to go to the gym. Clearly he needs to put himself out there more. Clearly he needs educate himself.

A quick search on YouTube of “I have no friends” shows that a good number of people who make these heart wrenching confessions are otherwise well adjusted people — of both sexes.

In my own life I’ve seen the issue play out for both sexes. Shortly after making a war veteran cry in the middle of the ice cream aisle, I was at the dog park, where there happened to be one other lady (mid 50s, Eastern European). After some small talk, we began to speak about one of the nearby restaurants — which was notable because it was finally open after being closed for over a decade.

It was here that this lady matter-of-factly told me: “I would love to go to the new restaurant. I used to love trying out new cuisines. But I have nobody to go with, so I probably never will.”

She didn’t mean it to garner any pity, but it struck me nevertheless, yet there nothing really that I could say in response that wouldn’t come across as either pathetic or condescending or otherwise creepy.

The point being: men have their various colored pills, and women have their "Men are trash" t-shirts, but this epidemic doesn't discriminate. It's a glass box all of us are trapped in, and if we're going to actually find a solution, we need to stop dunking on the other side and realize that neither men nor women have a monopoly on this.

OK, now 95% of people have stopped reading, so now I can say whatever I want

Originally this post was going to be a little bit more self-help in nature, where I was going to write in flowery pros and a semi-fictional point of view. Here’s the TLDR of that post:

1. Get good sleep

2. Don’t eat processed food that upsets your stomach

3. Have a plan for the day so that you don’t find yourself with time to ruminate

4. Have some sort of mindfulness practice. Yes, I know you think it’s just woo woo garbage and that you are far too logical in order for those things to work on you. For the love of god just do it anyway.

I don’t know what it is about me, but aside from the war veteran and the lady at the dog park, an increasing number of people have been outright confessing to me how lonely and isolated they feel in their daily life.

I wouldn’t really consider myself an expert in anything (besides my absolutely flawless Jason Statham impersonation) — but when it comes to spending extended intervals of time by myself (either voluntary or otherwise) I know a few things. I’ve been “flattening the curve” for the better part of three decades.

Without boring people with the story of my life nobody cares about, I was constantly moving around as a kid (around a dozen schools by the time I was in fifth grade). This, along with: a) being an only child b) my idiosyncratic social tendencies — collectively made for the perfect storm of living in the Perpetual Outgroup™ .

So I can empathize with all of this.

It’s a pain in your chest. It’s the words that are caught in your throat. It’s the endless rumination, wondering what exactly about yourself you have to fix before they finally let you in — whoever “they” is.

It’s the feeling that you’re only, like, 72.35% human — because you’re technically part of the world, but you’re not really participating in it. That other 27.65% is an array of human experience closed to you.

In some ways it becomes a superpower. If you’re a low status individual for long enough, there’s no form of insult or rejection that can actually hurt you anymore. It’s like throwing another piece of litter onto a mountain of trash.

But it also means that you don’t care if you die from cancer, because your wife and your war buddies are all dead, and the only person you can tell your life story to is some guy searching for ice cream.

I suppose that’s why I stopped and listened to him, even when I had the opportunity to walk away. On some level I can see myself turning into that guy. We all have something that we want to say, with nobody to listen.

Conclusion

Honestly I don’t know how to end this post. I don’t know who’s reading this, so I’m not going to try and wrap this up with some little platitude that doesn’t really apply to your situation. I’m certainly not going to pretend that I have any sort of solution for the housing crisis, AI companionship, or the gender divide.

Instead I will reiterate something I previously wrote in “Reasons to keep living” — one of the few pieces of self-help advice which is both true and helpful:

If you’re miserable, you might as well take your shot at X — whatever X happens to be. Because, barring any financial devastation or physical injury, the worst thing that can happen if you fail is that you become miserable. But you’re already miserable, so you have nothing to lose.