Michael: Here’s a wild thought: the word 'loneliness' as we know it—that deep, aching feeling of isolation—is younger than the United States of America. Kevin: Wait, what? That can't be right. People have been alone forever. What did they call it? I mean, surely cavemen felt lonely. Michael: That’s the fascinating part. They had a word for the physical state of being alone, but not for the emotional crisis it can cause. This is the core idea from a brilliant book we're diving into today, 'A Biography of Loneliness' by Fay Bound Alberti. Kevin: And the author is a cultural historian who specializes in the history of the body and emotions. So she’s not coming at this like a psychologist, but more like an archaeologist digging up the origins of a feeling we all think we know. Michael: Exactly. She argues that for most of human history, being alone was just a fact, a state of 'oneliness.' It wasn't necessarily good or bad. The idea that being alone makes you emotionally deficient, that it’s a kind of sickness, is a surprisingly modern invention. Kevin: Okay, my mind is already a little blown. 'Oneliness.' I've never even heard that word. You're saying we had to invent the feeling of being lonely? How does that even happen? Michael: It happens through stories, through massive shifts in how we see ourselves and society. And to really feel the difference, we just need to look at two famous castaway stories, told almost 300 years apart.

Kevin: Alright, I'm intrigued. Lay it on me. Two castaways. Michael: First, we have Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, published way back in 1719. Crusoe is shipwrecked on a deserted island for 28 years. Twenty-eight years! He builds a home, he farms, he fights off cannibals. But you know what he never does in the entire book? Kevin: Complain about being lonely? Michael: Not once. He never expresses that modern, soul-crushing feeling of isolation. He worries about his survival, he worries about his salvation, he talks to God. His internal world is full. He sees his solitude as a test of his faith and his resourcefulness. He is in a state of 'oneliness,' but his mind isn't consumed by a lack of social connection. Kevin: Wow. So he didn't need to paint a face on a volleyball. Michael: He absolutely did not need a Wilson! Now, fast forward to the year 2000. We get the movie Castaway, with Tom Hanks. His character, Chuck Noland, is also stranded on an island. He's got the survival part down pretty quickly—he learns to make fire, to fish. But what's the central conflict of that movie? Kevin: It's the loneliness. It's the crushing, silent, psychological horror of being completely alone. It drives him to the brink of insanity. Michael: Precisely. And what does he do? He cuts his hand, presses a bloody handprint onto a Wilson volleyball, draws a face on it, and creates a companion. Wilson becomes his lifeline. The most heartbreaking scene in that entire film isn't a shark attack or a storm; it's when he loses that volleyball at sea. He weeps, screaming "Wilson, I'm sorry!" Kevin: Oh man, that scene is devastating. So Crusoe didn't need a volleyball because his entire worldview was different? He had God, a sense of purpose from his faith, a framework for his solitude. While Tom Hanks' character just had... FedEx packages and existential dread? Michael: You've nailed it. Alberti argues that between Crusoe and Castaway, the world fundamentally changed. The 18th and 19th centuries brought massive shifts. First, the decline of religion for many people. Without a constant dialogue with God, silence becomes empty, not sacred. Kevin: The void opens up. Michael: The void opens up. Then you have the rise of individualism. People started to see themselves as unique, special individuals, not just cogs in a community machine. Your personal feelings, your inner world, became incredibly important. Kevin: And if your inner world feels empty, that's now a personal failing. Michael: It's a personal failing! And the final piece was the new emphasis on 'sociability.' In the 18th century, being charming, witty, and good in company became a sign of a good person. Politeness was a virtue. So, if you preferred being alone, you weren't just quiet; you were seen as strange, melancholic, maybe even dangerous. Kevin: That’s incredible. So society basically created a new disease by first telling you that your feelings are the most important thing about you, and then telling you that if you feel like being alone, you're a failure. Michael: That's the biography of loneliness in a nutshell. It wasn't a timeless human curse. It was constructed, piece by piece, until being alone went from a simple physical state, 'oneliness,' to a painful emotional condition: 'loneliness.' Kevin: It's like we built a prison of social expectation and then were shocked when people felt trapped inside it. Michael: And that prison has some very specific, very powerful bars. Which brings us to one of the most powerful cultural myths that keeps us locked in.

Kevin: So if society started telling us we need to be social to be normal, it feels like the next step is telling us we need one perfect person to be complete. Is that where the soulmate myth comes in? Michael: That's exactly where the book goes. Alberti argues that the modern romantic ideal of 'the one'—the soulmate who will complete you—is a massive engine for generating loneliness. Kevin: How so? It sounds like the opposite. It sounds like the cure for loneliness. Michael: That's the trap! The book traces this idea all the way back to Plato's Symposium. The myth goes that humans were once two-headed, four-armed beings who were so powerful they threatened the gods. So Zeus split them in half, and now we're all doomed to wander the earth looking for our other half to feel whole again. Kevin: I remember hearing that. It sounds romantic, but when you actually think about it, it's also kind of horrifying. It means you're born broken. Michael: You are born fundamentally incomplete. And Alberti shows how this idea gets supercharged in the modern era. Think about books like Wuthering Heights. Catherine says of Heathcliff, "I am Heathcliff! He's more myself than I am." Or even modern stories like the Twilight series. Bella's entire existence, her safety, her identity, revolves around finding and keeping her vampire soulmate, Edward. Kevin: Right, and if she doesn't have him, she's not just sad, she's a void. She's nothing. That's a lot of pressure to put on a relationship. Michael: It's an impossible pressure! It defines loneliness as the gap between your reality and this perfect, all-consuming union. If you don't have it, you've failed at the most important quest in life. And the book makes the point that this myth is particularly damaging for women, who are culturally conditioned to see romantic absorption as their ultimate purpose. Kevin: That's brilliant. It's like our culture creates this impossible-to-fill hole, and then consumerism steps in and says, 'Hey, you can't find a soulmate, but you can buy this new phone or these cool shoes!' The book talks about this, right? How we use material things to feed that hunger? Michael: It does. It connects this abstract cultural idea to something very physical: the lonely body. The book uses the powerful case of Sylvia Plath. Plath didn't just feel sad; she described her loneliness as a physical ailment, a 'disease of the blood' that was impossible to locate or cure. It was in her, a part of her body. Kevin: A 'disease of the blood.' That's such a visceral, terrifying way to put it. It’s not just a thought; it’s a physical state of being. Michael: And this is where the book's analysis gets so deep. It argues that loneliness is an embodied experience. It's a hunger. Neuroscientists have even found that the brain regions that light up when we feel social rejection are the same ones that light up for physical pain. Kevin: So that feeling of being 'heartbroken' is not just a metaphor. Your brain is literally processing it like a physical injury. Michael: Exactly. And if you're starving for connection, what do you do? You might try to feed that hunger with other things. This is where the book brings in a fantastic artistic metaphor: Franz Kafka's short story, 'A Hunger Artist.' Kevin: I don't know that one. Michael: It's about a man whose profession is to starve himself in a cage for public spectacle. People come to watch him. But over time, the crowds lose interest. They walk past his cage, eating and laughing with their friends, while he wastes away. The story's final line is the artist whispering that he only fasted because he could never find any food that he liked. Kevin: Whoa. So he wasn't starving for food... Michael: He was starving for a different kind of nourishment. He was starving for an empathic gaze, for genuine human connection. He was looked at, but never truly seen. And Alberti uses this to argue that modern loneliness is a similar kind of starvation. We might be surrounded by people, online or in real life, but we feel unseen, unfed. Kevin: And that's when we turn to Wilson the volleyball, or our Instagram feed, or a shopping spree. We're trying to fill that hunger with empty calories. Michael: Precisely. And that leads to the book's most provocative argument for today's world. We hear all this talk about a 'loneliness epidemic,' but Alberti argues that framing it that way is part of the problem.

Kevin: Okay, I see that everywhere. 'The Loneliness Epidemic.' It's treated like a public health crisis, like the flu or smoking. Why is that a bad thing? It seems like it's taking the problem seriously. Michael: It takes the problem seriously, but it misdiagnoses the cause. Alberti argues that calling it an 'epidemic' makes it sound like an external contagion, a virus that randomly infects people. This medicalizes the problem and leads to searching for a simple cure, like a 'loneliness pill,' which is something scientists are actually working on. Kevin: A pill for loneliness? That sounds like something out of a dystopian novel. Michael: It really does. And it completely ignores the root causes. The book makes a powerful case that a lot of modern loneliness is a direct symptom of our political and economic system, specifically what's often called neoliberalism. Kevin: Hold on, 'neoliberalism' is a big word. What does that actually mean for a regular person feeling lonely on a Tuesday night? Michael: In simple terms, it's the ideology that has dominated for the last 40-50 years, which says that competition is the most important human value. It prioritizes the individual and the free market above all else. It's the mindset that leads to cutting public funding for things like libraries, community centers, parks, and social care—the very things that create a social safety net and foster community. Kevin: Right. So the government might appoint a 'Minister for Loneliness' with one hand... Michael: ...while defunding the actual places where people could go to not be lonely with the other. It's a system that encourages us to see ourselves as individual competitors in a marketplace, rather than members of a community. And in a world of constant competition, everyone else is a potential rival, not a potential friend. That's a recipe for mass loneliness. Kevin: Okay, but loneliness is a huge problem. It has real health consequences. We know it's as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Is the book saying we should just ignore that? Michael: Not at all. It's saying we need to reframe it. The problem isn't being alone; the problem is enforced, chronic, and meaningless isolation. The book ends on a much more hopeful and empowering note by looking at how some people, particularly artists, have found a different way to relate to solitude. Kevin: So, turning the poison into a medicine? Michael: Exactly. The final chapter looks at figures like the writer Virginia Woolf. She was part of a bustling social circle, the Bloomsbury Group, but she often felt a deep, terrifying loneliness. She wrote in her diary about the 'great agony' of it. But she also recognized it was necessary for her work. Kevin: How so? Michael: She wrote, "I have entered into a sanctuary... of great agony once; and always some terror; so afraid one is of loneliness; of seeing to the bottom of the vessel." For her, that solitude, as scary as it was, was a space where she could access a deeper reality, where she could hear her own creative voice without the noise of social obligation. It was a gift she had to give herself. Kevin: The key there seems to be choice. She chose that solitude. It wasn't forced on her by a society that had dismantled all its community spaces. Michael: That is the absolute key. Agency. Is your solitude chosen or is it enforced? Is it a temporary retreat for restoration and creativity, or is it a chronic condition of feeling disconnected? The book argues we've become so terrified of loneliness that we've forgotten the value of positive solitude. Kevin: We've lost the art of 'oneliness.' Michael: We've completely lost the art of oneliness. We see any time spent alone as a problem to be solved, usually by scrolling through our phones, instead of as an opportunity for reflection or creativity.

Michael: So, the book's ultimate message is that loneliness isn't this timeless, monstrous thing we're all doomed to fight alone. It has a biography. It was born at a specific moment in history, it's shaped by the stories our culture tells us—like the soulmate myth—and it lives physically within our bodies. Kevin: It’s not a universal bug in the human software; it’s more like an app that our culture installed a couple of hundred years ago, and it's running in the background, draining our battery. Michael: That's a perfect analogy. And by understanding its history, by seeing it as this constructed thing, we get some power back. We can start to question it. We can start to write our own relationship with it. Kevin: It makes you wonder—what parts of our own loneliness are 'real,' and what parts are just stories we've been told? Maybe the first step isn't to find more people, but to question the feeling itself when it arises. To ask, 'Is this a genuine hunger for connection, or am I just feeling the pressure of a cultural myth?' Michael: That's a powerful thought. It shifts the focus from a frantic search for a 'cure' to a more mindful examination of the feeling itself. We'd love to hear what you think. Does this change how you see loneliness? Let us know on our socials, we're always curious to hear your perspectives. Kevin: It’s a conversation worth having. This is Aibrary, signing off.