Here's Why There Are So Many Lonely People

The Gilded Age produced Horatio Alger's stories of industrialists who pulled themselves up from poverty to riches, Herbert Hoover extolled the "rugged individual," and popular movies of lone cowboys and romantic outlaws all pointed to an abiding American myth: individual effort leads to success.

On the literary front, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, has sold over nine million copies and continues to sell in numbers each year to make any writer envious. According to a 1991 Library of Congress survey, Rand’s novel was named the second most influential book in the U.S., after the Bible. The novel served as a vehicle for Rand’s philosophy, popularizing the virtues of selfishness, which is the title of a non-fiction book of hers.

From 19th-century Andrew Carnegie to heroic comic book figures, stories valorize individual effort. They assume that people are self-made, success is a matter of effort, luck plays no part, and the social world is mainly an impediment to self-fulfillment.

The appeal of individualism is understandable, as it can be a stance against mindless conformity, and it can also foster creativity and innovation. The stories can be inspiring and uplifting.

But stories in which individual effort alone accounts for success are distortions of reality, with several serious side effects. One is that personal liberty is prioritized over other essential ethical values, such as justice and mercy. A corollary of individualism is blaming victims for their own failures, as an individualist psychology dismisses being born healthy, avoiding accidents and illnesses, having reasonably good looks, living in peaceful times, and being the first born in a family as significant elements in achieving success, while in fact, they are all important.

Individualism promotes not only making it on one’s own but also living on one’s own. However, social isolation and loneliness are not the same. Some who live alone don’t feel lonely, while some with social attachments may feel very lonely. Nevertheless, social isolation is a major predictor of loneliness. As pointed out by sociologist Christopher Swader, in individualist societies, friendship ties make the difference in whether a person feels lonely or not.

Forming friendships when personal liberty is paramount can be difficult. Political sociologist Paul Hollander wrote that some find substitutes for friendship in the pseudo-community of celebrity culture, because identification with a celebrity, “may provide vicarious gratification to people who seek to escape anonymity and believe that they do not get sufficient amounts of attention.” Mel van Elteren, in 2013, added that “politics has become a culture obsessed by celebrities.”

Celebrity politics isn’t new, but it has become commonplace, attracting people who overcome their loneliness vicariously. By identifying with the celebrity-hero, people feel that they, too, are worthy because they have stood up to the elite status quo. Ironically, at this point, individualism has been turned inside out. No longer celebrity followers, people become hero worshipers; no longer political activists, they become cult followers.

Recognizing the need for children to acquire skills that make learning possible, many schools have implemented Social Emotional Learning (SEL). As University of Virginia education professor Diane Hoffman writes, “While currently stressing links between SEL and academic achievement, program literature also places emphasis on ideals of caring, community, and diversity.” Despite SEL’s stated goal of the importance of learning how to deal with relations, Hoffman continues, “...recommended practices across programs tend to undermine these ideals by focusing on emotional and behavioral control strategies that privilege individualist models of self.”

So embedded in our culture, it is near impossible to imagine that individualism is a cultural choice. Hoffman presents the Japanese approach to bad classroom behavior as an alternative. She writes, “In Japan, ‘acting out’ is never an individual problem; it means the child needs more emotional connection to the class and teacher, not less, making techniques of teacher-imposed segregation rare. Instead, teachers redouble efforts to connect the child to the class, perhaps by giving the child extra attention, privileges, or using other kinds of supportive emotional encouragement.”

Individualism is an innovation of early 19th-century America, as French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville observed. “Individualism is a novel expression...which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself.” de Tocqueville concludes, individualism “throws [the person] back forever upon himself alone and threatens, in the end, to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

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The Pledge of Allegiance, written in 1894, contains a remnant of a pre-individualistic ethos. If everyone who recites this pledge (and which American hasn’t?) reflected upon it, then perhaps we could once again appreciate the inseparable nature of the individual and society, one based on freedom, fairness, and inclusiveness, as is indicated in the concluding phrase: “with liberty and justice for all.”

Rather than being a ritualistic expression of patriotism, the Pledge offers a way out from the solitude of one’s own heart.