What Are the Reasons and the Cures for Loneliness Today?

I was appalled, while reading a recent article in The New Yorker magazine, to learn that so many people are turning to A.I. for therapists, for friends, and even for lovers. I read that many prefer to talk to an artificial intelligence, programmed to give responses we wish to hear, than to a real doctor if they are looking for empathy or even good advice. Why is this happening? How is it possible that people prefer an illusion to the reality of a human being? Why are so many people so lonely that they turn to a machine rather than a real man or a woman?

The Reasons for Loneliness

There are many reasons for loneliness at all ages today.

The Young

Young people who constantly turn to social media or video games on their iPhones are gradually losing the habit of talking to one another, conditioned, as so many are from such an early age, to the use of the machine for enjoyment. One has only to take the subway and look around to see mothers who ignore their children completely, staring down and fixated on their phones when they could be communicating, reading, singing, playing a game, or just smiling at their child.

The Elderly

Later on in life, elderly people who live longer and longer lives are more and more cut off from others who are now habituated to using electronics to communicate (texting constantly), to changing plans at the last minute, and not always answering a telephone.

What Are the Solutions?

A Personal View: The Role of Education

Personally, as a lecturer at Princeton, I stress from the first class in the Freshman Seminar that I teach the importance of the group. I do not allow any electronics in the classroom and have the students write longhand in every class and share their work with both me and one another. I divide them into small groups and have them discuss their ideas, with the whole class coming up to the blackboard and writing up their conclusions for all to see. I hold one one-on-one conferences whenever possible and allow the students to give presentations to the class verbally.

Groups as a Way to Communicate

At any age, there are groups one can easily join: Book groups, of course, are wonderful ways to share ideas, emotions, and even our own lives seen through the prism of a text. Language groups can also be effective and bring together speakers of different tongues from different places and cultures. Religious groups can be very helpful as they often stress kindness and sharing with one another.

Books as Ways to Escape Loneliness

Reading, even alone, allows one to share ideas with an author, to enter another world, or another age or time, to reach across differences of class and culture, and to find what remains the same at any time or place.

The Family

Ultimately, it is up to each and all of us to help those who are around us to reach out to one another: husbands to wives and vice versa, parents to children and children to their parents, in our own families. It is up to us to take time from our work to eat a meal together, to play sport together, to enjoy music, books, and art, or to take a walk together on a lovely day and enjoy the world around us.