Epidemics of loneliness and purposelessness
Two books are on my mind.
I become a bigger fan of audiobooks each year, having come a long way from wondering “does this even count as reading a book?” when I made my foray into the format several years ago.
Yes, of course it does. Having a book read to you is a different experience than reading it silently to yourself (or shouting it out loud in a coffee shop, which will lead you being gently removed from the space).
It’s not my preferred method for all books, and I still read some on the written page as well, but I have come to understand that I often process information better with audiobooks. (Downside: I can’t underline or dog-ear pages. The best I can do, which I have done, is take screen shots of time stamps showing where I am in the book in order to refer back to particularly relevant passages).
The “Libby” app is one of the greatest inventions in our modern culture, allowing library patrons to reserve and check out audiobooks (as well as digital print copies) for three week intervals for free. But as more and more people have discovered how great it is, the best new releases have had increased wait times.
So I have a system: Go through a handful of trusted review sites for new releases, usually narrowed down to non-fiction because that’s generally what I like to read, find a handful of books that look interesting and put down a bunch of holds in Libby.
The app tells you the approximate wait time until it’s your turn to check a book out, and things tend to line up pretty well. Right now I have one book checked out, another coming my way in a few weeks, another in six weeks, one more in seven weeks, then nine, 10 and 12.
But sometimes there’s a gap, and I end up checking something out on a whim. I can usually tell if I love or hate it within the first five minutes.
Example of a love at first sight found randomly a year or two ago: “Novelist as a Vocation” by Haruki Murakami).
Another example from about three weeks ago: “Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?” by Dave Eggers.
I have read many of Eggers’ books and have tended to really like his non-fiction while thinking his fiction work is pretty average. But this novel was different, and I knew it immediately.
It is comprised entirely of dialogue, with multiple voice actors working as the various characters in the audiobook. It was a perfect choice for the format, as it almost felt like listening to a theatrical production as much as a book.
The novel initially felt like it couldn’t have been more different from the next book that popped up in my queue, the one that I had been waiting for on hold while biding my time: “The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness,” about an ongoing and nearly century-long Harvard study.
But as both books marinated in my brain over the last week, that feeling changed. Through vastly different techniques, one fiction and one non-fiction, they were telling a synthesized tale of the human condition.
They were telling me to pay attention to the connected epidemics of purposelessness and loneliness.
These are what I consider the two greatest how we are living challenges of our time.
The Eggers novel, which came out in 2015, follows a troubled main character looking for answers to questions both within his own life and in society as a whole.
His increasing desperation reveals something of a coherent lament even as he becomes less coherent: that he is part of a lost generation of young people harmed by both his upbringing and a world in which no great unifying force has been revealed to give him purpose. Promises of greatness have been trampled on by the lies of institutions, leaving people like him alone in a world that prioritizes safety over risk.
He longs to fight in a war or some other grand event and envies another character in the book who has even though it cost him his legs.
Though taken to the extreme in his actions, the character’s lament is relatable and has shown up with alarming force in the real world in the decade since the book was released. A 2022 survey showed that 58% of young adults had felt sometime in the previous month that their life lacked meaning or purpose.
This can show up in a perception that our work/career is not meaningful, which has validity in a world where knowledge work is imperiled by Artificial Intelligence and service industry jobs are on the rise.
But this also goes beyond a sense that we are less able to “make a difference” with what we do and speaks more of a broader feeling that there are not big shared goals or values the vast majority of us are pushing toward.
This is part of the crisis.
Very few of us would rationally suggest that a traumatic worldwide war is the way out of this crisis in the United States.
But it’s sadly hard to imagine more than half of Americans even agreeing on what any sort of unifying thing would be.
Purposeless is adjacent and connected to loneliness, as we find in another recent study, which brings us to “The Good Life.”
Co-authors Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, both of Harvard, seemed to be speaking directly to my inner thoughts with this work. In the book, they bring decades of scholarship to things many of us have considered but have perhaps not explicitly known.
And while they are (correctly) loathe to boil down the notion of happiness or a good life to shortcuts and simple paragraphs, they do note that their study and others like it overwhelmingly suggest that relationships are essential to our well-being.
The fracturing of relationships and connectedness are detrimental to our well-being.
Again, this isn’t a brand new idea or trend. Great Britain appointed a minister for loneliness in 2018 in response to data suggesting it was becoming a major problem among the country’s citizens.
In the years since, Great Britain has studied the issue further and attempted to implement practical steps to mitigate loneliness. The Covid-19 pandemic also happened along the way, further isolating us.
Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared an epidemic of loneliness in America in 2023 and to his credit has continued to both sound the alarm and offer ways to address the problem beyond just identifying it.
I remember hearing about the declaration of a loneliness epidemic a couple years ago. Maybe you do, too. But it becomes like so many things that garner a great deal of attention initially, inevitably fading in our consciousness behind 47 other micro or macro problems of the day.
But we can’t let it drift, and we don’t need more studies. In the cases of both loneliness and purposelessness we need action. We need a national movement toward living the way more of us want to live, which means both broad change and individual change.
What does that look like? Here are some thoughts:
A greater emphasis on volunteer work. My extreme idea involves a form of government-mandated volunteering with some optionality that has a greater time commitment in young adulthood but continues throughout life. That would serve a dual purpose, particularly as people search for secular ways of belonging and making a difference. “When we focus on connecting to something bigger than ourselves, that’s actually when we find joy,” Murthy said recently. “It’s why service is one of the most powerful antidotes to loneliness.”
Creating a massive public works program built around a cause that can have some common ground between young, old, left and right: The Green New Deal. It’s such an obvious solution, but it unfortunately gets caught up in the machinery of the politically powerful. If you want to give the next generation a purpose, this is it. Here is your platform for the 2028 election if the Democratic Party wants it.
More intention around how we interact and how we move through the world. We will never return to a truly analog time, and that’s probably for the best when considering all the advancements that should be making our lives great, but we have given over too much of our lives to convenience. It is too easy to opt out of experiences and too tempting to avoid the messiness or hassle of in-person interactions. Murthy, from a difference piece in 2024, had this to say: “Even though there's a lot of great benefits to technology, what we see is that the ability to get everything delivered to us where we are means that we also just encounter people less often in the grocery store, in the retail store, or in our neighborhoods.” A frictionless world is not a better world. It’s a lonelier world.
Introspection and personal action. Loneliness and purposelessness are not choices most of the afflicted have consciously made or sought out. They are byproducts of our circumstances and our environments. Are there small steps like reaching out to one person a day for five days that might help you (and them) fight loneliness? Is there a way you could be spending your time — I’m not talking about a job or career change, just small pockets of non-work time — that would give you more of a sense of purpose?
We live in a time of unprecedented privilege and possibility. But we can’t run away from our own questions. And we definitely can’t run away from each other.
Thanks for writing this! I think purpose has definitely become tough to come by and, the lack of it reasonably does add to loneliness. It makes me think of how many people are not having children which likely contributes to both. I love Libby too and actually just took out the Murakami book as it sounded great, and maybe it'll push me to getting around to getting my novel done. Incidentally, I find writing to provide more purpose than my job so if Murakami can get me to find a way to do it as a vocation it might be a two-fer.
As usual, you are thoughtful and geared toward improving individuals and society. As a fairly recent retiree, I'm especially aware of purpose and connections with others. So many stories throughout the years have discussed the problems of older people who, once they retire, lose their reason for being. Luckily, I have interests beyond what my former work entailed and friends and family to provide connections. However, many people have predicated their self-worth on their work life, producing an older generation of purposeless, lonely people--which, according to experts, impacts quality of life and longevity. Happily, younger people have more energy (although much of it goes to work and kids) and are more flexible in embracing new directions. Yet, what of older people who only seem to be waiting to die? How can they be convinced to embrace the rest of their lives?