Loneliness and Solitude
Robinson Crusoe, Crowded Cities, and the Hunger for Witness
Philosopher Hannah Arendt drew a sharp line between the fertile company of solitude and the barren ache of loneliness. In solitude, a person is alone with their thoughts in a quiet two-in-one conversation with themselves. In loneliness, that inner companion vanishes, leaving a person feeling deserted by the world and hollow inside.
Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe was inspired by Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, marooned alone for four years and four months on an uninhabited island off Chile. Selkirk kept his sanity by reading the Bible aloud, singing psalms to the surf, and taming wild cats and goats so his voice had company.
In the opening book of the Politics, Aristotle declared that a creature who can live entirely outside human society by nature rather than by shipwreck is either a wild beast or a god. Human beings alone possess language to debate what is fair and unfair. A complete life therefore requires a shared civic table.
Edgar Allan Poe's 1840 story The Man of the Crowd and Edward Hopper's 1942 diner painting Nighthawks captured a distinctly modern paradox. The sharpest loneliness on Earth rarely strikes a shepherd on a hillside. It strikes inside a brightly lit metropolis where a person passes ten thousand strangers a day without being known.
Visiting Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842—where well-meaning reformers locked prisoners in silent solitary cells with hoods over their heads in the yard—Charles Dickens was horrified. He wrote that this silent isolation was a slow, invisible torture worse than physical racks, because cutting off human faces unravels the prisoner's mind.
Retiring in 1571 to the round third-floor library of his stone chateau, Michel de Montaigne advised every busy adult to keep an arrière-boutique. This quiet back room of the mind sits behind the noisy storefront of family and work. Only by learning to sit contentedly alone can a person rejoin company freely.
In 1971, evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton used simple geometry to explain why physical isolation sets off an ancient alarm across herding animals. When a lion approaches a flock, the animal standing on the outer edge is the easiest target. Loneliness is the warning bell telling a straggler to step back toward the herd.
Because an early human sleeping alone by a cold campfire had no companions standing watch against night predators, loneliness changes how people sleep even inside a locked modern apartment. Lonely adults sleep the same total hours as connected neighbors, yet suffer dozens of brief, restless micro-awakenings throughout the night as if listening for footsteps.
When Henry David Thoreau built his ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin at Walden Pond in 1845, he was no misanthrope hiding from humanity. He kept three chairs inside his cabin—one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society. He also walked two miles into Concord village almost every week to dine and gossip with neighbors.
In 2014, psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked Chicago train commuters either to sit in their normal morning silence or to strike up a conversation with the stranger sitting beside them. Commuters predicted that talking to a stranger would feel awkward. Yet the talkers reported having a far happier commute than silent riders.
In 2018, the United Kingdom appointed the world's first Minister for Loneliness after public health researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad combined 148 studies covering more than 300,000 people. Living in chronic social isolation raised the risk of early death by 50 percent—making chronic loneliness as hard on the body as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
In his 1904 Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke offered a wise corrective to the romantic myth that love erases aloneness. The highest task of a bond between two people, Rilke wrote, is not to fuse two unfinished halves together, but for two solitudes to protect, border, and greet each other.