The Tragically Modern Condition That Wasn't Even In The Dictionary 400 Years Ago
Oh, how far we’ve fallen.
Gang Zhou | Canva “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal
As a writer, I love to uncover strange historical facts. It’s part of the way I get creative, and recently, I found out that the term “lonely” was once part of a rare compendium of words.
No, really. It was a word that was actually rare.
In the year 1674, a man by the name of John Ray added the word “loneliness” into a book of rarely-used words. The word “lonely” was also added. He was right. If you take a look at old literature, “loneliness” just doesn’t show up.
The only real time that you will see the word “loneliness” in classic literature is in Hamlet, when Ophelia suffers from it and then later dies as a result of madness. It was also featured in the epic poem “Paradise Lost.”
An article in The New Yorker backs this up, noting, “The word “loneliness” very seldom appears in English before about 1800. Robinson Crusoe was alone, but never lonely.”
It seems like loneliness may be a part of the human condition, but it’s clear that it’s a far more pervasive issue today. But, how is this possible? The world is more populated now than it ever was before!
As someone who grew up lonely, it’s hard to imagine loneliness as a modern issue…but it is.
How often is it that you feel lonely? If you feel a pang of loneliness on a regular basis, congrats. You’re like at least half of the population’s youth. (61 percent of young Americans feel lonely on a regular basis.)
When I was younger, I always felt like loneliness was just a thing that was part of life. You either were blessed with the friends and popularity that came from having the right family, right looks, and right income or you just weren’t.
I thought that was how it always was. I mean, I read books about how strict Victorian culture was. I’ve read The Scarlet Letter about how women of “ill repute” were shunned in society.
Considering everything, one would think it’s normal to feel lonely. As it turns out, we are actually the loneliest we’ve ever been.
Why are we so lonely these days?
I want to say it’s because of the pandemic, changing social standards, as well as the way that corporations wrecked online dating. While we often point to these issues, they are not the only reasons why.
Truthfully, there are far deeper conditions that make it hard for us to bond the way we once did.
In the past, humanity had to rely on each other much harder to survive.
I don’t think we fully appreciate how easy life is today. We have massive corporate farms that large-scale produce our food. We have the technology to offer irrigation, pest control, and even artificial lighting for indoor plant growth.
Every single country has infrastructure that makes travel across the world a cinch. You can actually get mail in any part of the country that you wish and you don’t have to deliver it yourself.
Hell, you can also access the world’s entire vast wealth of knowledge by pressing a button on your phone. That’s incredible!
It was not always this way.
For most of humanity’s history, everything from food to shelter was precarious. There wasn’t always enough food to go around. Disease was rife. Sanitation was sketchy, and many people died very young.
Food, in particular, was not easy to come by or ship long distances. The advent of canning helped, but it wasn’t a panacea. What I’m saying is that most food production was fairly local or traded by sea.
If people didn’t work together, we’d have died out. Even hunter-gatherer societies have to work together just to keep themselves fed. This is one of the reasons we humans instinctively feel exclusion as a serious injury. If you were excluded in the past, you were going to die in the cold.
Our species’ survival required us to work together and get along. The more dire the situation, the more cooperation has to happen. With cooperation comes interaction and bonding. That’s why societies were not as lonely.
How do I know this? Simple: I’ve been homeless in New York City. I’ve been in circles where things were always dire. The funny thing is, those circles are never lonely. They have way bigger issues to worry about.
The growth in wealth and living spaces also means that people now have the means to more privacy.
When you have limited tech and limited money, you are going to end up with smaller houses. This means that you will have to live with others and work with others while sacrificing privacy.
Most pioneer houses were a single room — maybe two if you were lucky. These houses held entire families until they could work together to expand the house. Privacy was a premium, luxury item for most of human history.
When larger homes were invented, keeping them clean and habitable was a major chore. Automation didn’t exist, so people hired servants to do it. Once again, this meant you literally couldn’t live without other people around you.
Only five percent of people lived entirely alone in 1910. Today, that number is 30 percent. That’s the highest ever in recorded history, and it’s a number poised to grow.
Do you think that would be possible in a home built like those in centuries past? With farming that needed to be done too? Nope. Not in those numbers.
Another reason why we’re lonelier is that there is survivor bias at play.
Remember when I said that being entirely shunned by society would lead to certain death? Well…being dead means you can’t complain about being lonely, doesn’t it?
Let’s say that you weren’t totally shunned. You were just an outcast. In many cases, you would have no way to actually tell others you were lonely. They wouldn’t care.
You might have been locked in a room, fed by family your entire life. Or maybe you’d end up in a psych ward. Or, you might end up just being a homeless drifter that no one spoke to.
This is, of course, assuming that any medical treatments or exorcisms they did to rid you of whatever made you an outcast didn’t kill you.
Finally, I think that part of our loneliness issue deals with the fact that our social rules aren’t as enforced as they once were.
This is just my own opinion and observation, but did you notice how passive our society is these days?
For example, if a man ghosted a woman in 1990 or 2000, women would talk and he’d likely be called a coward. Men might talk smack to him too. Ghosting was so rare and shamed, it didn’t even have a name until the early 2000s.
Today, people ghost relationships with almost no recourse or penalties. In fact, I’ve even heard of people who ghosted ex-fiancees with the help of family members. The ex, for the record, did nothing bad to this guy.
Another example would be parents who would make kids RSVP to a child’s birthday party. When I was young, the concept of forcing kids to attend a party was already on its way out. However, parents would expect kids to decline an invitation.
Nowadays, the internet is littered with stories of birthday parties that were planned for people who claimed they’d attend only to have no one show up. This is the new normal, and it’s vile. And yet, what recourse is there? None.
In the 19th and early 20th century, shotgun weddings happened as a social consequence. You got married because you had to “do the right thing.” If you didn’t agree to marriage, you had to skip town.
Those social rules we had served a purpose — they kept us together as a society. They prevented division and helped encourage working together. It also gave people a good “cause and effect” lesson on interactions.
Having serious consequences for things that hurt others dissuaded people from doing them. There’s a reason why the bully who gets arrested stops bullying while the one whose victim ignores him continues.
Having serious social consequences for your actions means that you can trust others to behave a certain way with you. With consequences slowly getting peeled back for many of these hurtful slights, the only way to protect yourself is to be increasingly unwilling to take a chance on others. I mean, what other recourse is there?
Loneliness is a serious issue today primarily because we evolved to avoid it at all costs.
I want to emphasize this: humans are not meant to be alone and isolated the way we are right now. We literally evolved to be social creatures as a survival instinct.
We may have improved technology to a point where life is getting better, but we forgot the most important factor to one’s quality of life: people. Thankfully, all we have to do to fix this is talk to other people.
So…can we please start reaching out, already?
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.