Here’s the latest from the crossroads of faith, media & culture: 10/11/23

The Isolation Pandemic. In May the US Surgeon General issued an advisory on “the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection in our country.” The report asserts that the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is akin to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day and is even greater than the health risks associated with obesity and physical inactivity. Even prior to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic during the last presidential election cycle, roughly half of American adults are said to have reported some measure of loneliness. What’s more, the problem isn’t isolated (as it were) to the US. Experts say loneliness is spreading across the globe at an alarming rate due such factors as self-isolating technologies, political divisions and general social fragmentation. The steps taken by government to isolate citizens to fight Covid only fed the isolation beast.

OTOH: Loneliness is nothing new – and, as unwelcome a feeling as it is, some have transformed it into fuel for incredible creativity.

In his new book, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity, author Richard Deming focuses on six such people.

·         Melanie Klein, the pioneering psychoanalyst whose fraught family life informed her groundbreaking work on the psychology of loneliness

·         Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and anthropologist, who believed that from childhood she was destined to be alone and yet wrote poignant books and essays that were to become revered and celebrated

·         Walter Benjamin, the daringly original philosopher/cultural critic/essayist who was a geographer of modern urban space and its alienations

·         Walker Evans, the photographer, and perhaps the most influential practitioner of his art, who distilled the essence of humanity and its feelings of isolation in the precise blacks and whites of his monochromatic prints and lived its realities as he struggled to accept his own sexuality

·         Egon Schiele, the iconoclastic but misunderstood Viennese painter who died in 1918 of the Spanish flu at the age of 28, after losing both his wife and his friend and mentor, Gustav Klimt, to the virus, and…

·         Rod Serling, the screenwriter and television producer and host who used genre television as a means to explore the most pressing of human issues and who encoded loneliness and desolation within the recurring themes of his iconic show The Twilight Zone

In these six lives – as well as his own – Deming finds hope that loneliness doesn’t have to lead to despair but can, in fact, result in useful insights about the human condition the can elevate both the individuals going though it and society as a whole.

 JWK: Why’d you decide to write about loneliness?

Richard Deming: A few years ago, while I was in the midst of working on an essay about the film Synecdoche, New York, a friend called to tell me that the very person I was writing about, a well-known actor, had just died a lonely death. That brought home for me the fraught stakes of loneliness and that powerful sense of despair and hopelessness it can foster.

I’ve felt chronic loneliness all my life, despite having a great marriage, friends and the like. Because of that fact, I’ve seen how it can be hard to get people to talk about loneliness.  It tends to be socially stigmatized, as if we are each responsible for our own sense of feeling isolated.

I wanted to really understand loneliness and to see how others who suffered from emotional isolation found a way to work with loneliness, especially since it is reaching epidemic status as it proliferates across the globe.  I set out to explore not just its impact but how specific people found ways to be creative not despite but because of loneliness.

JWK: What has your research led you to conclude about the psychology of loneliness?

RD: Ultimately, I came to see that loneliness can lead to a deepening of empathy. If it is an existential condition, that is, if it is in part an unavoidable experience of what it means to be human, then loneliness provides a possibility for knowing ourselves better and for learning how to see and read other people. By becoming better at reading and acknowledging loneliness in ourselves and then seeing it in others, we find common ground, we gain intimate insights. The people I discuss in the book all developed profound insights about living through loneliness.  They didn’t solve loneliness, so much as find its possibilities.

JWK: In your book you focus on six accomplished people who you believe utilized the loneliness they experienced in their own lives to produce works of great insight. How did you choose your subjects?

RD: They were all figures who had wrestled pretty evidently and directly with feelings of isolation or disconnection throughout their lives. I wanted to think about loneliness from different angles and each person had a different way of responding to their feelings. Walter Benjamin thought about culture and wrote essays and letters to make philosophical sense of how nostalgia can ground us in a feeling of home, even when we feel thrown about by crisis. Melanie Klein, the pioneering psychoanalyst, explored the psychological origins of loneliness. The novelist Zora Neale Hurston found stories—fictional and folkloric—could form a sense of belonging but they could also make a person feel excluded. The famed photographer Walker Evans wanted to look deeply at people in order to feel empathetic connections that would ease loneliness. None of these people solved loneliness but they found ways to navigate its waters.

JWK: One of your subjects is the writer Rod Serling who created and produced the iconic TV show The Twilight Zone. Can you cite one of his works – perhaps from that show – in which he really used his own experience to explore the subject of loneliness?

RD: Like so many writers, Serling found ways to transform aspects of his life and experience in such a way that they might not necessarily seem autobiographical but they are actually emotionally rooted in things that happened to him.

Take for example the first episode of The Twilight Zone (titled) Where Is Everybody? Without giving away any spoilers, we can think about its premise. Mike, a man wearing a military jump suit walks into a town only to find that everyone there has disappeared. It seems like they vanished just moments before he arrives, however.  He sees evidence everywhere: there’s water boiling on a stove in an empty diner; a lit cigarette is burning in an ashtray.  A payphone rings but, when he answers, there’s no one on the other end.  Still, he’s utterly alone and isn’t clear how he even arrived in the town.

RD: By itself, the episode is about a feeling of the desolation of loneliness. It gains additional resonance when we think about Serling’s own life.  He had a powerful connection to his hometown of Binghamton, New York. After doing his tour of duty in the Philippines during World War II, he returned there hoping to reacclimate to civilian life after the traumas of war that he had experienced as a decorated soldier, wounded in combat.

Months before, however, Serling’s father had suddenly died of a heart attack—his car pulled to the side of the road.  Consequently, Serling’s mother moved away to a different city to be with her sister. Serling’s ties were suddenly gone. In fact, because of problems with the mail reaching soldiers overseas, Serling hadn’t learned about his father’s death until well after the funeral. His brother by then lived in another state and had a career and his friends were either moved away, at college or killed in the war. Binghamton looked like home but most of the people who made it feel like home had essentially vanished. That is all to say, Serling must have felt much like Mike walking into that empty town. As they say, write what you know.  Serling did that, again and again.

JWK: Most, if not all of your subjects are in one way or another an artist – a writer, a painter, a photographer.  Is it possible to produce truly great art without having experienced loneliness in some sort of profound way? 

RD: I don’t think there is a specific formula for creating powerful art and I wouldn’t want to suggest that people should go out and try to make themselves feel lonely in order to make art. I do think that very often loneliness is something that prompts people to want to create things that reach out to others.  At the heart of loneliness is the phenomenon of “anti-mattering,” that is, feeling like you don’t matter to others. The art, whatever its form, can be a way of dismantling that feeling by calling out to the world and using your own feelings to help others feel a common connection. The making of art, writing, thinking, feeling deeply, can be evidence that proves even to yourself that you exist.

JWK: Is loneliness normal? Is some loneliness necessary for growth?

RD: Loneliness is natural, for sure. There are many who argue that it is a fundamental part of human existence.  For instance, as infants we start to develop a sense of individual identity when we understand there’s a distinction between us and our mothers. That’s the I/Thou split.  In essence, we first begin to discover who we are by way of that initial split. It’s a bit like leaving Paradise and in so doing developing a consciousness of the self.

There are lots of feelings and circumstances that can lead to growth, many that have nothing to do with loneliness. At the same time, loneliness can be a catalyst for change. It also creates an occasion for introspection, of exploring how and why you feel lonely.  All that can lead to growth. That’s what I call “exquisite loneliness.” We see what we need, we see what we love more keenly through the experience of separateness, from feeling an intense, poignant distance and being aware of its textures as it occurs. This separateness is the central condition of life and perhaps a foundation for love. We are spurred to know others, driven to deeper relationships because we are not enough for ourselves. In part, we need others because they are not us: they are different even when they are similar. They help us get beyond our own boundaries of who and what we are.

JWK: How much loneliness is too much?

RD: That’s a great question and a hard one to answer. Remember Laika, the stray dog from the streets of Moscow that was sent up into space in 1957 in Sputnik 2?  In that spacecraft, all alone, she orbited the Earth alone in the cold dark of space for a few hours—making four circuits around the planet—before she died. That seems to me an image of profound loneliness.  If that starts to feel like a metaphor for how you feel, and for a long stretch of time, then that’s too much. That would be the time for some kind of help.

JWK: Do you think social media has produced more social connection or social isolation?

RD: There’s no denying that social media, unbounded by geography, can provide new and widening opportunities for people to connect. They’re not bound by circumstance and contingencies. That can help you find that other people do share your experiences. That said, there are countless, countless examples of how social media can be made into a cudgel that drives people apart. Social media is so dependent on presenting a curated life, it is bound to make other people feel like they’re missing out.  I think, too, it can also drive home the sense that the life you represent online is not actually the life you are living, and that can feel self-alienating.

Often it can also be a platform for expressing ideas and venting, but not enough of a venue for listening and developing empathy and real connections. If they remain just part of social media, the connections it makes possible do tend to be a lot like eating empty emotional calories. It makes you think you’re taking a lot in but none of it is filling and, ultimately, it becomes unhealthy. Or it’s like drinking salt water: the more you drink, the thirstier you become.

JWK: I know you’re not a doctor but how do you feel about treating loneliness with medications? My own guess is it’s probably appropriate in some cases – but, as a society, do we risk becoming over-reliant on pills that can prevent us from discovering the deeper insights that really help us move forward?

RD: There are researchers who are, in fact, trying to find ways to medicate loneliness – so it’s a great question. I myself have periodically taken medication to navigate depression. Medication has often been just a way to set the feet, a way to get some stable purchase from which I can think and make decisions. Nevertheless, I still have to do that work to think and experience things differently so as to not end up back at the same place of emotional distress. I also have substance abuse issues in my past. If I took a pill to relieve a physical craving for alcohol, I’d still have all the feelings that surrounded substance abuse. It’s all the work, the deep, personal, emotional work, that has largely rescued me from my feelings. I know medication alone wouldn’t have really solved things.

My own perspective is that, no matter what, there is a need to wrestle with the self—medication doesn’t and, ultimately can’t, take the place of insight and self-discovery. In the end, medication or no, each of us is left with ourselves and that can be a lonely thing.

JWK: What do you hope readers take from your book?

RD: My hope is that they see that people are never alone in their loneliness.  As painful as loneliness is, it can become a focus by which we explore what we need, what we lack—and, understanding such things, we come to know ourselves. In some crucial way, loneliness is part of what makes us all human.

As I mentioned before, our society stigmatizes loneliness and, therefore, people often feel ashamed that they feel lonely and this only makes them feel more alone because they can’t talk about the pain with others.

One of the most moving elements of working on this book has been the number of people who have pulled me to the side in order to confess their own feelings of loneliness—students, colleagues, curators, doctors.  All walks of life, as they say, and all ages.  I hope that others see that in many ways our loneliness is what can most connect us.  More than that, there are people—such as the people I write about—who try to use that loneliness to make things, think things, discover ways of being that might not have occurred without that intense level of feelings. They responded to the inner turmoil of their own forms of loneliness and fashioned something out of it, not simply as expression but as a signal, a flare, so as to be of use to others.  That’s no small thing.  It may be, in the end, the most important thing.

John W. Kennedy is a writer, producer and media development consultant specializing in television and movie projects that uphold positive timeless values, including trust in God.