Throughout his life he has sought out the work of writers and artists who themselves have worked to diminish the pain of their loneliness by spelunking into it and examining it, and then trying to create their way out of it. In this interesting and far-ranging book, Richard Deming, who directs the creative writing program at Yale, has undertaken not just to analyze the phenomenon of chronic loneliness but also to manage his own. (Feeling lonely among a group of people is, I can say from experience, a special kind of awfulness.) People don’t like to talk about this: loneliness, some clinical psychologists contend, is more stigmatized than depression because people fear that it bespeaks an emotional neediness that feels shameful to admit. They feel an unbridgeable apartness from other people, even when in crowds. But for some people, loneliness, whether due to temperament or life circumstances, seems to be an inescapable existential condition. Murthy’s national strategy seeks to combat loneliness as a public health scourge. Perhaps even more ominously in this fraught moment for American democracy, an excess of loneliness can have political consequences: Hannah Arendt concluded her 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism with a meditation on how when loneliness metastasizes into “an everyday experience” (as opposed to being something that afflicts just, say, the elderly), a large swath of the populace seeks to assuage its aloneness by submitting to a charismatic fascist-a precondition for the rise of tyranny. Among young adults between 18 and 25, according to a recent Harvard study, an astonishing 61 percent reported experiencing “serious loneliness” in 2021. And the number of Americans afflicted by loneliness is not small: a recent survey found that more than 50 percent of us reported feeling lonely-and that was before the pandemic forced us to pioneer new frontiers in physical isolation, leading to rising rates of loneliness and concomitant increases in anxiety, depression, and addiction. The lonely are at substantially elevated risk for heart disease, stroke, obesity, addiction, and dementia being lonely increases your overall risk of premature death by more than 60 percent. But the scope of the problem, as laid out by Murthy and others, is striking-not just how many people are lonely but how much damage that loneliness does. Public health experts have been warning for years about the toll loneliness can take. On May 3, Murthy formally announced a “National Strategy to Advance Social Connection” geared toward reducing the emotional isolation that is damaging our psyches and our bodies. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a major public health crisis. That’s not a metaphor-it is, according to U.S. It’s now official: America is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity by Richard Deming Viking, 336 pp., $29
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