I The idea of writing a book about loneliness first came to me in 2012. I was 35 years old and had just moved to New York City when I became lost in a maze of isolation and sadness. A love relationship had ended suddenly while I was still high on expectations, excited with relief that I was finally entering a stable couplehood. Failing in this transition, being rejected and abandoned, filled me with shame that felt truly inexplicable.
So there I was: alone in the city, an outcast doomed to watch the world pass by. It was a humiliating and very scary feeling. The pain was made more intense than it would be with a broken leg or a broken heart, by the fact that my loneliness seemed unacceptable, something that could not be said for fear of displeasing other people. This was the most distressing aspect of the experience, in that the need to hide deepened the isolation, making loneliness more inevitable, a fortress of solitude whose walls and ramparts would not stop growing.
But as soon as I realized that loneliness works in this strange, amusing way, it became strangely interesting to me. What was it, this feeling that felt so radioactive, so shameful that it could not be acknowledged? What did it look like, what were its characteristics? Were other people quietly experiencing it like I was? If as an individual I was originally frustrated, the writer in me began to realize that I had blundered into uncharted territory.
The simplest definition of loneliness is a state of craving more connection and intimacy than you have. It is not the same as solitude, which can be pleasant and satisfying, nor does it require complete physical separation. You may be alone at a party; Alone at a wedding. This feeling is extremely painful and brings with it deep physical consequences. Loneliness increases blood pressure, accelerates aging and cognitive decline. It causes insomnia, weakens the immune system and predicts increased morbidity and mortality. To put it in simple language, it can prove fatal.
As for whether other people experienced this, I immediately realized that the lonely city was indeed a very populous place. I conducted my investigation through visual artists, among them David Wojnarowicz, Andy Warhol, and Henry Darger. While we tend to assume that loneliness is the result of personal failure, a lack of attractiveness in some way, what I found by examining their lives is that loneliness is often the result of larger societal forces of stigma and exclusion, which serve to isolate a variety of vulnerable populations. Being poor, being an immigrant, being sick, being transgender, being a person of different color or having a different sexuality: these were the drivers of segregation. If The Lonely City had any message, it was that loneliness is political and should never be a source of shame.
At least some of the shame has gone away since my book was first published in 2016. Loneliness is no longer a taboo condition. It is widely discussed as an emotional experience, such as depression or anxiety, and as a social problem, the subject of academic research and government policy. It is also considered a global public health concern. The 2024 Health Survey for England reported that 22% of the adult population feel lonely at least some of the time, 6% – around 4 million people – feel lonely often or always, while the 2025 World Health Organization report on social belonging found that one in six people worldwide are lonely.
Although Theresa May appointed the world’s first Minister for Loneliness in 2018, I suspect that the reduced stigma is largely the result of the massive encounter with loneliness that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, affecting even people already connected to a wealth of social connections. According to the British Red Cross, 41% of people reported feeling lonely during the pandemic.
Even lonely people have a tendency to believe that loneliness is their own fault, a product of something essentially distasteful in their own existence. It’s hard not to blame yourself for suffering through something so culturally abhorrent. But loneliness often depends on circumstances such as new motherhood, moving house, loss or bereavement. The lockdown served as a global demonstration of this essential randomness, confronting many previously socially secure people with evidence that life could change, ushering in a catastrophic isolation.
But by far the biggest change in loneliness in the last decade is related to the Internet. Social media has weaponized loneliness, manipulating it in ways I couldn’t have imagined 10 years ago. In my time of loneliness, the Internet was a source of solace to a degree that now seems surprising to me. Twitter in particular was a place of interaction and community, rather than the trolling and death threats that characterized X under Elon Musk’s ownership. While I was skeptical of technology’s ability to reduce alienation, I had not anticipated how social media would fuel the rise of the far right, ushering in a new era of violent exclusion in which the right to engage is increasingly revoked. Nor did I suspect what role loneliness would play in this process – although I am not surprised that loneliness is among the consequences of this ugly new landscape of hatred and division.
Reports on the “loneliness epidemic” have long discussed the isolating and atomizing impact that our migration online has had on the public sphere. Whereas 10 years ago the focus was on the loss of physical solidarity in favor of screens, now the focus has shifted to the powerful algorithms that drive us into digital pens, information silos that mean people inhabit divergent and increasingly extreme realities with distorting effects on our shared civil society.
Loneliness is not just a result of the increasingly digital world. It is also an exploitable vulnerability that lies behind much of the violent extremism spreading online. As Hannah Arendt said in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Loneliness is the general basis of terror”. The process by which it turns into anger and a desire for vengeance does not occur in a vacuum.
Far-right groups prey on loneliness, use feelings of being left behind, isolated, neglected and ignored as a recruitment tool, and offer powerful narratives that stoke grievances and displace vulnerability onto other bodies who may be hated and attacked. Even Tommy Robinson’s blatantly racist and Islamophobic Unite the Kingdom rallies promise to “strengthen community bonds” and “bring people together regardless of background, belief or circumstance”.
One of the many places where this process occurs is the manosphere. Mass murderer Elliot Rodger, an “incel” and self-described “lonely virgin”, explicitly blamed loneliness for his actions in his misogynistic manifesto My Twisted World, describing the 2014 Isla Vista attack as an act of vengeance against those who had rejected him. As their manifesto demonstrates, the manosphere attracts lonely people by offering a compelling ideology that defines individual rejection and isolation as deliberate and systematic exclusion, providing a ready enemy to blame in the form of women. Like many far-right movements, the language is of grievance and entitlement. While no cure is offered other than violent punishment of those who deny the incel’s self-proclaimed right to sex, there is a sense of belonging and meaning, no matter how distorted.
These ideas have gone mainstream through influencers like Andrew Tate, who promote toxic masculinity as a solution to loneliness in a cartoonish way that particularly appeals to boys and young men. The problem of this perceived treatment can be seen through Tate’s recent absurd claim on X: “If you’re a straight man with a girlfriend in 2025, you’re gay.” In fostering such overall levels of hatred and suspicion toward women, toxic masculinity actually promotes loneliness, shutting down the vulnerability and empathy that are prerequisites to love and intimacy; Even friendship.
If big technology has generated worrying new forms of loneliness, it also promises new solutions. AI chatbots and avatars like MyAI, Replika and Gilvesa are aggressively marketed as cures for isolation: endlessly sycophantic replacements for human friends and lovers. Hyper-realistic AI girlfriends with names like DreamGF, Candy, and Grok’s “Lolita-style” Annie are always available and obedient, without any needs or demands of their own. While these analogies of relationships may provide comfort and solace, they again risk loneliness, this time by indoctrinating the user into the two-way demands of intimacy, reducing their tolerance for the necessary give-and-take, hard work, and potential disappointment at any human relationship.
This may be a surprising thing to say, but I don’t think a romantic partner is in any way a solution to loneliness. I was determined that The Lonely City would not end with me solving the “problem” of loneliness by meeting someone and thus unhappily obtaining my passport. If loneliness is political, the result of stigma and exclusion, then the solution is no partner, whether human or AI. Instead, there is a need for solidarity across difference. We make the world less lonely by rejecting stigma. We do not defeat it by stigmatizing others. The real lesson of loneliness is one of collective vulnerability and shared responsibilities of care.
One of the most interesting findings of the 2024 Health Survey for England was that loneliness shows a strong association with area deprivation. Practical solutions put forward by bodies such as the Red Cross, the Campaign to End Loneliness and the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness focus not on dating or friendship but on community assets such as transport, green space, social centers and activities.
These are places where people can experience what sociologists call “weak ties”, a sense of being connected and visible, a person who matters within a sustainable community. But these spaces and resources – from mother and baby groups, parks and libraries to rural bus routes, youth clubs and surgeries – have been destroyed by austerity and years of systematic reduction.
It is no coincidence that the areas of the country with the highest levels of loneliness are the same areas where the far right is gaining popularity. Over the past few years, I have come to view loneliness as the key to our turbulent politics, a root cause that needs to be addressed if we are to avoid a rising tide of violence and distrust. Focusing on this as an underlying wound is one way to circumvent the continued polarization of issue-based positions. And if loneliness can best be cured by repairing the cracks in the social fabric, then that work could be one of the most powerful tools we have for countering the far right.
