Internet’s aloneness is a cyclical social event

AS I write I’m sitting in a café in Vancouver. It’s pouring with rain and I’m on my own and extremely tired. I’m in town for a wedding and friends are starting to appear, but I’ve been travelling for the past week – completely on my own.

Among other emotions, including some positive ones, I’ve felt tired, at times frustrated (should I go to this or that craft brewery?) and annoyed (the incessant expectation of tips). But the one thing I haven’t felt for one second is lonely.

So I noted with interest a major study about loneliness by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), widely presented in terms of a crisis moment, and a sign of the deep alienation afflicting citizens of the technological age – and particularly its youth. The study found 10% of those aged between 16 and 24 were “always or often lonely” – the highest percentage of any age group.

The figures, of course, don’t make much of the 90% who aren’t particularly lonely. Nor does the ONS delve too probingly into the reasons for the rates of gloomy aloneness.

Predictably, noises are being made about young people being on the internet all the time, and therefore failing to connect to people offline.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that if young people prefer to communicate in two-line messages and emojis they will lose the art of conversation altogether. Less and less young millennials are to be seen sitting and actually talking to each other without their phones being in constant use.

But this merits closer attention, as the loneliness figures are the tip of the rather complicated iceberg that is digital life. For, in a sense, social media follows one everywhere with the doggedness of a stalker. It’s always there, pulsing away, hundreds or thousands of other people’s connectedness visible to you wherever you are in the world.

Wherever I happened to be this week I could (and did) message my friends, wherever they happened to be – be it London or Sydney or New York. And I could receive instant replies from them.

This sense of swarming connectivity, of everyone always being there, hanging in the ether, is very different from the long, boring, melancholy but also peaceful stretches of time that characterised my teenage years.

But those solitary, boring hours were hugely important. They were my thinking, reading and feeling hours. They taught me that life isn’t always a whizz-bang spectacle of fun and instant gratification. Most importantly, although I didn’t realise it at the time, those periods when nobody was around, ensured that my peers and I learnt how to be on our own and take pleasure in things other than the endless social feedback loop.

Of course, we love to blame the internet for everything. But loneliness is hardly a new cause for concern. Divorce and other factors meant many people began to live alone for the first time in the seventies. A spate of hand-wringing studies and books about it also appeared back then. But these were merely an update on similar writings from the late 19th century, when the aftermath of the industrial revolution created a new, rootless “clerk class”, seen to be floating about cities on their own, disconnected from their communities and troublingly single.

Given that we’ve been lonely since long before the internet, perhaps it’s time to accept loneliness is a part of being, as much as it is a product of bewildering social changes.