Attention, Loneliness!

My close parasocial friend Scott Galloway claims that less than two in three men have a single close friend. Other close parasocial friends of mine, eminent in the health podcasting space, reinforce the diagnosis, adding something about increased mortality from loneliness on a par with lifelong chain-smoking.

One day, in the park, the girl I had been keeping in touch with for years in hope that a flood or earthquake would trap us in a room together long enough for her to realize she was in love with me, asked what I wanted from life. I was an aspiring writer, with one published story that anybody had read, secretly inspired by my feelings for her, and called, flatteringly, in the published introduction, "the loneliest story ever told." I had a few other published stories no one had read. I was working on a novel. "I want to be a writer," was thin stuff for someone trying to impress the pants off a girl in gradual, steady increments over the course of decades. I dug deeper.

"I want to amaze and delight people so that people in turn will amaze and delight me," is what I said. This was a translation from the unspeakable, I want to be invited to dinner parties and glamorous events, where people will be predisposed to like me due to my literary fame, which is the pretentious form of today's chief Gen-Z aspiration I'm far too old for: I want to be a content creator, so people will admire me, so I can stop feeling alone, without having to leave my bedroom and tell a girl in the park what I'm feeling.

Okay, people have always been shy, fearful of rejection. Technology has provided a marvelous buffer: text messaging (still the greatest gift to the shy ever given), its more scalable descendent tweeting, the less demanding posting, not to mention, for the concentrators still among us, long posts like this one, deep, soulful talks with AI chatbots, and nearly continuous streaming of daily life. Why is it that anyone with any sense would rather play Russian roulette than give a toast to a dear friend in front of more than five people, while broadcasting one's thoughts to everyone one's ever met, and, one hopes, many millions one hasn't, hardly raises our pulse?

Apparently there's a categorical difference between real-time, real-life attention, and asynchronous, media-mediated attention. Well, if the async, virtual attention is a good enough replacement for the palpable human responses our minds (still evolved from long, slow processes of natural selection, however pliant they may be) are seeking, fine. As a technologist, I don't begrudge tech's transcendent possibilities.

But the mind has readily answered that question, which we can now scramble to confirm by reasoning, if we must. Like yours, mine went with an instant, unequivocal no. But there may yet be room to wiggle with whether the ersatz attention we seek and receive is better, not than the alternative legacy in-the-room attention, but of the more likely form: no attention.

Hey, kid. Hey, old man. Hey, young mother moved upstate for some space, want a social life? Let me escort you to the next sock hop, the Elks lodge, the Episcopal congregation, the . . . The slide started before social media, and has something to do with capitalism, the atomization of Western society, the withering of the third place, outside of home and work, where people of yore could have the routine, casual contact from which a person beyond school age can find and form friendships.

So the loop tightens: technology steps in to provide what the world won't, a semblance of sociability, enabling the further attrition of real-world social outlets, until the friction of making real-world friends is so high, and the technological compensation so irresistible, because there's so much profit in making it, that even a formerly sociable person like me, living in a boisterous writers' group house in the then-sketchy depths of Brooklyn—a provincial high school outcast's dream of life—could end up among the one in three men my parasocial pals speak of, without a single close friend. I have dear friends, people who spent hours on public transit to attend my book launch, and who would possibly attend my funeral, but I would have to go back more than two years now to find a Friday night when someone called or even texted to ask what I was up to, and I've had exactly two one-on-one, face-to-face conversations with a friend over dinner or drinks in those same years.

Part of that is from moving upstate, having a first child two and a half years ago, and part of it is that when I have a few minutes to take a walk, I eagerly start up a podcast, rather than a phone call. What's more, I genuinely mean it when I heart a friend's Instagram art opening or other life event I'd have otherwise had to call to learn about, and I'm happy for the convenience. I've grown uncomfortable calling people, not only from shyness, but a feeling that it's no longer quite acceptable to monopolize a person's synchronous attention without advanced notice. How often, when you get a call, if you're still among the elite who gets calls, do you pick up? The commoditization of attention has understandably left us with a new, unacknowledged revaluing of attention as something so precious we dare not take others' without a damn good reason.

If the change came quicker—had I been locked up for not updating the address on my driver's license for the last eight years, and, through excessive voluble reference to my lawyers, been thrown into solitary confinement, the world would have heard my wails. But the daily carton of loneliness cigarettes I've been debonairly puffing have deposited their tar stealthily enough. And so it is not only for the third of us men without a close friend, or the gigantically increased proportion of society that reports feeling lonely, but for those of us who haven't noticed yet, who can still run a marathon with our blackened lungs. The social constriction that excepts only the most cosmopolitan, or atavistically communally plugged-in, creeps. In the absence of the third place, one can hold one's remaining friends close enough to think it natural one isn't making new ones. Now let me coin an alarming medical-sounding acronym: AUL. AUL disease. Accepted unnatural loneliness. Friendship recession, loneliness epidemic are apt diagnoses for a society. AUL is for me, for a person.

So what's the prescription? I'm not going to tell myself to go out to bars, where in the Northeast it's not remotely acceptable to accost strangers without mustering more charm and nonchalance than can be expected of someone mildly crazed with loneliness. I'm not going to tell myself to become an avid enough soccer player to join a local league, or an avid enough knitter to join the knitting circle at the local yarn bar. I won't even tell myself to play pickleball.

I will say, David, gird your nerves and look people in the eyes and listen and step back into the fearsome, then refreshing, oceanic swirl of synchronous human attention. Then I'll ask myself, have you listened to a word I've been saying? Or I'll quote those great companions of lonely souls, The Smiths, "When you want to live, how to start, where to go, who do you need to know?"

And I'll reach a point of doing something about it, from the comfort of my bedroom: and make a new approach to third place, modeled after art residencies, but for people living in the less hospitable real world, on real-world schedules, and call it, grouchily, Groucho. So far, people have been enlisting in every major city in the US and alas more minor ones than can field the bi-monthly-meeting IRL, hand-assembled social "Groucho" clubs, at the moment. Well, I hope other solutions appear, but meanwhile here is my offering to we sufferers of AUL^*.

Attention, loneliness. You've been warned.