Friday essay: ‘like being hungry’ – loneliness afflicts nearly 1 in 3 Australians. It can be devastating, but can spark creativity or change

My sharpest experience of loneliness was during the New Year period when I turned 22. Following the breakdown of a youthful and doomed marriage, I had landed in a new country, in a city, Wellington, where the only people I had contact with were at the job I’d just started. They were work acquaintances, but not yet friends. Luckily, one of them realised I would be alone over the Christmas break. She invited me to spend it with her family. I couldn’t have been more grateful, yet once Christmas had passed, I found myself alone again, preparing to greet the New Year and my birthday.

My father had died four months earlier, so I was not only alone, but grieving. In the aftermath of his death, my mother and younger brother had left Sydney and returned to South Australia. Their move had left me feeling as if the world I’d been raised in had collapsed behind me. I felt there was no way back.

Even at work, in a busy office, I existed in a bubble of pain and separation. The people around me all had busy lives, complex connections, history with the place they occupied. I was out of my country, a discarded young wife, a bit of an oddity.

On that New Year’s Eve, watching from the kitchen window of my flat as car headlights streamed towards me and away, I felt rootless, forgotten. I had slipped through a crack into a dark vacuum. Knowing I had brought this upon myself was no comfort. Each hour crawled by like ten. I didn’t see anyone to speak to until the third day of January, when I was relieved to return to work. Afterwards, I always volunteered for shifts over long weekends, so as not to repeat the experience.

Loneliness is felt as a profound and painful yearning for connection. In her book The Lonely City, Olivia Laing describes it as

like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated.

Laing has talked about the shame of loneliness, describing it as “a taboo state that will cause others to turn and flee”. People who are lonely often try to keep the fact a secret, fearing it will make them appear weird, or needy. Fear can lead them to become hypervigilant for signs of rejection, which in turn leads to rejecting behaviours. In this way, loneliness forms a persistent cycle.

‘Unloved, unheard, unseen’

“In a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness,” wrote Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Daunting as this idea may be, many of us will face varying states of loneliness as we age, with the inevitable losses of parents, siblings, partners, and friends.

A recent study shows nearly one in three Australians feel lonely, and one in six experience severe loneliness.

Songwriters have always been sensitive to the emotion of loneliness, though most have sugared its bitterness with a plaint of romance gone awry. In 1949, Hank Williams sang of a night when time crawled by to the whine of a midnight train. Wrapped in the waltz-time that shouts the lack of a dance partner like no other beat, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry became a country music classic. By 1960, Elvis Presley was crooning Are You Lonesome Tonight?, while in the same decade, The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby documented lives of haunting emptiness.

Growing up alongside those songs, and a slew of others, few of us believed we could ever be old and sad enough to become the people they were singing about. But loneliness is not exclusively an affliction of age: new mothers are at risk, as well as the recently bereaved, refugees and other people living outside their own culture.

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of this hard-to-define, yet devastating emotion is that it can even affect people in the midst of busy lives – and people within families, who for some reason feel misunderstood, unloved, unheard, unseen.

A global public health priority

The World Health Organization has declared loneliness a global public health priority. It links loneliness to depression and suicide, and an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia.

In the United Kingdom, a joint study commissioned by the British Red Cross and Co-Op, Trapped in a Bubble, found nine million people there (almost a fifth of the population, and more than the population of London) often or always feel lonely. In 2018, the British government introduced a national strategy to tackle the problem, and appointed the world’s first Loneliness Minister. Australia has been urged to do the same.

Japan appointed their own minister in 2021, prodded into action by escalating suicides (particularly of young women) during the pandemic.

Since then, other countries are trialling their own solutions: some good, offbeat ideas include “chat checkouts” in a Dutch supermarket, where shoppers can stop and chat rather than be shuffled through as fast as possible.

The Loneliness Project, a research collaboration between the University of South Australia and an Adelaide Hills community centre, is just one Australian initiative. Together with local people, who responded to an advertisement, they will develop strategies to address community loneliness: plans so far include a cafe, regular social activities, a women’s development program and a podcast.

“The health risks of loneliness are thought to be as high as for smoking or obesity,” says Hayley Everuss, the project’s community development officer.

Ending Loneliness Together is a national network of organisations formed to address Australia’s growing loneliness problem. Their 2023 survey found lonely people are more likely to suffer anxiety and depression, and to have worse physical and mental health. Perhaps surprisingly, people over 65 were the least lonely, with 26% of 65-74 year-olds and just 13% of those aged 75+ reporting loneliness.

The highest rates of loneliness were among those aged 18-24, at 38%. With the transition from high school to university, or to first jobs, young people are faced with paths that stream away in many directions. Social media offers the illusion of connection, yet it may be the very thing that makes them feel most isolated.

While frequent social media use isn’t connected to loneliness, according to the survey, social media addiction is: 16% of lonely people reported being addicted to social media, compared to 9% of people who are not lonely.

Loneliness and ‘luminous menace’

Lynne, an artist now in her seventies, tells me as a young woman she was very much a “people person”. She thrived in communal living and was happy in the most chaotic of houses. In those days, her greatest nightmare would have been to find herself living alone. Decades later, she is doing it.

Since the breakup of her marriage, and the move from a family home to an apartment, followed by retirement (and as someone vulnerable to anxiety and depression), Lynne was managing reasonably well. Until the pandemic hit. Pre-COVID, she had more people dropping by, but now they’re out of the habit. “We just broke the pattern,” she says.

COVID-19 pushed all of us apart, with its masks and gloves, and its 24/7 drive-through testing stations, often sited in disused or semi-abandoned spaces. As we waited late at night in the sealed bubbles of our cars to be swabbed, those makeshift outposts – aglow against the urban dark – embodied something of the luminous menace of the painting, Nighthawks, by the American artist Edward Hopper.

Painted in 1942, it shows four people inside a brightly lit New York diner, a capsule of shadowless light set among darkened, empty streets. The lack of an entrance is a troubling detail, and the figures inside appear both exposed and trapped.

Hopper, a man known for his immense reserve, insisted each painting was an expression of his inner life, publicly stating his belief that “the man’s the work” and so the pictures “talk about me”.

A habitual night-walker of New York’s streets, Hopper began Nighthawks late in 1941, after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour propelled America into World War II. Dimmed lights and evening blackouts became the norm in the city; it was a different kind of crisis to the pandemic, but a crisis all the same.

For the viewer, a Hopper painting resembles an exquisite short story, which invites the reader to receive and interpret the elements of place, character and tension according to their own experience. Paintings like Automat (1927), in which a young woman sits alone in a cafe serviced by machines, and New York Movie (1939), with its bored or contemplative usherette standing to one side in a movie theatre while a film plays out on the screen, invariably return me to that lonely time after my father’s death. That is when I first stumbled upon Hopper’s work.

“The loneliness thing is overdone,” Hopper said. And I doubt I would have described his figures as lonely when I first saw them – if they were alone, they had been captured in a moment of typically human solitude. But now, decades later, I see that Hopper’s figures spoke to something deeper in me than the apparent loneliness of a young woman living far from home.

As great works of art have the power to do, they struck a note against my truest self: the part that had chosen the solitary path, despite its perils and pitfalls.

Meanwhile, the pandemic jabbed at us with its vocabulary of punishment: “isolation”, “quarantine”, “lockdown”, “curfew”. Only separation was safe. COVID’s social distancing rules normalised a fear of close contact we may never entirely lose.

For Lynne, travel is a way of offsetting the loneliness of solo living. “I love seeing other places, but also I’m with people around the clock,” she told me. “I’m usually sharing with the friend I travel with, so I wake up in the morning with someone, I go to sleep with someone there. And that’s the bonus on top of the travel.” After a recent month-long trip to India, she is again facing days when she doesn’t see or speak to anyone, unable to re-establish her pre-COVID social connections.

“I hate the fact that I wake up and it takes me so long to remember which day it is. And the thing about it is that it’s of no consequence, whereas once it was important whether it was Saturday or Sunday or Monday.”

Loneliness appears to be less prevalent in some other cultures. Over her many trips to Bali, Lynne has noticed that, despite the challenges of poverty, no one there is much alone. In a local family she’s become friendly with over the years, the grandmother has been cared for within the family, bathed and fed by her grandson when she became very ill.

Across Western society, we have long ago lost the village model of living, though a version of it still prevails in places like Bali. If we are lonely, it is an unwelcome outcome of the way we live now in the first quarter of the 21st century: tuned to the “self” rather than to the family group. (If there is a functioning group.)

Family networks stretch nationwide, or even globally. But families themselves break down, or become so complex in their connections and loyalties, they often cannot provide a safety net for those who encounter serial losses and find themselves alone.

Communal living and finding comfort

The loneliness of our “me” culture is quietly driving change. In Australia, co-housing schemes are creating “intentional communities”. This means either living in a collection of private homes, accompanied by communally owned shared spaces, or in developments of self-contained dwellings, arranged within common areas for shared activities.

Communal living, or co-housing, is a revival of the village model that arguably served our ancestors better than our current individualism is serving us. As we push deeper into the century, and our population ages, co-housing, or versions of it, are likely to become a mainstream housing form.

Not all loneliness is involuntary, and my own suffering at 22 arose because I chose to isolate myself. But for old people, loneliness mostly accrues over time. When combined with grief, it can be hard to break out of the isolating bubble. As a society, we are not skilled at knowing what to say to grieving, lonely people.

Interestingly, a research paper on loneliness by the pioneering German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann refers to the way loneliness following a bereavement is often counteracted by a process of “incorporation and identification”. In this defensive behaviour, a person mourning the loss of a loved one comes to develop a likeness “in looks, personality, and activities” to the lost beloved. In this way, they fight their loneliness.

I read this with a ping of recognition. After my mother’s death, I clung to the things that had belonged to her. On most days, I carried with me one of the soft cotton handkerchiefs she favoured. I wore her hand-knitted jumpers, spritzed her perfume. I found comfort in the steady tick of her wristwatch and bedside clock, and the fact I was so often told how much I look like her.

My mother used to say four days at home alone was about her limit. I like to think we never allowed her to reach the four-day mark. But as her hearing deteriorated, the daily phone calls became more problematic. Visual impairment and impaired hearing are both factors in social isolation for all age groups. Many of the old people I’ve spoken to have mentioned hearing loss as presenting significant difficulties.

Eighty-year-old Philippa, now living voluntarily in aged care following her recovery from a serious stroke, explains how she prefers to watch movies with subtitles. “But sometimes they’ll say that the subtitles can be really confusing for the people with dementia. So [I say] what about doing it for me, or people like me? And there’ll be a little bit of silence there.”

COVID only increased the difficulties for Philippa, and for countless others with diminished hearing, since most care-home staff have English as a second language and mask-wearing inhibits lip-reading. “Deafness is the hidden disability, and people are impatient,” Philippa says. “They get irritated when you ask them to repeat something.”

Blindness is perhaps even more isolating than hearing loss. But any disability or serious illness can set people apart. A diagnosis, such as cancer, leaves you feeling alone with your body, knowing no one can go through it for you.

Of course, we sometimes choose to enter states of constructive loneliness. These are usually temporary, and often looked forward to, such as retreats of various kinds, or creative residencies. Nearly all creative works are begun and finished during periods of productive aloneness. For writers and artists, solitary toil is the norm, but solitude lacks loneliness’s razor edge.

Outsiders in other lands

A side-effect of my loneliness in those far-off days was that it was when I began to write. But although I later returned to Australia, I never again lived in Sydney. I was right to have sensed the collapse of that world, and though I have been back, it was never as someone returning home.

There is a loneliness to these losses of time and place that we can only absorb.

That no one, living or dead, shared my 22nd birthday is a grief with no possibility of resolution. It is related to the way our younger selves are forgotten with the passage of years. And to the fact children will never quite be able to believe in their grey-haired grandmothers’ existence as young women in miniskirts and skinny-rib jumpers, with painted-on “Twiggy” eyelashes and platform shoes. Not even when we show them the photographs.

These are states of irredeemable loneliness, when what we mourn is who we once were.

My second period of great isolation was a long stretch of years from my mid-thirties, when I agreed to move to an island on the other side of the world, into a culture very different to anything I knew. We shared a common language, but the local accent was so strong that every time I opened my mouth I was identified as “foreign”.

In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing, who is British, writes of being misunderstood in New York because of her “different inflection”. Laing quotes Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who she describes as speaking for all exiles: “The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.” As both Laing and I discovered, failing to make those adjustments marks one out as “a non-native, an outsider”.

I described my emotional state during those years as “homesick”, but I see now that homesickness is only another facet of loneliness. Like loneliness, which abates with connection, homesickness fades as soon as the sufferer reconnects with home.

But for those who become permanently displaced – through war, or natural disaster – what is lost with their migratory loneliness is not only the familiar faces and places of the past, but the identities that have been evolving over their entire life spans. They have to begin again to create their narratives, and there is acute loneliness in not being known for who we are, and for where we’ve been.

Jean Rhys and art forged in loneliness

Jean Rhys’s autobiographical-leaning novels reek of the migratory loneliness she endured after being sent from Dominica, aged 16, to live with an aunt in England. Rejected from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art after two terms because of her inability to speak “proper English”, Rhys became a sometime chorus girl. She drifted into the same rootless, damaged and damaging existence – eked out in rooming houses and seedy hotels – as the heroines of her novels.

Wide Sargasso Sea, published when Rhys was 76 and all but forgotten in literary circles, was the culmination of her talent. A work both of genius and of long hard labour, it was also a complex fusion of Rhys’s life with literature: a lushly imagined prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In it, Rhys channelled her experience of the particular suffering of exile into the character of the young Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway, the first Mrs Rochester.

Following an arranged marriage to an unnamed Englishman who is desperate for her dowry, Antoinette’s journey from post-slavery Jamaica to incarceration in the attic at Thornfield Hall is only marginally more dramatic than Rhys’s own trajectory from Dominica to Devon. It was a route that took her via Paris, London, and latterly Cornwall, with a brief stay in Holloway Prison, charged with assault.

During the writing of her masterpiece, Rhys was living a lonely, poverty-stricken, alcohol-fuelled existence in the Devon village of Cheriton Fitzpaine. Continually at odds with her neighbours, she was thought by local children to be a witch. Daily life could hardly have been more bleak.

But as Olivia Laing observes in The Lonely City, “many marvellous things have emerged […] things forged in loneliness, but also things that function to redeem it”. With the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys’s life did change for the better, just when she needed it most, despite her bitter response that success had come too late.

So what measures can we take to shore up our lives against future loneliness? Is forewarned forearmed? By looking ahead and accepting the possibility loneliness might come knocking, we could work harder at building new friendships. We could introduce more sociability into our lives before we even really need it: by volunteering, or embracing a group activity such as a walking club, a choir, or by taking a class.

Recently, delivering a bundle of bedding to the Salvos, I was directed to a receiving area, where all the people in sight within the cavernous warehouse were elderly. A small army of them was receiving and sorting donations. In another part of the building, other elderly volunteers were selling clothing and bric-a-brac. It is the same when I visit the Oxfam secondhand bookshop.

Voluntary labour largely goes unnoticed, but without it, most charities couldn’t function. By doing good for others, we could also be doing good for ourselves.

It helps, too, to remember there are people all around us who doubtless feel the same. We never know what is going on in the background of the lives we brush up against. A greeting and a smile could go a long way towards making someone feel that the world is not an entirely hostile place.

The company of books

I’ve managed my own lonely times by reading. A good book offers a world one can sink into and become part of. Books – and public libraries – can be places for the lonely to shelter. But reading is a solitary pastime. Ideally, if looking to treat loneliness through reading, one would join a book club or discussion group, so the activity can be shared.

Perhaps the surest antidote is to develop, if not a love of solitude, then at least a tolerance for it, and find ways to make our alone-time fruitful. As we age, we’d be wise to cling fiercely to the skills acquired over a lifetime and continue to develop them. We should also consider taking up new ones.

With typical melancholy and pragmatism, Murakami insists

the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It’s true for everyone. That being the case, there’s no reason to complain. And besides, who would we complain to, anyway?

Only ourselves, I suppose. But while recent statistics appear not to support Murukami’s assertion, there exists the possibility that older people are just more stoic, more habituated to their solitude and less comfortable revealing loneliness, even in an anonymous survey.

I ask myself as I write this: Am I ever lonely? The answer is, sometimes. Because writing is a solitary practice. It takes me out of the world for hours and days at a stretch. But I write in a house I live in with two other people, who I can go to at any time for company and conversation.

What if I were to lose them? The dark reality that shadows our small household’s happiness is that one day, I will – or they will lose me. What is to become of the one of us who remains?

Will they be as desolate as Eleanor Rigby? Will they listen through the too-long nights for Hank Williams’s lonesome train? Or will they mourn for a time, and then, sensibly, find ways to forge new connections?