It all started with a desk.
By all objective measurements, it was a boon. Somebody on the local Buy Nothing group was giving away a desk to a good home, and my teenage daughter had a room that needed it. We get a free desk, they don’t have to throw it into a landfill. Everybody wins.
Unfortunately, it is quite heavy. Not too heavy that Stephanie and I couldn’t get it into the house, but navigating it up the stairs to my daughter’s room? No chance, not without a third adult. We’re going to need to call a friend.
So, who do we call? We usually depend on our parents for logistical support, but they’re not really up for heavy lifting. My school-age friends? Scattered to the four corners of the earth, I see them in real life maybe twice a year. My extended family? I’ve got plenty of cousins nearby, but we lost touch during the pandemic and never really rebuilt the connection. Coworkers? I’m not really close enough with any of them to say “come to my house to lift a heavy thing, I’ll buy you a beer.” Adult friends, outside of work, I’ve made in the two decades since I left college?
I…don’t have any.
The realization hit me like a sack of bricks. This poor unsuspecting piece of furniture triggered a horrible revelation that threatens to bloom into a full on existential crisis (or, short of that, at least three blog posts). If you define the word by a specific set of requirements, I might have no close friends.
At least I’m not alone. In 2023, 8% of American said the same about themselves: they have no close friends. Loneliness is everywhere. If there’s one place I’m not alone, it’s among the lonely.
The wrinkle here is that friendship is a difficult thing to quantify. How do you measure “closeness” with another person? Geographical proximity? Emotional resonance? Cultural and lifestyle similarity? Do you evaluate it by quantity of time spent, or modulate by quality? It’s a multivariate, chaotic, and dynamic system. However, I think I’ve found one clever heuristic to measure a friendship at a glance: can you call the person to ask them to come over and heft a desk?
Is the connection “heftworthy?”
Set aside the physicality and now just assume I needed another set of hands. Sure, I have people I know, neighbors I talk to in passing, coworkers I treasure. Either none of them are heftworthy, or I’ve become too used to solitude to ask. I still love the friends that I made in high school and college, and I can talk to them every day on Discord. Same with my brother, who I know will always have my back when shit hits the fan. None of them are heftworthy either; they aren’t here, and it turns out proximity matters a great deal.
This simple example, a heavy desk that needs lifting, fits into a pattern that plays itself out across all aspects of our lives. We’ll talk to therapists over Zoom about how uncertain we feel about work or our relationships, but never catch up with a friend over coffee to have the same conversation. We’ll grit our teeth and bear it through illness and injury to get through the day, because who would we call to pick up groceries on such short notice? We’ll let parenthood warp into a series of car rides shuttling us to and fro in ways that are likely redundant with our neighbors (and, oh boy, you better believe we’ll talk more about parenthood soon).
And then what happens? We get tired, fatigued, exhausted by spending days struggling against the world by ourselves. We no longer have the time or the strength to put in the considerable effort to create, build, and maintain friendship. We just get up the next day, look at the list of things to get done, and dig in. The cycle repeats and reinforces itself.
In the previous posts we have found that social isolation is unplanned and self-perpetuating. What the example of the desk reveals is that isolation is also holding us down. Loneliness is its own force of gravity: it takes the mass of everyday life and imposes upon it a weight. The unbearable weightiness of being alone manifests itself in loads left un-lifted, storms weathered unassisted, battles fought unsupported, and desks stuck at the bottom of the stairs.
Lesson Three: Our disintegration is gravitational. It raises the difficulty of everyday life, making easy problems hard and hard problems insurmountable.