Headlines in America’s newspaper of record imply that if you’re
not feeling lonely, you may be the lonely exception: “Sad,
Lonely World Discovered in Cyberspace”; “Alone in the Vast
Wasteland”; and “The Lonely American Just Got a Bit Lonelier.”
Add books such as Bowling Alone, The Lonely American, and Alone
Together, and you might think that there is an epidemic of
loneliness. An endemic epidemic, perhaps, because we have
received such diagnoses for generations. The 1950s—the era of
large families, crowded churches, and schmoozing
suburbanites—brought us hand-wringing books such as Man Alone:
Alienation in Modern Society and the best-selling The Lonely
Crowd, which landed author David Reisman on the cover of Time
magazine. About a half-century before that, policymakers were
worrying about the loneliness of America’s farmers, and
observers were attributing a rising suicide rate to the
loneliness of immigrants or to modernity in general. And so on,
ever back in time. Noted historian Page Smith described colonia