[Infowarrior] - Interesting Essay on Social Isolationism

[Richard Forno]

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/08/16/fewer_friends/print.html

Actually, hell is other people

A new study says Americans have fewer friends than ever -- but what if we're
enjoying more solitude and intimacy?

By Lisa Selin Davis

Aug. 16, 2006 | Earlier this summer, I spent a week vacationing with some of
my oldest and dearest friends, suffering most of the time from paranoia
after one of them pronounced me "addicted to worrying" and another accused
me of being relentlessly negative (I responded to her T-shirt, printed with
the question "What Would Nature Do?" by asserting that nature is a whole lot
more violent than Jesus). I resented being known so thoroughly and longed to
be surrounded by intimacy lite: acquaintances and cocktail party banter
buddies from whom I'm distant enough to ensure a conflict-free interaction,
as opposed to friends who have compiled empirical evidence about my
character defects over the years.

While I was busy questioning the benefits of intimacy, three sociologists
from Duke and the University of Arizona were releasing a study called
"Social Isolation in America." The researchers found that Americans have
one-third as many close friends as they did 20 years ago, and nearly three
times as many said they don't have a single confidante. This, by the way, is
how close friends are defined in the study: people with whom one discusses
important matters, though one person listed "getting a haircut" as an
important matter. I count myself lucky to have more than the study's average
number of friends and confidantes. In fact, I am a serial confessor and
discuss important matters with anyone who'll listen; by the haircut
standard, my postman Ronnie is a close friend. But like many other Americans
these days, I find close friendships maddening and admit to the occasional
onset of good old-fashioned misanthropy, a subscription to Sartre's
observation that hell is other people.

The study, a random sampling of 1,467 adults, sparked a short-lived
whirlwind of media activity examining the crisis in American camaraderie,
pointing the finger at sprawl and technology and work to explain it. But
when I went out searching for the friendless, I found that overwhelmingly
they blamed no one but themselves. They are what I'd call voluntarily
lonely. Some people seemed almost proud to say they could call no one a
friend, proud of the fortitude that loneliness requires. My dad once told me
that friends are people you can do nothing with, but these days, people seem
to prefer doing nothing by themselves. Are they choosing loneliness because
friendship is so much work and real friends are hard to find and make and
keep?

I didn't need to go far to find one of the voluntarily lonely, just down the
block where my neighbor Stephen Cohen lives. Cohen had plenty of pals back
in 2001, when he worked on Wall Street as a computer consultant, meaning he
had disposable income and regular business hours and could spend evenings
and weekends partying. "It was always about staying up late and being up on
popular culture," he says. Then he got serious. Turned 30. Got his pilot's
license. And he found as he outgrew his job that he outgrew his friends,
too. "When I started to go to bed early, it was incompatible with that
lifestyle." So he distanced himself from them, and, he says, "Eventually the
phone just stopped ringing."

Cohen used to choose his friends, he says, "by if they listened to New Order
or wore Doc Martens. From that quick assessment you knew you had things in
common." Forming new friendships requires a certain chemistry, much as
romantic relationships do, and the older we get, the more we have to
approach friendships the same way, with friend dates and relationships and
breakups. Now, Cohen says, "I'm really friendly, but I don't have any
friends." By "friends," he means people he sees regularly, people who call
to say hello. Cohen doesn't seem to mind the vacuum left by his old friends'
departure. "I used my therapist as a surrogate," he says. "We stopped
talking about my problems and I ended up just telling her about what I was
doing that week."

Louise Hawkey, a research scientist in psychology at the University of
Chicago, says certain people select what she calls existential loneliness.
"They find it a purposeful, meaningful way of living out their lives," she
says. Hawkey has been working on a study measuring the genetic
predisposition to loneliness -- some people are more prone to it than
others, but even for those, there may be a certain amount of self-deception
involved in voluntary loneliness. "If people are choosing it, either they're
perfectly able to live in those circumstances and aren't inclined to feel
lonely," she says, "or they're really good at deceiving themselves that this
is acceptable for them: The way to come to terms with a solitary life is to
say, 'This is my choice. I like it like this.'"

A writer in Albany, N.Y., named Daniel Nester says when he relocated upstate
from Brooklyn he chose to bring little of his old life with him beyond his
wife and the contents of his apartment -- no one from his former circle of
friends. "I'm currently not interviewing for new buddies. I've downsized my
circle of friends to almost nil," he says. "I have one friend. I used to
have 30." Petty grievances that were once small fissures grew to crevices as
he prepared to leave, and instead of courting new friendships, he drew
closer to his wife, filling the social absence with books. Nester would
rather be friendless than in the companionship of what he calls "fool's
gold" friends. "My faith in friendships is pretty low right now," Nester
says, but his expectations are high. "It's like a blood bond: We confide in
one another; we defend one another," he says -- anything less is not
friendship at all.

Compared with Nester's single friend, Basya Grinhstein's strange and
far-flung circle seems like a veritable in-crowd. Grinhstein, a 20-year-old
from Houston, says she has three friends: Two live in other states and one
is her 7-year-old brother, who has Down syndrome. "I paint by myself, I
watch movies by myself, I go dancing by myself," she says. "With other
people, I get irritated or feel uncomfortable. I'm not very trusting of
other people." Yet she believes that her utter lack of interest in making
friends draws people to her. "People always say, 'Can I have your number?
Can I have a way to keep in touch with you?' and I'll say, no, I'm not
really looking for that."

Every day on television, friends cross each other, betray each other,
infuriate each other, and 22 minutes later, all fractures are repaired. In a
media-saturated society that lionizes friendship, it's hard to believe that
the voluntarily lonely aren't just playing hard to get. Our electronic
culture and methods of keeping in touch -- cellphones, e-mail, instant
messaging, text messaging -- are noted in the study as possible grounds for
our increased isolation. For all their promise of keeping us connected, they
often disconnect us, and the result is that we have more
computer-to-computer than face-to-face time; my friends with BlackBerrys
send the most perfunctory messages, and even the text "miss U" does not make
me feel loved. One author of the study, Lynn Smith-Lovin, pointed out that a
distant e-mail correspondent will be of little use when you need someone to
pick up your kid at day care in a pinch. But Hawkey points out the
Internet's social potential. "Some think that the Internet keeps people
closer -- we'd lose touch with certain faraway friends and family if we
didn't have e-mail."

For many, technology fulfills social needs, and old school pals become
practically outdated. It's easy to see how blasting one's innermost secrets
to the world at large on MySpace.com would preclude the need for
confidantes. And if Doc Martens aren't enough to gel a friendship, one can
search out others with a variety of aligned interests with whom to bond, or
find a way for technology to replace the usual human interaction. My
favorite waiter at the local diner told me that his wife spends a great deal
of time on the Foo Fighters chat room, and that she witnesses entire
relationships unfold electronically. "People are on there all day," he said.

Even if we've increased this virtual intimacy, an architecture of loneliness
drives us apart. The researchers explain it this way: There has been "a
shift away from ties formed in neighborhood and community contexts." In
other words, those who suffer long commutes from the suburbs, work long
hours, and come right back to the 3,000-square-foot McPalace, the three-car
garage with a door leading directly into the home, never need to lay eyes on
a neighbor. Even if we moved to suburbs envisioning utopia, suburban life
is, in some form, voluntary loneliness.

The study finds that while Americans confide in fewer nonfamilial friends,
they've drawn closer to their spouses. It's odd that this is presented as
the disintegration of friendship instead of a testament to the strengthening
bond of American marriage and faith in romance (though another study
revealed that folks live longer surrounded not by family but friends). Six
months ago, Cohen found the girl of his dreams and she became No. 1
confidante. "I don't have nearly as much to say to my therapist now that I
talk Nicole's ear off."

As for my friends, I've been thinking about what we've been through
together. One friend had abdominal surgery last year, and the group rallied
by her bedside. Another has been struggling through chemotherapy, and we've
had a series of celebrations for her, including a bye-bye boobie party
before her double mastectomy. A friend flew out for my 30th birthday a few
years ago, a miserable evening eating In-N-Out burgers and seeing a Robert
Altman movie after some former friends canceled my birthday party. She saved
me from, well, who knows what I would have done had she not been there? I
may not see that friend every day. I don't discuss all my important matters
with her -- or even my haircuts. We have dinner maybe just once a month, but
she is my close friend. And, in fact, aren't friends in part there to call
you out, alert you to your faults, and offer advice on how to correct them?
Friends are there in case of emergency and, also, there to do nothing with.
My friends are, it turns out, lie-down-in-traffic-for-you kinds of buddies
-- I've had them all along, but never noticed.

Hard as I find it to navigate friendship, I'm lucky to have so many people I
can call friends. But what about those who don't? What about those with only
two confidantes, a couple of close friends? I don't see why that should be
an indication that we're more socially isolated -- for some people,
voluntary loneliness isn't so lonely after all. As Daniel Nester's mother
always told him, "If you find one friend in your life, you're lucky."

-- By Lisa Selin Davis