Can we really live alone?

These days everyone says living alone is great, and that everyone should be able to stand on their own without depending on anyone, whether for family or for relationships.

But I’ve been wondering for a while: can we really live on our own? And why do we try so hard to manage alone?

Count who you’ve depended on today

Without someone to build your home, where would you sleep? Without the auntie selling food, what would you eat? Without the people who keep the power and water running, could you turn on the lights or take a shower tonight?

Imagine you were the last person left. Not lost in a forest, just living in an empty city with no one else in it. The buildings and roads are all there, but there are no people. Would you really survive?

I think it would be hard.

What we call “living alone” might really mean “living with countless strangers doing everything for us, without ever having to see their faces.”

The thin wall between us

The strange thing is that we’re all connected, one way or another, all the time. Yet it’s as if a thin wall stands between us. We don’t know each other at all, and we don’t seem to want to.

And the wall seems to keep getting thicker. This isn’t just a feeling. The sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote that the number of people living alone has risen sharply in many countries around the world over the past several decades.¹

So who benefits?

This is my own suspicion. I have no data to back it up.

Take something small, like seasoning. A family can buy one big bottle and make it last a month. But people living on their own often buy small single-use sachets instead.

If that’s the case, wouldn’t a seasoning company want people to buy separately, and buy more, because it makes more profit? And what if it isn’t only seasoning?

How does a social-animal brain feel about this?

The question I most want answered is this: when people lose their connections, stop helping each other and no longer feel part of a society, what does that set off in our brains?

The social neuroscientist John Cacioppo spent decades studying loneliness. He proposed that loneliness isn’t just an emotion. It is a biological warning signal, like hunger or thirst.²

Hunger tells us to go find food. Loneliness tells us to go back to people. For our ancestors, falling out of the group meant danger: no one to watch for threats, no one to share food.

What’s interesting is that Cacioppo separated “being alone” from “loneliness.” Someone who lives alone but still feels connected to others may not be lonely at all, while someone surrounded by people who doesn’t feel they belong to anyone can be lonely.² So the problem may not be the room we live in by ourselves, but the thin wall that makes us feel we have no one.

If this warning signal keeps ringing for a long time, the brain goes into a state of alert and watches more closely for social threats. It’s as if our social-animal brain is telling us that something is wrong, that we’re being abandoned.²

His team’s research also found that loneliness is a risk factor that predicts increases in depressive symptoms later on.³ That doesn’t mean everyone who lives alone will become depressed. But the suspicion that living apart could be linked to illnesses like depression doesn’t seem to be something I just imagined.

What I think

“I can live alone” may be an illusion. We’re never really alone. We just can’t see the people who are with us. And when we can’t see them for long enough, the brain starts to believe we have no one.

So what do you think: can people really live alone? Yes or no?

Footnotes

1. Klinenberg, E. (2012). Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. New York: Penguin Press. ↩

2. Cacioppo, J. T., & Patrick, W. (2008). Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Cacioppo, J. T., Hughes, M. E., Waite, L. J., Hawkley, L. C., & Thisted, R. A. (2006). Loneliness as a specific risk factor for depressive symptoms: Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. Psychology and Aging, 21(1), 140–151. ↩

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