HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE

British author Emily White comments on a book she wrote about long-term loneliness.  On the one hand, some people lead lives so cluttered as to not understand the problem.

When I tried to mention it to my doctor — a man with a wife, three children and a busy practice — he laughed and said that he’d love, yes, love, to have some time alone. He misunderstood me so fundamentally that I left the surgery without a word.

(How can a man who is warm understand a man who is cold? -- Solzhenitsyn.)

On the other hand, the trappings of sociability might conceal more anomie and isolation than meets the eye.

The stigma against loneliness has got worse, precisely because we’re more vulnerable to it than we used to be. We have more to fear. Even though we’re more connected in some ways — ‘friending’ each other on Facebook, and Twittering away to our followers — in other ways, we’re more alone than ever before.

I have a Twitter account, but I don’t feel ‘linked in’ in any relevant way. I can Tweet all morning, but if I don’t have a phone call with someone or a meaningful exchange, I feel as alone as before.

More than 30 per cent of people in Britain live alone and the time we spend visiting friends and family has fallen. A recent study in the U.S. showed that almost a third of the respondents had no one to confide in.

There was a time in my life, after I moved from one end of the country to the other, when there were only three people in my social circle, a number so low it qualifies as ‘socially isolated’.

Loneliness has become a major problem of our time. The Mental Health Foundation’s 2010 report described loneliness in Britain as having reached ‘epidemic’ proportions. And yet we still don’t talk about it.

When I was lonely, I hid my emotional reality and lied outright. I fudged facts and did everything necessary to make my isolated life look full. I hinted that I hadn’t been single for as long as I had. I worked as a lawyer, and if someone at the office suggested I looked tired, I pretended that a busy social life was leaving me drained.

If they’d spent the evening alone at home, they’d tell others they’d had the most fantastic time, catching up on long overdue phone calls.

Weekends on their own would, come Monday morning, mutate into a fictitious round of endless socialising.

The people who did these things, who lied and embroidered, were struggling with the weight of social norms because just as loneliness has become more intense — as rates of living alone increase and the number of confidantes falls — we’ve been exposed to more and more images of easy-to-achieve sociability.

Read on, though. Perhaps that easy sociability is really a mask for deeper desperation.

TV programmes (think Sex And The City, Friends, Mad Men) are filled with people leading satisfying lives.

Adverts for brands that have nothing to do with sociability — such as the clothing lines Boden, Jack Wills and Tommy Hilfiger — come adorned with models wrapping their arms effortlessly around each other.

This means that sociability is what we’re presented with, while loneliness is what we experience.

With sociability so glamorised, so normalised, it’s no wonder we lie about loneliness. Who wants to admit to not fitting in, to having some of their most basic human needs left unfulfilled?

I watch Mad Men. But that Ray Stevens couplet, "Eighty-six proof anaesthetic crutches brought you to the top, Where the smiles are all synthetic and the ulcers never stop" rattles around in my mind every time the account executives talk shop in a bar.