“There’s this idea that going out into those vast spaces and connecting with the wilderness and escaping the past was precisely what made us Americans,” Woodard says. Solitude and isolation do not automatically equal loneliness, but with additional recent stressors - the rise of social media and virtual life, post-9/11 polarization and the way COVID-19 interrupted existence - the challenge becomes even more stark. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an American epidemic, saying that it takes as deadly a toll as smoking upon the population of the United States. And in many countries that’s more true than it was in the United States,” says Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.Ī man uses a cell phone in New Orleans, Aug. They were tied up in a web of connections. In the age before democracy, for better and for worse, “People weren’t lonely. This has been a recurring thread in how Americans perceive themselves. throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” “Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it. “They acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands,” he wrote. Or is that, like other chunks of the American story, a premise built on myths?Īlexis de Tocqueville, watching the country as an outsider while writing “Democracy in America” in the mid-1800s, wondered whether, “as social conditions become more equal,” Americans and people like them would be inclined to reject the trappings of deep community that had pervaded Old World aristocracies for centuries. But as far back as the early 19th century, when the word “loneliness” began to be used in its current context in American life, some were already asking the question: Do the contours of American society - that emphasis on individualism, that spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape - encourage isolation and alienation? When you add recent stressors - the rise of social media and virtual life, post-9/11 polarization and the way COVID-19 interrupted existence - the challenge becomes even more stark. He cited some potent forces: the gradual withering of longstanding institutions, decreased engagement with churches, the fraying bonds of extended families. “Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows,” he said, “and that’s not right.” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it an American epidemic, saying that it takes as deadly a toll as smoking upon the population of the United States. In reality, loneliness in America can be deadly. It’s a classic example of a fundamental American tall tale - that of a nation built on notions of individualism, a male-dominated story filled with loners and “rugged individualists” who suck it up, do what needs to be done, ride off into the sunset and like it that way.
As the closing music swells, Wayne’s character looks around at his kin - people who have other people to lean on - and then walks off toward the dusty West Texas horizon, lonesome and alone. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E, File)Īt the end of “The Searchers,” one of John Wayne’s most renowned Westerns, a kidnapped girl has been rescued and a family reunited. surgeon general declared it an epidemic, saying that it takes as deadly a toll as smoking.
Wayne lonesome dubplate full#
American lore is full of tales of a nation built on the foundations of individualism. People walk past an American flag inside the Oculus, part of the World Trade Center transportation hub, at the start of a work day in New York, Sept.
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