Mornings have been like this.

Cold, homegrown orange slices and hot coffee while pouring over Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City.

It’s a book I have been exploring for years, each time returning to it to find something new.

The book that introduced me to Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol when I was just beginning to wade into the pool of art that I have been twelve feet under ever since. It’s also the book that continuously shocks and soothes me with it’s unfiltered accounts of raw human experience, of being one solitary being on a planet of billions and what a perpetually vulnerable and haunting experience that truly is.

Yet a beautiful one. For the subtitle is adventures in the art of being alone. How you live is your art. How you suffer and how you smile, its all art. The book is about that.

CONTEMPORARY LONELINES

There is a chapter titled “Render Ghosts” that has particularly captured my attention lately for it’s absolutely harrowing examination of our contemporary world. With a focus on social media and virtual worlds as they have evolved since the dawn of the 21st century, Laing walks you through the terrifying allure of the internet to the human brain and how deeply entrenched in it’s illusions of connection that we have become.

She writes,

“It’s easy to see how the network might appeal to someone in the throes of chronic loneliness, with its pledge of connection. its beautiful, slippery promises of anonymity and control. You can look for company without the danger of being revealed or exposed, discovered wanting, seen in a state of need or lack.”

-Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

She goes on to explain that despite the internet’s offer of connection with anonymity and control, it only takes a few ignored calls or messages to send our human minds reeling into pits of despair. She even cites a study that revealed the pain that one feels when left out of a chat on the internet is just as real and aching as the pain one feels when excluded by a group in a social situation IRL.

As someone who came of age with social media, I don’t need a professor of an MIT study to convince me of that.

Laing also writes,

“I can’t count how many pieces I have read about how alienated we’ve become, tethered to our devices, leery of real contact; how we are heading for a crisis of intimacy, as our ability to socialize withers and atrophies.”

A crisis of intimacy. How gorgeously eerie and painfully accurate. I find myself wondering about previous eras, when people looked each other in the eyes and spoke real words to real people.

A NORMAN ROCKWELL CHILDHOOD

I love talking to my grandmother about her childhood because it was the exact opposite of a crisis of intimacy. She tells me stories of growing up in Chicago in the 1950s, stories that remind me of Francie’s life in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

She says that back then, everyone sat out on their porches while kids ran around the streets playing games. Women would gossip and invite each other over for coffee and pastries, pastries that had yet to be mass-produced with chemicals and wrapped in plastic. Pastries from your neighbor’s own oven or the bakery on the corner. She tells me that someone would make lemonade and grill hot dogs and invite the whole block over on a random afternoon.

What?

It’s all so Norman Rockwell I can barely stand it. My neighbors barely speak, let alone invite each other over for coffee on Saturday mornings. What must that have felt like to have been a part of?

I compare it to now, where kids have tablets standing between them and the real world, acting as a barrier that keeps them from touching real things, knowing real things.

SAFE ZONE

Laing argues that those tablets, those screens, offer something that the real world never can—safety. Or, the illusion of it. She points out that the need for intimacy and the fear of it create a stalemate.

The internet offers a space where one can indulge in a simulation of intimacy, a simulation that allows them to handcraft how they appear to others, minimizing the risk of rejection that waits on every corner of the living, breathing world. It feels safer. More anonymous, less personal, but while still managing to light up areas of the brain that signal connection.

It’s insane.

Why put yourself out there in a bar or coffee shop when you could just open your phone and let a dating app match you with a compatible stranger? They are saying that my generation is lonelier and more depressed than ever, findings that I credit entirely to the internet. Go to any airport or coffee shop or line at the post office and see nothing but humans standing five inches from each other, absorbed in their own worlds.

There is no longer the forced need to engage. You can just pull out your safety blanket of a phone and be free to ignore everyone. And if you don’t, if you try to be present, you might just find that you feel more alone than ever, for you are the only one really there. It makes my blood go a bit cold. How did we get here? They say we can’t ever go back.

A SCARCITY OF EMPATHY

By the end of the chapter, Laing dives into a discussion of the city and how radically outrageous it is that a modern metropolis like New York, a concrete jungle with opportunities for authentic connection on every corner, has somehow become one of the loneliest places.

“Cities shift from places of contact, places where diverse people interact, to places that resemble isolation wards, the like penned with the like.”

It’s very Edward Hopper, this idea of the being most alone when surrounded by others. Of walking around in a fishbowl where everyone can see in and you can see out but no one can move from one side of the glass to the other. We are all just breathing the air of our own realities, observing others as they do the same. Laing explains that not only has this created the aforementioned crisis of intimacy, but really, a crisis of empathy as well.

The lack of real connection caused by virtual socialization is slowly corroding our ability to empathize. The very safety that we clung to the internet for, that lack of vulnerability and the minimized risk of rejection, have also fed into a kind of apathy. We don’t need to care so much. Our attention spans our shorter. Our need, and therefore our desire, to commit to any one thing is far less potent.

When there is an illusion of infinity at our fingertips, the things standing in front of us feel more, well, replaceable. If that date didn’t work out, open your phone and pick from any one of the dozens of matches waiting for you. If your friend has grown toxic, unfollow her and move on. Don’t like this couch? Order another one and it will be here tomorrow.

We live in a throwaway culture where there is always more to be had wherever that came from. And so, like spoiled children, it becomes harder to care. The stain of apathy sinks deeper, moving through our tissue and infiltrating our bloodstream like an airborne virus we cannot go anywhere without breathing in. As a result, Laing points out that we are increasingly lacking empathy for others.

You know how I know this is true? You know what makes me realize it the most? When I am standing in the grocery store and some kind elderly person strikes up a conversation with grace and ease and we are chatting about god knows what for five minutes. It’s those moments, those tiny little occurrences that someone like my grandmother would understand as normal, that truly reveal how ill our world has become. For why is it strange to feel that little spark of joy from talking to a stranger? How did we get to a place where small talk in the cereal aisle has become such a stand out moment of the day? I find myself caring about this random guy and how his dinner is going to turn out with that new recipe he was telling me about. I find myself caring.

We are so estranged and lost in our own lives that simply talking to a stranger is enough to make us feel radically less alone in the world. That’s wild to me.

TAKING CARE

In closing, Laing tells a story of walking down the street and seeing a exhausted looking man who started spilling out his life story to her. He told her that no one would talk to him. That he had been there for days. That they just threw pennies at him.

She writes,

“It was snowing hard, the flakes whirling down. My hair was soaked already. After a while, I gave him five bucks and walked on. That night I watched the snow falling for a long time. The air was full of wet neon, sliding and smearing in the streets. What is it about the pain of others?

Easier to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Easier to refuse to make the effort of empathy, to believe instead that the stranger’s body on the sidewalk is simply a render ghost, an accumulation of colored pixels, which winks out of existence when we turn our head, changing the channel of our gaze.”

I froze when I read this. Wet neon, sliding and smearing into the streets. What is it about the pain of others?

Not only does Laing beautifully summarize the ways in which virtual worlds have created an instinct to “turn off” our empathy IRL, to look down at our phones instead of into the eyes of a stranger, but she does so with such a smart play on words that I can’t not share it.

I mean, an accumulation of colored pixels, which winks out of existence when we turn our head, changing the channel of our gaze? That’s brilliant. It captures how pixelated and fleeting our perceptions of reality have become while delivering prose that melts like butter.

It’s one of those books I can’t help but tell everyone about all of the time in a fashion that is probably annoying but really cannot be helped.

It’s a medicinal, raw, aching account of what it really means to be alive in this world, at this moment.

And we all need a little of that, don’t we?

Love, m.

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