Is the Internet Making Me Lonelier?

If you glance around pop psychology venues this question comes up a lot. Social media is ironically named, they say. We are always in contact with people, friends and others, yet we seem further away, further isolated from them and ourselves. Part of this comes from the nature of social media as a presentational or performative venue. We see people living their ‘best lives’ and we struggle to compete — either to live that way (to live better) or at least to post better.

We know, of course, that people don’t live this way and even influencers have boring days, I imagine. But we know this and yet we still feel out of the loop, voyeurs in other people’s lives and more alienated from our own. Is this the cause of increased loneliness? Certainly it plays a part.

Professor Zadie Smith made a claim about Facebook almost 10 years ago that rings true today. She said that with Facebook, what matters is not the quality of the connection, but the quantity: big data friendship. In her New Yorker article ‘Generation Why’, she argues that while connection is the goal, “the quality of that connection, the quality of that information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits, none of this is important.”

When I treat couples in therapy, the primary issue people often describe is “communication problems.” There is communication happening in the relationship, just like online, but it is not enough, something is missing; it is not satisfying or rewarding. Ironically, when couples wait in the waiting room (when we met in person), they would both be sitting silently on their phones. Therapy was a chance to put the phone down for a bit and work things out differently — to try and bridge distance and loneliness by slowing things down together, risking, stumbling, allowing emotion to take over, building that elusive qualitative muscle of communication.

So is loneliness social media’s fault? Partly. Boundaries are murkier now. Work and leisure bleed into each other; we take our phones to dinner and to the bedroom and ignore the person next to us. Being social, being connected takes effort, intention and risk. But it also takes concerted and elongated time. Uninterrupted time. The usual one-hour therapy session is a good start.

Carl Jung has an interesting comment on loneliness that precedes the internet and social media by a half century: “Loneliness does not come from having no people around, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” For Jung, loneliness and felt alienation were not connected to social connectivity — either real or virtual. Getting involved in social activities, hosting more dinner parties, or having 10k followers will not cure loneliness as he sees it.

The cure for loneliness is communicational, but a subtle and rarefied communication related to speaking the unspeakable, or speaking that which is “inadmissible.” It is privileged and private speech. It is certainly dangerous and risky speech. It is speech where the self denudes itself to the other. We might even describe it as sacred speech.

This is the aim of good therapy — to elicit and hold this speech. But it might also be said to be the elevated goal of interpersonal speech as well. What might a relationship look like where true desires or regrets were allowed to live? What kind of gap is bridged when communicating the “unspeakable” to a close friend or colleague? There are far too many daggers and vultures online for this kind of speech, and so, from this angle loneliness online is likely to endure.

To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.