On Loneliness

So City Journal has an interesting article on America's loneliness epidemic.

Then there's one man's strategy for dealing with loneliness: Meet 10,000 people!

I put it all down to the culture of uprootedness. People don't stay in one place for more than a few years. Consequently, they have no particular allegiance to place (or to anyone in that place). That, of course, is a vast generalization, one with countless exceptions, but I think there's something to it. People are marrying less, plus there are more people than ever that choose not to raise a family. There are fewer barriers than ever to pulling up stakes, or (to put it differently) fewer barriers to the ideology of self (where self-serving takes precedence over other-serving). It's an ideology that used to reach its peak in one's teens, but then give way to the competing interests of family life.

But what if there is no family life? You get to stay a teen (essentially) well into your 20s and perhaps even 30s. Somewhere along the line you wake up one morning, look at your grizzled gob in the mirror, and say, "Damn I'm lonely."