An investigation into loneliness and belonging

About a month or so ago, I realized that I was trying to write a book on the subject of loneliness in the loneliest way possible: in front of my computer with a giant stack of books. This is Classic Mandy. I am, after all, the person who tackled the problem of her love life with piles of scientific research (in my defense this worked out pretty well). Part of me genuinely likes the irony of writing a book about loneliness all by my lonesome, but we can probably agree that it’s actually a terrible idea.

Hence: this newsletter, which I hope will become more of a conversation on the subject—and maybe even a kind of community?

Why loneliness?

For a long time I lived in a small apartment building at a busy Vancouver intersection. After a few years, I realized I still didn’t know most of my neighbors’ names. And it’s not like I didn’t run into them—there were only eight apartments in the whole building. People frequently passed in the hallway without making eye contact or saying hello. This drove me nuts! I realized that, as a fairly shy person, I’d spent my life relying on other people’s friendliness. But now that wasn’t working.

For awhile, I thought the problem was the city itself. Though it aspires to be one of the most livable in the world, Vancouver is infamously lonely. (The city actually did a study on the problem).

I never thought of myself as lonely, though. I had a close group of friends and I was often out biking, attending literary events, going to breweries. I was living exactly the kind of life I had imagined for myself in my early twenties. Still, I struggled with the sense that I was, in a very existential way, on my own. My successes and my failures, my happiness and unhappiness—all of it was up to me.

A lot has been written about the social isolation that shapes modern lives, but it's easy to get the sense that this kind of loneliness is an individual problem that might be solved with individual solutions, like finding a good therapist and joining a softball league. The goal of this project is to consider loneliness as a larger, more existential dilemma—one that is inextricable from our modern lives.

In many ways loneliness seems like the inevitable result of global migration, vast inequality, precarious employment, and our sense of ourselves as somehow separate from the natural world. Now, in the midst of this pandemic, we have the opportunity to rethink the ways we are living. This project imagines that those systems are not fixed and that real belonging is possible. I just don’t know quite what that looks that yet.

But I’m excited to find out—and I’m eager for some input.

If this sounds remotely exciting to you, I hope you’ll join in the conversation:

Oh and, tell your friends!