The Loneliness of Justin Bieber

I don’t know how much Justin Bieber you listen to during the average week, but I’ll just say this: since this pandemic started, I’ve been listening to A. Lot. Of. Bieber.

I haven’t been a Bieber fan for all that long, so I don’t know how to explain this life choice (and it is a life choice, as the other member of my household can confirm) other than to say that when my world is in a state of high emotional entropy, I crave songs—or better yet entire albums—with as little emotional complexity as possible. I want to press play and feel one crystalline sentiment at a time. 

The song “Yummy,” for example, is like this little zap to the most cheerful part of my brain. And yes, I know, the song is essentially just one word repeated over and over. And that word is “Yummy”—a word children apply to crackers—and—improbably? predictably?—it’s about sex—sex with his wife, so it manages to be absurd but not at all transgressive. What is there to like about this song? Only the fact that it incomprehensibly hypnotic, which, in the long century that is the year 2020, is, for me, a true pleasure.

I’m sure you can imagine that I was excited when I heard Bieber was performing a new song on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago. And guess what? It’s called “Lonely” and it’s perfect. 

It’s not just that that this song is everything I want in a song right now, it’s that somehow—almost magically—the song is the inevitable conclusion to a particular thread of loneliness I’ve been tracing for months. A thread which has taken me through the minds of a conceptual artist, a long-dead philosopher, a sparkling essayist, and landed me here, on YouTube with, arguably, the world’s biggest pop star. And I’m going to try and explain that whole journey here so, um, I hope you will bear with me.

Early this year I was reading Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing (which I definitely recommend if you like conceptual art or rose gardens or thinking about new ways of being in the world). Odell, an artist and a writer, argues that we fall into habitual patterns of moving through our days, tending to look through the world around us rather than at it. But, if we can open our attention—if we can see like artists—we can be more present in the world as it is. Odell puts it this way: “Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.”

 When we allow ourselves to be truly curious, we begin to see the familiar in new and profound ways.

Of course this got me thinking about loneliness. Because aren’t we always looking at one another through the lenses of agenda and expectation? Seeing what we expect to see in one another, rather than what is? 

I kept thinking about this idea—about what it would be like if we could actually encounter “the unfathomable fact” of one another’s existence. The person in front of you in line at the grocery store checkout would cease to be someone who feels entitled to sneak two too many items into the express lane and instead become what he actually is: a whole and unfathomably perfect being. I know, most days it feels like a stretch. 

To unpack all this, Odell references a 1923 book by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber called I and Thou. Naturally, I ordered a copy. 

Buber’s book is, in all honesty, a challenging read. It gets pretty abstract and, at times, eerily mystical. But I love the central idea which is basically this: there are two types of relationships we can have with the world around us. One is the I-It relationship, where we see the things and people we encounter in terms of our own agenda. (ie: Express Lane Guy is both bad at counting and not respectful of others’ time.) The other is the I-Thou relationship, where we encounter others with our full attention, no longer seeing them as objects or obstacles, but instead being present in relationship with them with our full attention and curiosity. 

In the I-Thou relationship, we don’t see ourselves as individual agents. Instead we allow the borders between ourselves and the world around us to collapse. The I-Thou relationship is, in a way, the ultimate form of belonging. The problem with the I-Thou, as I’m sure you’ve already started to notice, is that it’s a notoriously difficult relationship to maintain. It’s really hard not to be annoyed by Express Lane Guy when you’ve had a long day and the store is crowded and your nose is itching but you can’t even reach under your face mask to scratch it.

I think of my dog Roscoe, whom, despite my deepest affections, I’m always objectifying. Instead of simply being present to his canine perfection, I try to coerce him into playing with me or giving me kisses or letting me rest my head on his abdomen like it’s a pillow while I practice my Polish lessons before bed. To be fair, though, I’m not sure he’s considering my unfathomable perfection when he’s demanding belly rubs or begging for dinner.

But sometimes he starts growling in his sleep and I stop whatever I’m doing and look over my shoulder so that I can take in the very fact of his existence, here, in the living room, all four paws piled together on his bed. It really is unfathomable.

All of this, believe it or not, brings us back to Justin Bieber. 

It’s not hard to imagine why the biggest pop star of his generation might be lonely, but Bieber lays it out clearly for us:

Everybody knows my past now

Like my house was always made of glass

And maybe that's the price you pay

For the money and fame at an early age

And everybody saw me sick

And it felt like no one gave a shit

They criticized the things I did

As an idiot kid

Do you see the problem? The very nature of fame—especially fame on the scale of Bieber’s—catapults a person straight into a series of I-It relationships. “Lonely” is a song about being visible without ever being seen. 

I’m not the first person to bring Buber and Bieber together. This Twitter account might get that award. But my Buber and Bieber interests, which I naively believed were separate interests, converged in one of the best essays I’ve read this year: Zadie Smith’s “Meet Justin Bieber.”

Smith imagines a corporate meet-and-greet orchestrated by Bieber’s record label: “With a fixed smile on his face he listens as they say the magic words, over and over: ‘I can’t believe I’m meeting Justin Bieber!’ As if he were not a person at all, but a mountain range they had just climbed. This is Justin Bieber, the ‘love object.’”

Smith believes a love object can never have an I-Thou relationship. The problem for Bieber is that “everyone Bieber meets is a Belieber.” It sounds like it might be nice—to be loved by everyone everywhere you go—but, as Bieber himself confesses in his song (a song written seven whole years after Smith’s essay, by the way), “I’ve had everything/ But no one’s listening/ And that’s just fucking lonely.” Having it all might be okay for a while, but being seen—really seen—by another person, that’s far better.

What I’m saying, in case it isn’t totally clear, is that Martin Buber and Zadie Smith both saw Bieber’s new song coming. You really should buy Smith’s book and read this whole essay because it is so smart and funny and delightful. I’ve read it at least half a dozen times because I am still so infatuated with how she weaves these two thinkers together. (Can we call Justin Bieber a thinker? I say we can.) 

If anything has shaped our lives these past few months, it is a flurry of I-It relationships. In a world of liberal snowflakes and progressive zealots and backwards rednecks and anti-maskers and social media influencers, there is very little space for I-Thou relationships. It’s not just Justin Bieber whom we are incapable of meeting in all his unfathomable wholeness.

What I’m saying is: how often do we approach others with genuine curiosity? How often do we really see each other?

When we rarely encounter one another beyond our screens, it’s easy to rely on shortcuts to belonging. But this kind of belonging is not, it seems to me, especially durable. It’s merely seductive. I should know. I am seduced by it all the time. 

But now that we’ve arrived in the shortest, darkest days of the year I find myself overcome with a desire to excise the I-It relationships from my life. I am tired of Twitter and I am tired of Zoom. I’m tired of politics and hot takes and debate. I am tired, even, of agreeing and disagreeing. I don’t want to be annoyed at the guy in front of me in line at the grocery store. I want to be surprised by him. I want to know what it might require to regularly encounter the unfathomable fact of another’s existence.

And I guess what I’m asking you is this: When have you felt the full force of someone’s attention and curiosity? What was it like and how did it change you? And do you have any strategies that help you stay curious about the people around you? And what’s your favorite Bieber song if you have one? And, if you don’t, why not?

Yours, 

Mandy