Modern Loneliness

Before any diagnosis, one distinction is essential. The word "solitude" covers two opposite realities that spiritual wisdom has always kept separate: a solitude that is willed, inhabited, fruitful, and an isolation that is imposed, empty, wounding. To confuse the two is to misstate the problem from the outset.

Fruitful solitude: silence, the desert, interior life

A whole tradition holds solitude to be a good, on condition that it is chosen and ordered toward God. Christ himself "withdrew to the desert places and prayed" (Lk 5:16); he invites his disciples to "come away by yourselves to a lonely place" (Mk 6:31). The Desert Fathers, monks, and Carthusians made this solitude the matrix of an intense interior life — not an emptiness, but a fullness of listening. Such is the meaning of the "inner cell" that Saint Catherine of Siena said she carried everywhere with her^[4], as developed in the article Growing in Interior Silence.

This kind of solitude does not isolate: it connects more deeply, because it places the soul in the presence of God and, through him, of all. "Solitude, silence, recollection" are, for the spiritual masters, the atmosphere in which "God speaks and visits us". The present article does not deal with that solitude, which is a grace, but with its opposite.

Unwanted isolation: the wound of our age

The loneliness from which modernity suffers is exactly the reverse: an unchosen isolation, experienced as deprivation. It is not the inhabited silence of the hermit, but the heavy silence of the apartment into which no one returns, of the telephone that never rings, of the table at which one eats alone. This solitude opens onto nothing: it closes the person in upon a lack.

The English language has fixed the distinction with two words: solitude, the positive and chosen state of being alone, and loneliness, the painful feeling of being alone, whatever the number of people around^[5]. It is loneliness — felt isolation — that contemporary public-health reports are talking about.

Alone in the midst of the crowd

For modern loneliness is not first a problem of the quantity of contacts. One can be surrounded and feel profoundly alone; one can live in a metropolis of millions and have no one to confide a sorrow to. Sociologists speak of relational loneliness: the gap between the relationships one has and the deeper ones one needs^[6].

This kind of loneliness also strikes people who are highly "connected". The isolated elderly person, the uprooted student, the separated parent, the overworked professional with no close friends, the bedridden sick person: these are not marginal cases, but ordinary situations in a society that multiplies contacts while making bonds rarer.

Long regarded as a private matter, loneliness has become, within some twenty years, an object of public policy and a subject of medical research. The very vocabulary has changed scale: people now speak of an "epidemic". In a single generation, loneliness has passed from the intimate register to that of global public health.

When governments appoint "ministers for Loneliness"

On 17 January 2018, following the work of a commission created in memory of the MP Jo Cox, the United Kingdom became the first country to entrust a member of the government with the fight against loneliness, a mission assigned to Tracey Crouch^[7]. Three years later, on 12 February 2021, amid a pandemic-related rise in suicides, Japan in turn created a ministerial post dedicated to social isolation, assigned to Tetsushi Sakamoto^[8]. That two great democracies should create a ministerial portfolio for an intimate feeling says much about the scale the phenomenon has taken on.

What the figures say

Surveys converge on the same finding of mass loneliness, even if methods vary.

In the United States, the Cigna survey of about 20,000 adults found as early as 2018 that 46% said they felt lonely "sometimes or always"; the figure rose to 61% in the following edition^[9]. Worldwide, the 2023 Meta-Gallup survey, conducted in 142 countries, found that about one adult in four (24%) reported feeling "very or fairly lonely", with young adults aged 19 to 29 the hardest-hit group^[10].

Changing ways of life accompany this experience. In France, according to INSEE, the share of primary residences occupied by a single person has risen sharply to about 38% in 2022, compared with just over a quarter in 1990^[11]. The expected growth in the number of households by 2050 will, in France, be driven almost entirely by people living alone, most of them elderly^[12].

The following table brings together a few quantitative markers of the phenomenon.

These figures call for caution: definitions of "loneliness" differ from one survey to another, and a reported feeling is not an objective fact. But their convergence — across several continents, by independent methods — forbids reducing modern loneliness to a mere impression of the times.

Loneliness as a major health risk

The decisive turning point came from medicine. In 2010, a now-famous meta-analysis by the psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad synthesised 148 studies covering more than 300,000 people: individuals with strong social relationships had a likelihood of survival about 50% higher than that of isolated people^[13]. In other words, social isolation weighs on mortality on a par with classic risk factors.

It was this finding that fed the advisory published on 2 May 2023 by the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, under an unambiguous title: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. The report compares the effect of a lack of social connection on health to that of smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day^[14]. A few months later, on 15 November 2023, the World Health Organization launched a Commission on Social Connection, co-chaired by the same Vivek Murthy and by Chido Mpemba, to treat isolation as a global health priority^[15].

Loneliness, long invisible, has thus become measurable, quantifiable, and recognised as pathogenic. What remains is to understand its causes.

Why do societies richer, more mobile and more connected than ever produce so much isolation? The causes intertwine; five major ones can be identified.

Individualism and the collapse of social capital

The deepest cause is cultural. Modernity has made the autonomous individual its ideal: freeing oneself from received belongings — family, religion, trade, village — in order to define oneself. This emancipation has a downside: in loosening constraining ties, it has also loosened protective ties.

The American sociologist Robert Putnam gave this decline a name and an image. In Bowling Alone (2000), he documents the collapse, since the 1960s, of America's social capital: less associative, parish, union and neighbourhood involvement^[16]. The title says it all: Americans still bowl, but alone, where they once did so in leagues. What is coming undone are the intermediate bodies — precisely what the Church's social doctrine calls natural communities, where the person learns the art of relationship.

The break-up of the family

The family is the first place where man is not alone. Its weakening is therefore one of the most direct causes of contemporary isolation: more separations, falling birth rates, the geographical dispersal of siblings, and above all the explosion of one-person households. Living alone can be a choice; it is often an endured situation, after a bereavement, a break-up, or for lack of having been able to found a home.

The large number of people living alone does not mechanically create loneliness — but it removes the safety net that once cushioned it: a presence in the evening, someone who notices an absence, a shared meal. The society of individuals has multiplied doors that nobody pushes open.

Old age abandoned

No loneliness is heavier than that of the elderly. Longer life expectancy, combined with the break-up of families and children moving away, leaves millions of old people ending their days in an isolation nothing comes to break. Pope Francis made it one of his constant themes, denouncing "the abandonment of the elderly to a painful solitude"^[17] and the "throwaway culture" that discards those it deems unproductive.

"The decline in the birth rate, which leads to the ageing of the population, combined with the abandonment of the elderly to a painful solitude, is a subtle way of stating that everything is about us, that only our individual interests count." — Pope Francis, encyclical Fratelli Tutti, 3 October 2020, § 19^[18]

This abandonment is not a demographic fatality: it is a societal choice, that of a culture which no longer knows what to do with old age and dependence. The question connects with the accompaniment of old age and the end of life, treated in The end of life.

The digital paradox: hyperconnected, disaffiliated

Communication technologies were supposed to bring people together; they have sometimes substituted contact for the bond. One can have hundreds of online "friends" and nobody for a rainy Sunday. Pope Francis notes that digital media "can expose people to the risk of dependence, isolation and progressive loss of contact with reality" and that virtual relationships, which dispense with the patient effort of real encounter, "are not enough to build a community"^[19].

"Digital connectivity is not enough to build bridges; it is not enough to unite humanity." — Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, § 43^[20]

This observation is not technophobic nostalgia: technology is good in itself, as the article Technology and man recalls. The problem arises when the screen replaces the face. Certain studies, such as those by psychologist Jean Twenge on the screen generation, associate the rise of the smartphone with record levels of anxiety and loneliness among teenagers — a debated correlational thesis, but one that matches common experience^[21]. When screen use tips into dependence, it belongs to the field of addictions.

Mobility and the anonymity of big cities

Finally, modern mobility uproots. People move city to study, region to work, country to live. Each move undoes a fabric of relationships that must be rebuilt from scratch. The big city, which concentrates bodies, disperses souls: there one passes a thousand faces without knowing a single one. Urban anonymity, once liberating, has become for many the ordinary form of abandonment.

Reducing modern loneliness to its social causes would be incomplete. Beneath the measurable phenomenon lies a more ancient question, which the Catholic faith places at the centre: man carries within him a desire for communion that nothing finite can satisfy. Felt loneliness is also the sign of a heart made for something greater than itself.

The restless heart: Saint Augustine

Long before health surveys, Saint Augustine had named this fundamental restlessness. At the threshold of his Confessions, he offers the sentence that sums up the whole Christian anthropology of desire:

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1^[22]

The deepest loneliness is not the absence of others: it is the absence of God in a life that seeks Him without knowing it. Every unfulfilled human loneliness points back, in the last resort, to that lack. That is why modern isolation, beyond its material causes, is also a spiritual fact: a society that has lost God discovers, at the same time, that it is more alone.

The "globalisation of indifference"

Pope Francis gave the moral dimension of the phenomenon a now-famous formula. From his very first journey, to Lampedusa, before the coffins of drowned migrants, he denounced the comfort that anaesthetises concern for others:

"We have become used to the suffering of others; it does not concern us, it does not interest us, it is none of our business! […] We have fallen into the globalisation of indifference." — Pope Francis, homily at Lampedusa, 8 July 2013^[23]

Mass loneliness has an active side: it is also the fruit of indifference. Each of us can maintain, without meaning to, someone else's relational desert — through the neighbour never greeted, the old person never visited, the colleague never listened to. Isolation is not only endured: collectively, it is also produced.

The worst poverty of the West

No one saw this new poverty more clearly than Saint Teresa of Calcutta, who had nevertheless spent her life amid the material misery of Calcutta. In her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1979, she recounted visiting a home where elderly parents, placed in an institution by their children, had every comfort — but waited, turned towards the door, for a visit that never came:

"They are hurt because they are forgotten. […] This kind of poverty is found right in our own home, in the neglect of love. Perhaps, in our own family, we have someone who feels lonely, who feels sick, who feels worried." — Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, 11 December 1979^[24]

Hunger for bread is satisfied by a meal; hunger to be loved is satisfied only by a presence. That is exactly the diagnosis that health reports are rediscovering forty years later, without always naming its root: a society can overcome material misery while producing at the same time an unprecedented relational misery.

To modern solitude, Christian anthropology does not oppose a slogan, but a vision of man. If isolation wounds us, it is because it contradicts what we are: beings made for relationship, in the image of a God who is himself communion.

"It is not good that the man should be alone"

From the very first pages of Genesis, isolation is presented as what God himself judges not good in a creation otherwise declared good:

"It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him." — Genesis 2:18^[25]

The Catechism comments: "Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another"^[26], and it makes social life not an addition but "a requirement of his nature"^[27]. Man is not first an individual who then chooses to enter into relationships: he is, from the origin, a being of relationship who is fulfilled only in bonds with others.

In the image of a God who is not a solitude

This vocation to communion is rooted in the very mystery of God. The Christian God is not an eternal solitude, but three Persons united in a single love. The Trinity reveals that the highest unity is not that of isolation, but that of reciprocal gift — a point developed in How to Explain the Trinity Simply.

"God did not create man as a solitary […]. For by his innermost nature man is a social being, and unless he relates himself to others he can neither live nor develop his potential." — Second Vatican Council, constitution Gaudium et Spes, 7 December 1965, § 12^[28]

Created "in the image of God", man thus bears within him the trace of a communion: his need for others is not a weakness to be overcome, but the reflection of his origin. Suffered solitude contradicts him because it cuts him off from what he is made for.

Finding oneself by giving oneself

Hence the most luminous principle of the anthropology of Vatican II, and perhaps the deepest answer to modern solitude. Against the illusion that we flourish by withdrawing into ourselves, the Council affirms exactly the opposite:

"Man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself." — Gaudium et Spes, § 24^[29]

The sentence is decisive. Modern solitude often feeds on withdrawal — into one's rights, one's comfort, one's screen, one's fear of being disappointed. Yet man possesses himself only by giving himself: it is by going out of himself toward the other that he receives himself. The remedy is therefore not, in the first place, to "receive" company, but to dare the gift of self — which presupposes a conversion, and not only a social arrangement.

Christ knew solitude

The Christian faith does not survey solitude from the outside: its God has passed through it. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus knows the anguish of abandonment, while his disciples fall asleep (Mt 26:40). On the Cross, he makes his own the most extreme of solitudes, that of a cry:

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" — Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 27:46^[30]

By assuming human dereliction to the very end, Christ made the darkest solitude a place of salvation. Henceforth, no solitude is altogether closed: the believer who suffers from isolation can join him in the solitude of his Lord, and transform it into an offering — what, in their own measure, victim souls live when they turn their trial into intercession.

The Christian diagnosis calls for concrete remedies. Against isolation, the Church opposes not an idea, but a millennia-old practice of communion: places, gestures, sacraments that lead from anonymity to belonging.

The family, first school of communion

The first remedy is the family, the "first and vital cell of society"^[31]. It is there that the child learns that he exists for others and through others, that he is expected, named, loved without having deserved it. Supporting the family, accompanying fragile households, restoring the value of marriage and fidelity is therefore not only a moral question: it is a policy for fighting solitude at its root. A society that protects its families protects its members from future isolation.

The parish and the Christian community

Where the big city disperses, the Christian community gathers. The parish is, by vocation, a place where one is known: there one has a name, a place, familiar faces from one week to the next. The primitive Church already struck the pagans by the quality of its bonds — "See how they love one another", Tertullian reported of the gaze cast upon the first Christians^[32]. Prayer groups, movements, fraternities, parish ministries: so many living intermediate bodies that rebuild fabric where society has lost it. Faced with anonymity, the community of faith offers what surveys call the social bond, and what the Gospel calls fraternal charity.

Concrete charity: visiting, accompanying

To isolation, the Gospel opposes a precise gesture: going out to meet the other. The solitude of the other is, for the Christian, a personal call, and Christ identifies himself with the one who is visited:

"I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 25:36^[33]

Visiting an elderly person, writing to a prisoner, sharing a meal with someone who eats alone, greeting a neighbour, accompanying a sick person: these works of mercy are the practical refutation of the globalization of indifference. They require neither budget nor programme, but attentiveness — the concrete decision to push open a door that no one pushes.

The Eucharist and the communion of saints: never alone

The Catholic faith finally offers a remedy that no social programme can give: the certainty that no believer is ever entirely alone. Through the Eucharist, Christ makes himself a permanent presence; through the communion of saints, the Christian is linked to the whole Church — in Heaven, in purgatory and on earth. The most isolated person in the eyes of the world — a recluse, a sick person, a prisoner — remains a member of an immense and praying body.

This truth does not remove the need for human presences, but it changes the meaning of solitude. The Vietnamese Cardinal François-Xavier Nguyên Van Thuân, imprisoned for thirteen years, nine of them in isolation, testified that at the height of separation he was never alone: the presence of God and the communion of the Church passed through walls^[34]. This is the constant experience of the saints — solitude inhabited by God ceases to be an emptiness and becomes a presence.

Inhabiting one's solitude

For many, finally, solitude cannot be removed: widowhood, illness, old age impose it. To them, faith proposes not denial, but a transformation. Suffered solitude can, through prayer, become inhabited solitude — the place of a face-to-face encounter with God, and of intercession for the world. What the Desert Fathers chose, the sick and the elderly can live by necessity: making their isolation a cell where God makes himself present, and offering their trial for those they can no longer reach otherwise.

Thus the Catholic answer unfolds on two inseparable fronts: recreating real human bonds wherever possible — through family, community, charity — and spiritually inhabiting solitude wherever it remains. One without the other would be incomplete: social activism forgets God; spiritual withdrawal forgets one's brother. Christian communion holds both together, because it comes from a God who is, in himself, relationship.

• How to Explain the Trinity Simply — the God who is not a solitude, foundation of all communion.
• Technology and Man — for a right relationship to tools, including the screen that connects or isolates.
• Artificial Intelligence and Catholic Doctrine — human relationships in the age of conversational machines.
• Addictions — when screen use tips over into dependence.
• The End of Life — accompanying old age and dependence, against abandonment.
• How to Grow in Interior Silence — fruitful solitude, chosen and inhabited by God.
• Victim Souls — transforming trial and isolation into offering.