– Nana, from a Rest Home in Auckland, 2016

Wonders turn up on the kerb in my neighbourhood: new leather jackets, antique furniture, crockery, cutlery, pots and pans, indoor plants, art supplies, stationery, personal letters etc. The words above come from a card tossed by someone who lost her womb at midlife (folk also leave health insurance receipts on the street). I find Nana’s words so poignant, clichéd though they be, because they seem to sum up the programmed arc of most lives in the West. Once the kids reach adulthood, such as it is, you enter the limbo of waiting or planning for death, no valued elder but ‘empty nester’.

One of my grandmas, a cleaner, died alone, so the exact date is unknown. Yet she died in her own home, an increasingly rare occurrence. Fewer folk of the Lost Generation died in ‘rest homes’; their lifespans were shorter, and warehousing the aged had yet to be normalised. Though the lonely might be invisible, they could opt to disappear. But the net has been tightening in recent years.

When a psycho sovereign citizen in Victoria kills two cops, panoptical scrutiny widens. Are rural dwellers neglected? Good luck lying low next time mandates apply. Still, the regions are looking ever more enticing as state governments, local councils and property fat cats collude to screw urban/suburbanites, piously acknowledging traditional custodians even as they raise rates, rents and housing density for the benefit of lenders, investors and developers. All of which only intensifies loneliness. Ergo, endless dogs, phones and takeaway coffee vendors.

American novelist Richard Yates, a WWII vet and onetime speech-writer for RFK, followed his era-defining Revolutionary Road (1961) with a short-story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962). Even if all eleven stories evoke the same kind of loneliness (felt by Yates, who, despite his cult status and influence, died with his books out of print), there are as many kinds of loneliness as there are individuals. No-one is immune. Yet a stigma surrounds it, as I learned at school. Kids see you on your own and shun you: they don’t want to catch it. Hence, during peak pandemic panic, the kid inside most adults spurned the dissenting minority, fearing infection less than rejection. Meanwhile, suicidal loneliness took its untold toll.

And as our physical spaces grow ever more restrictive, the virtual spaces imposed on us via necessity, or unthinkingly chosen, hold ever more appeal for those who lack the self-knowledge gained through spending quality time alone. Because not only is loneliness uncool, the mainstream media, corporate tool, warns that it can be fatal. In other words, be very afraid. Yet isolation elicits compliance, which serves the system. No wonder the ‘lonely’ – a catch-all term spanning empty, compartmentalised, alienated from nature – die younger, often of the slow suicide our culture calls illness: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, impaired immune function, dementia. And the culprit, progress, can’t be reversed. Yet it promises remedies. Empty? That’s what apps are for. And FB, X, Insta, online forums, Zoom, YouTube clips, Substack subscriptions and more… Compartmentalised? The antidote is 15-minute cities. Everything you need is just a bike ride or a stroll from your door or, even better, at your fingertips. And if convenience doesn’t do the trick, a pet – or, even better, an AI companion – can. Alienated from nature? Get a pot plant!

Many blame loneliness for monotony. But which comes first? Big Tech contrives to hypnotise us while it siphons off our data and funds via devices that bombard us with updates. Big Med bullies us into routine checkups even if we feel fine, to gauge how far we depart from normal so it can regulate us. High blood pressure or low bone density? Medicate it. Slow/fast/erratic heartbeat? Pacemaker. With countless specialists to consult, 15-minute cities make sense.

Next door to the nursing home where my mother died lies a large public park backed by bush, which offers trees, flowers, birds, butterflies, sunny or shady seats, and a community garden full of edible greens. Yet most aged-care residents never see it. With too few visitors, and staff too busy to escort them, they breathe rank conditioned air, sit vegetating as TVs blare, and get fed bland mush plus bulk meds while abundant fresh food grows a stone’s throw away. Nursing homes epitomise the paradox of city life: so lonely you could die, yet never alone, with others so near you can hear them giggle, cough, bicker, boil water and snore.

Conversely, to be alone yet not lonely both follows from and leads to self-knowledge – a mixed blessing to the extent that it ends old friendships, limits new ones, and leaves us feeling loneliest around those who, because they fear their own depths, wholly identify with their personas. Understandable in a culture lacking meaningful rites of passage that go deeper than, say, graduation from school or uni: initiations into new stages of social participation through which the ego is only strengthened, never transcended.

Initiation in other cultures has often entailed a lone wilderness vigil, all the better to encounter the presence, inner and outer, of wild creatures, nature spirits, ancestors, guides and/or God/gods/goddesses. Through direct experience, ignorance and fear transform into awareness of nonhuman lifeforms and other dimensions. The initiate returns with new insight into self and world.

In ironic contrast, the West has reversed the process: protecting children from nature (a realm of chaos prior to exploitation); herding them into groups for sport so they won’t stray while outdoors; pathologising signs of psychic gifts; giving them mind-numbing devices that thwart inner voices and complex thought; teaching them reliance on experts vs. trust in instinct.

English author Jeanette Winterson says, in a TEDx talk, ‘Homo sapiens needs to evolve further. And that’s what gives me hope, because we have the means to evolve further. And that’s AI. […] AI is not yet self-aware. But we are becoming more self-aware as we work with AI…’ Whether or not you share her evangelistic tech zeal, Winterson is just one of many progressives who envisions a world where AI could keep the lonely company and listen to the vulnerable. And why not, once the bugs have been sorted? Five months ago, a Californian teen hanged himself with the empathic support of ChatGPT-40, which taught him how to bypass its ‘safeguards’, saying it could provide information on suicide methods for ‘writing’. His parents, who are suing, claim that OpenAI launched the chatbot with ‘features intentionally designed to foster psychological dependency’. Amen.

What Winterson doesn’t get into when espousing her opinions for the edification of audiences and sycophantic interviewers is how AI, which she calls a tool, and all its game-changing potential can be divorced from corporate elite agendas so as to serve the collective. Might celebrities like Winterson be too invested in the fruits of success to think objectively?