Last month, I found myself returning to a deceptively simple question: is there really such a thing as a loneliness epidemic? The answer, as ever, is both yes and no, and loneliness, as both a feeling and a language, is impossible to separate from history.
I was exploring this issue as part of an “ask the expert” panel for the British Academy, chaired by Hetan Shah, in the Academy’s Age of Self series. What quickly became clear, in conversation with colleagues and an engaged audience, is that loneliness resists easy definition. It is shaped as much by culture and expectation as by individual experience, and the data, which is so often invoked to prove its rise, is far from definitive.
Our discussion ranged widely, from digital culture to menopause, from demographic trends to the subtleties hidden within statistics. One recurring challenge was how readily we reach for simple narratives, such as “epidemic”, when the reality is far more complex. Such language can reinforce the idea that loneliness is always negative and externally caused, rather like germs that invade us, rather than something also shaped by social structures, including neoliberalism.
For my part, I have long argued that loneliness is better understood not as a single emotion, but as an emotion cluster, a constellation of feelings that shift depending on context, history, and the stories we tell about ourselves. I explore this further in A Biography of Loneliness (2019), now translated into several languages.
This raises a broader question: to what extent can we study emotions historically at all? It is something I explore in a recent article for History Today, where I consider the challenges of recovering emotional experience from the past, and what it means to write histories of feeling.
Loneliness continues to sit at the centre of my research into human experience and connection. Over the past six years, however, my work has also taken me in a seemingly different direction, the study of face transplants. Yet the underlying questions are closely related. How do we understand ourselves as conscious and self-conscious beings? To what extent are our physical bodies integral to that sense of self, and to our relationships with others?
These questions formed the basis of a recent conversation on Start the Week, with Michael Pollan, Mary Costello and Tom Holland. We discussed the relationship between face and body, self and world, and the ways in which identity, gender and belonging intersect with consciousness.
How we imagine and represent the face is central to how we perceive others’ value as human. This is something we can trace historically, as I explore in an article for BBC Extra. The “seven faces” I use to tell the changing story of portraiture and the human face include a Stone Age Venus, an Egyptian death mask, and a twenty first century challenge to who deserves to be recorded for posterity.
What we value, preserve and represent has never been neutral. Racism and gender ideology run through many of our ideas about the face, and about value, even today. Which brings me back, in a sense, to Start the Week.
What interests me increasingly is how much of what we describe as eternal or universal consciousness is, in fact, rooted in a particular intellectual tradition, post Enlightenment, Western, and often implicitly male. Recognising this does not diminish those ideas, but it does open space to question them, and to imagine alternative ways of understanding connection, embodiment and selfhood.
This is one of the central concerns of my current research, on which more soon.
Loneliness continues to sit at the centre of my research into human experience and connection. Over the past six years, however, my work has also taken me in a seemingly different direction: the study of face transplants. Yet the underlying questions are closely related. How do we understand ourselves as conscious – and self-conscious – beings? To what extent are our physical bodies integral to that sense of self, and to our relationships with others?
These questions formed the basis of my recent conversations on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’ with Michael Pollan, Mary Costello and Tom Holland. We discussed the relationship between face and body, self and world, and the ways in which identity, gender and belonging intersect with consciousness.
How we imagine and represent the face is central to how we perceive others’ identity, status and value as humans. And we can trace that through history, as I show in an article for BBC Extra. The ‘seven faces’ I use to tell the changing story of portraiture and the human face include a Stone Age Venus, an Egyptian death mask and a 21st-century subversion of the norm.
Because what we value, preserve and talk about it has never been neutral. Racism and gender ideology run through so many of our ideas about the face, and value even today. Which brings me back to that ‘Start the Week’ discussion.
What interests me is how much of what we describe as “eternal” or universal consciousness is, in fact, rooted in a particular intellectual tradition: post-Enlightenment, Western, and often implicitly male. Recognising this does not diminish those ideas, but it opens the opportunity to question them – and in so doing, to imagine alternative ways of understanding connection, embodiment and selfhood.
That is one of the subjects of my new research – on which, more soon.