Loneliness: the final taboo?

Mid-life loneliness is officially A Thing. And I'm lonely... are you?

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

Recently I’ve been feeling very lonely. This is not usually something I’d admit - at least in earshot of another human. Because admitting loneliness feels like one of the final taboos in life. In a world where so little is off limits as dinner conversation - mental health, embarrassing medical concerns, all-consuming rubber fetishes - loneliness stands alone (fnar) as a bastion of shame.

After years of keeping schtum, I’m now comfortable telling people that I have chronic depression, that I had a shit time at university (“the best years of your life” my arse) and that I didn’t find The Office (UK version) remotely funny. But to admit I am lonely… well that feels like a whole new frontier.

Loneliness, perhaps unfairly, is something we often associate with “old people” - something that happens after your spouse dies and everyone else dies and you’re the last poor bastard left soldiering on, while your body does all it can to hold you back from going out. This seems to be the only socially acceptable form of loneliness.

Anything other than “my friends have all died” is a failure. Feeling lonely when you’re young enough to leave the house with a working pair of knees means you’re just not popular enough. You’re not making enough effort. You haven’t joined enough clubs. You’re not nice enough or good enough. You’re giving off bad energy. It’s something that should be in our control - and therefore we are fucking up. To be lonely is to be a failure at life.

Yet it seems I am not the only one feeling lonely in my 40s. A recent study by Arizona State University found that middle aged people in England are the loneliest in Europe. Moreover, the study found that those aged 45-65 reported far greater levels of loneliness than the generation above them (65-96). Incidentally The Times reported on this with an excellent first person piece from

Farrah @Substack

about how she set out to make her 40s less lonely than her 30s - highly recommend.

While depressing, the concept of middle-aged loneliness makes a great deal of sense to me. These years are as challenging as they are enlightening - it feels at times like a dark night of the soul after a care-free youth to sort the wheat from the chaff.

For starters, there’s the children thing. For parents, these are years of children growing older, becoming teenagers, needing more space and starting numerous hobbies. Cue moving out of town and spending weekends ferrying kids to and from houses and activities. In these situations, other parents become the people you spend most time with - and if they don’t happen to be your cup of tea? Well that’s got to be a lonely place.

I chose not to have children - in theory a glorious Arcadia of freedom and joy. But it’s not without its own challenges. Friends move away and have less time than they did (see above) - but I figure this works out when we’re all a bit older. Perhaps this is why the over 65s are less lonely. I moved out of London in search of a more balanced life - and this has in many ways been my saviour and my downfall. I feel better - but I am far away from many people I care deeply about. Which makes me feel worse. Go figure.

More significantly, however, these are years when Big Life Shit Goes Down. I have very few friends who are not currently dealing with Big Life Shit (BLS). BLS is rife as you get older - divorce, health scares, bereavement, grief, burnout, child illnesses, infertility, redundancy, financial problems, caring for unwell relatives… the list goes on and on. It hits when we least expect it - often with more than one blow at once. And while BLS forges us in many ways - and teaches us what’s important to us and what storms we can weather - it doesn’t always leave us with a great capacity to socialise.

When I think of my BLS in recent years, it’s really been a shitter for my social life. There was my mum’s sudden death (couldn’t leave the house), ongoing serious bouts of life-threatening depression (couldn’t leave the house) and job loss/lack of income (couldn’t afford to leave the house). Of course in an ideal world we all rally around when BLS hits someone we love… but what happens if you have your own BLS at the same time? And everyone else is also mid-BLS? I’m learning as I get older that we can’t always be there for each other in the ways we might want to be.

This can be hard to swallow. In periods of extreme depression I’ve been unable to help friends as much as I would like. And, likewise, been unable to get the help mental health websites will glibly tell you to seek by reaching out to others. Because everyone else has their own shit going on too - and mid-life often feels like peak shit. People can’t drop everything and come and sit in your shit with you.

There’s also the challenge of time and exhaustion. We are busy - of all us - with huge demands on our time and a finite amount of energy. Solving this game of Tetris while having a fulfilling social life is… hard.

But is it more than this? I can’t help wondering if our society - and in particular my generation’s penchant for all things self-help and wellness could also making things worse? Sure, we want to improve ourselves. But could it be this is actually making us less tolerant… both of our own weaknesses and those of others?

While my parents’ generation - the Baby Boomers - got on with things with post-war pragmatism, we seem to demand more and more perfection from life - and each other. We want houses with a bathroom for every bedroom, a meaningful career and flawless behaviour from everyone around us. We are told to have boundaries and goals and be busing ‘slaying’ - to have good vibes and see things with love and be perfect to all things and all people. And yet… we are human an will inevitably fuck up.

For my own part, I have lapped up the idea that nobody will love you until you can love yourself so fervently that at times I have shut myself away to “do more work” on myself until I am good enough to be accepted - fearing judgement and rejection. Which is, of course, incredibly isolating.

If we demand perfection of ourselves, it stands to reason we demand it in others too, however. Making us swift to judge others. Not just in the macro Cancel Culture way - but just being much quicker to judge others in our day-to-day interactions.

If we see behaviour we don’t like, we’re as likely to suggest a personality disorder as we are to wonder what’s going on for that person. We slap the word ‘toxic’ before anything we want out of (a workplace, a partnership), rather than try and understand it better. Compassion takes a back seat as we try to protect our houses of cards - and in a world where life is increasingly exhausting, we will all of us, at some point, fuck up.

The net result? We like ourselves, and others, less. And all this means we end up lonelier.

For me, the end of loneliness is understanding. To be understood is a big goal of mine in life (one I hope to one day '“slay”) - and I suspect is what we all crave. This is why one can feel lonely even in a day when you have 20 interactions with colleagues, neighbours and dog walkers. Because the end of loneliness is to be seen - truly seen and understood.

By happy coincidence, spending time seeing and knowing others is a wonderful thing to do. I have a personal theory it’s what we’re put on this world to do.

Earlier today I saw a post marking the birthday of Kimberley St John - a palliative care nurse who died suddenly in 2020 of a stroke aged. She was 32. A year before she died she wrote an article listing what she had learned from working with the dying. One brought tears to my eyes:

“Don’t delay anything that is important to you. I have known people to put off marriage, a special trip, making up with a relative. None of us know how much time we have. Use it wisely”.

Life is too short to not make time for the people who matter to us. Life’s too short to be lonely. I just don’t know how to break through sometimes.

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Hello team - I hope, for all of your sakes, I’m the only one that feels like this. But am I? Will anyone else admit the cardinal sin of loneliness? Or maybe you went through this in mid-life and have good news from brighter shores ahead? I’d love to hear your thoughts… sorry if this one’s a bit of a downer….