Tag: loneliness

How the pandemic made us confront what it means to be alone.

Giving birth in the last year has meant a suffocatingly cloistered, rather than a communal, experience.

After separating from her husband and entering quarantine, Anne Liu Kellor faces her ongoing desire for a partner and the necessity of loving herself.

Sarah Fay reflects on four years spent in solitude (and isolation [and loneliness]), viewing it through the lens of punctuation.

Jacqueline Alnes shares her own dating app experiences and nine stories about the pitfalls of finding a partner online.

Elisabeth Donnelly looks back at a relationship with a wily cat during a lonely time in upstate New York.

There’s food there, and shelter and healthcare. Which is (sadly) more than you can say for a lot of places.

The psychology behind America’s obsession with Hallmark Christmas movies.

A woman out of her mind, locked in an apartment. This, I believed, was the optimal, and probably only, condition under which art could be made.

In Japan, business is booming for those who clean out apartments after people die.

Everyone is feeling very alone in this month’s books newsletter.

We’re eating alone more often than in any previous generation. But why should a meal on our own be uninspired? Why shouldn’t the French saying “life is too short to drink bad wine” still apply?

One elderly man’s attempt to combat crushing loneliness.

For some elderly women in Japan, prison offers companionship and a life free from worry.

Many members of Japan’s rapidly aging population live isolated, solitary lives in massive apartment communities filled with people.

Being alone, free of distraction, can be both a writer’s dream and a nightmare.

While searching for a Korean radish to make her grandmother’s soup, Vivien Lee meditates on family and food.

(Vincent) Van Gogh likely had a cadre of mental issues, none of which were suitably diagnosed while he was alive. Yet what seemed to weigh heaviest on him was the inevitability of his loneliness. According to his letters to Theo, he felt he had one of two options: content himself with loneliness or try to […]

With Alfred, you no longer have to open the door for the Instacart delivery: A worker comes into your apartment and stocks food in your fridge. You don’t hand off your dirty undies to a Washio messenger; Alfred puts the laundered undies in the drawer. This all happens by paying your Alfred $99 a month, […]

When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to […]