The Loneliness Epidemic: Why We Forgot How to Be Alone (Video Essay)

What if the reason you feel so alone is not that you have too little connection, but that you have destroyed the one kind of solitude that made connection bearable? We are the most connected human beings who have ever lived, and by every measure the loneliest. In this essay we use Hannah Arendt's forgotten distinction between loneliness and solitude, and Byung-Chul Han's diagnosis of the exhausted self, to argue that the phone in your hand did not cause your loneliness by isolating you. It caused it by taking away your ability to be alone. When was the last time you were by yourself, with no screen, and did not reach for one? Jorge Lucio de Campos