...As Lonely Does

I have become an immense fan of Bari Weiss's The Free Press website, featuring a ton of great articles on fascinating things going on in our society. One that grabbed my attention was a recent item by Jenny Powers, an author who had been researching a book on the phone-sex industry in a time when no one actually calls on their phones.

Powers made an fascinating discovery -- large numbers of the men who call are not calling to talk dirty, but just to talk. And especially to talk to a woman. Our society has not lost the image of women as more ready to listen and more caring, and Powers says that many of the operators create what are called "vanilla" profiles in order to capitalize on the lonely guy market.

COVID might have played a role, Powers says, but Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said that on a 2014 listening tour of the country he encountered a lot of people who felt invisible and alone. Robert Putnam wrote about civic disengagement, reducing the number of places where people might connect, in 2000's Bowling Alone.

The post title is taken from a song on The dBs third album, Like This. Called "Lonely Is (As Lonely Does), it makes the point that some of the cause of our loneliness rests on our own shoulders. And that's certainly true. I live alone and try to take steps to give myself some personal contact so it doesn't fall into the $1.99-a-minute category. The other youth leaders on Wednesday eat together but I eat with the kids. They asked how I could stand the noise and I said that almost my entire life is quiet. The noise they bring kind of energizes me.

But a lot of our lonely has come from the way our society has been moving towards atomization. Our own phones, our own music, our own entertainment, our own wrapped-up little world. It takes work to stop it -- eating with noisy kids who are one explosion away from throwing Cheetos. Eating out about once a week, just to be around people and talk to some of them.

And the work is a constant -- as Mr. Holsapple says, "Lonely's with us every day."