The Lonely City & Its Discontents (Part 1)
Photo by Thom Holmes on Unsplash
Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to the other side of the Christmas holiday!
At this time of the year, I keep thinking of a few years ago, when I got the chance to be a visiting professor at DePaul University in Chicago, and experienced my first American winter.
Remember, folks, that I live on what is essentially the world’s largest desert island, so let us just say that going into my first North American winter was…educational (I am trying not to say “traumatic”).
Not only did I experience unprecedented bitter cold, but I also got the visceral experience of something else entirely - weather-induced loneliness.
I must say that first up, I was spared of that during the Christmas celebrations themselves, thanks to my reconnecting with an old flatmate from Rome and his family. I got to eat Turkey and ham, sit by the fire and frolic in a winter wonderland.
When I had to return back to downtown Chicago, though, the winter got more intense, the winds got blisteringly stronger, shops were closed and I had no one nearby to commune with. This meant that I had to coop myself up in the apartment on my own for days at a time, and I experienced a sensation that I had not experienced before. It was only looking back then that I concluded that I had a deep sense of loneliness during those days holed up in my apartment, waiting for the worst of the cold to subside.
It is not as if this experience of loneliness subsided when I returned to Sydney, either. Though it may not be weather induced, the fluidity of Australia’s largest city and its tendency to create a population of transients has created a different set of disconnections that result in the same experience of isolation. It seemed to me that loneliness is somehow baked into the structure of cities.
As I mentioned in my last post of 2019, as we get into the holiday season, one pervasive mood among many people, especially people living in cities, would be that of loneliness. I promised that I would turn to this when I returned from my break.
I mentioned that during a recent conversation, someone I do not know posted an article by Tanzil Shafique on how design can contribute to ameliorating urban-induced loneliness. This sparked an interesting conversation between two friends of mine, Tom Gourlay (who edits the new philosophical project Macrina Magazine) and Kamila Soh (who tutors in architecture at the University of New South Wales, and regular readers might recognise her from a guestpost in 2019).
I thought it would be good to encapsulate our discussion in two follow up posts, first by Kamila and followed by Tom.
This would build on a previous post that linked to two podcasts on loneliness. The first was my interview with Justine Toh about the vice of acedia, and how one of the drivers of that vice was the desire for autonomy from the limitations imposed by others. The second podcast is by my friends at The Eucatastrophe, who looked at the social and political dimensions of loneliness, and how loneliness might contribute to the social malaise we find ourselves in.
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