Loneliness

I broke earlier than I thought I would, in a doctor’s clinic beneath the Tokyo Tower, after an eventful morning when I suddenly realised I’d left my anti-anxiety medication back in Australia.

Friends and fellow travellers had warned me that Japan was a country that not only nursed a sense of isolation, but actively provoked it. Tokyo, especially. But I was nonplussed. I had grown up so close to loneliness in my waking life that the feeling was more akin to friendship. What could a city that split its people into atoms teach me about the art of being alone?

To be perfectly frank, my main fear about the trip was that I would not feel this promised sense of detachment at all, that I would end up moving through the city as I had through my own life: alone, certainly, but not always lonely.

And then, to reward my sweet idiocy, the universe arranged a few things to aid my cause. I flew into Tokyo during what I then believed to be the middle – how wrong I was – of a coronavirus epidemic that was sweeping the world.

I was sick. People in the airport looked at me the way characters in a B-grade horror film react to a friend the moment after said friend has been bitten by a zombie. They know there’s no coming back from that. And the sweat pouring from the victim is not to do with the zombie fever; it’s that the victim knows it, too. Deep down.

I had just finished writing an article about Covid-19. I knew the score. While waiting in the airport queue for an hour to collect my Japan Rail pass, I wondered who in the line would be strong enough to do what the group required, which was to take a crowbar and cave my skull in. My eyes settled on a small, stumpy Asian woman who reminded me a lot of my mum, Deb, and I knew it would be her. It’s never the ones you first expect; people tend not to factor in the tactical physical advantage of having a low centre of gravity.

If you are after an isolating, awkward or plain lonely entree to a city, then I’ve yet to discover a better one than my introduction to Tokyo that morning. The illness was so debilitating, I didn’t realise that first day that I had left my antidepressants back in Sydney. But the next morning, when I went to leave my hotel on the park by Tokyo’s Shiodome railway station, I walked straight into a wall.

Five years after starting on the medication, I was convinced I didn’t really need to be on it anymore. Staying with the dosage turned out to be far easier than trying to get off it, however.

Did you know that trying to get off my type of antidepressant can lead you to having thoughts of wanting to kill yourself? Spoiler alert! I found this mildly amusing when my GP first told me about it, as is my wont, because to me it seemed like being sold a home alarm system that, when you try to uninstall it, sends individual text messages to known house burglars with your address and location of valuables.

Give me back my money!

Before these dire side-effects kick in, however, missing even a day’s dose can be pretty whacky. My record prior to Japan was three days, after which my brain felt like it was about to melt. On day two in Tokyo, the world had shifted almost (but not quite!) imperceptibly along its horizon so not only was I now aware I had left my entire prescription back home, but also I felt like I was on a cruise ship for my troubles. And not a fun cruise ship, but one of those ones you recognise from grainy closed-circuit TV security recordings of a ship venturing into a dangerous tropical storm. Usually there is a pleasantly holiday-themed older person sliding across a varnished floor and into a grand piano, or a tray of mojitos exploding on to the pool deck. Fun to watch, not amazing to live.

Maybe, I thought calmly, this would be a good way to come down from the high dose that had been in my system for half a decade? And, besides, navigating the Australian health system was almost beyond my reach; what hope did I have in Japan? So I went about my day, making a beeline for the absolutely nuts Shimbashi railway station so I could jump a train to Shibuya and explore. There was a moment, deep within the catacombs-like underbelly of the station, with the Japanese salarymen dissecting my path at every turn that I realised how fucked I truly was.

My brain lost the ability to smooth-track through fast-walking subjects. The commuters in their mid-morning haste turned into elongated blurs. I was completely incapable of judging the distance between each one, getting caught by their glancing blows as they moved through the crowd like laser beams. It was, quite literally, a spin out.

I’m not going to last the rest of this trip without medication, I thought.

Still, I’m a rock-bottom type guy. I need to know the worst has arrived before attempting remediation work. And so I blundered through Shibuya like a Roomba without an algorithm before hitting the worthless clay soil of my own lowest point.

On the recommendation of an acquaintance from social media, I found myself at the Tokyo Medical and Surgical Clinic underneath the candy-cane-coloured Tokyo Tower, where a doctor with a startling English accent asked me what I was doing in Japan in the first place.

‘I’m writing a book about love and vulnerability. And loneliness,’ I offered, through the increasing static of my brain.

I might have imagined this, but I recall the young doctor in that moment doing a theatrical slow swivel towards me in his chair before looking me directly in the eyes and saying: ‘Well, you’ve certainly come to the right place for that.’

There was a hint of melancholy in his voice and, right then, I wanted him to hug me. Here was somebody who understood my pain and maybe I could provide some solace for his.

Yes, this particular moment was loneliness. The bite of it is bone-crushing in the way solitude isn’t.

Solitude is a sort of mistake in our programming. Loneliness is the correct code, from a survival perspective. It exists for the same reason as physical pain: to warn us.

Of course we are not meant to be alone. In pre-history, that meant certain death. And as we’ve already established, pre-history is the very basis for our brain. I have enjoyed so many stretches of solitude in my life, the way they seemed totally borderless and plump with nothing. But there is always an invisible line that divides elixir and poison.

Loneliness is a disease, like cancer, and certainly deadlier than the coronavirus, which at that point was starting to shut air travel between China and countries like Singapore. Loneliness might even be more fatal than smoking, which is doubly bad news for me. Apparently sitting is also, medically, as bad as both smoking and loneliness, which at the time of writing this book gives me the kind of trifecta I could never manage on the Melbourne Cup.

You know that feeling, though, don’t you? When your solitude morphs from guilty pleasure into the searing failure of loneliness? Social creatures like us have all experienced the bleed from one state to the other, like water turning into gas under heat.

Solitude is wind or water, so beautiful and necessary. Loneliness is what happens when the wind or water become so persistent they erode the substance around them. It is erosion. When does wind or water become a force that can wear down the face of granite? Not today or tomorrow, or next Tuesday. But it will.

After the doctor gave me my new prescription for the drugs I’d left back in Australia, I took my dose and went to sleep for seven hours and then another ten while my brain recalibrated.

Although it is surely insufferable, I awoke from that restorative slumber with a new mission in mind: to go to the bar where they filmed Lost in Translation and wait for deliverance, whether that be in the form of Bill Murray or Scarlett Johansson.

Nobody tells you, until you are that high up and can see it for yourself, that every high-rise in Tokyo has blinking red lights at their highest points. I imagine it’s an air traffic control thing, though I’ve never noticed it in any other city before. It feels unique and, because I’ve seen it nowhere else before, it seems to reinforce the loneliness of the vista.

Being fifty-two floors above the largest metropolis on earth is its own kind of psychic realignment. In the months before my trip to Japan, my friend Bridie introduced me to the writing of Australian academic Jill Ker Conway; in her beloved memoir The Road from Coorain, she describes the landscape of outback Australia as the ‘annihilation of self’. Having grown up under that same vast skies, I read that passage and thought: Yes, yes, yes! That’s it! Though I now know that you can get the same experience at the New York Bar at the top of the Park Hyatt in Shinjuku.

Up there, I ceased to exist. There was a five-piece jazz band and windows that stretched across two floors with views out on to the expanse of Tokyo beyond, and there was the bar with the angular lamps where Bill Murray met Scarlett Johansson and where I now sat. At either end of the space were floor-high murals by Italian artist Valerio Adami, which themselves were enough to make a person feel small, bright as they were. The room was an absence more than it was a presence, and that allowed the city to rush in at you. The city and all of its people, all of those constituent parts, refracted by the light and yet as one.

After recovering from the early low point of my trip to the doctor, I was enthralled. This dance between the two states of mere solitude and the messier work of loneliness was more familiar territory for me. To drift along the imaginary plane between them felt real, like nothing else had in recent memory.

If only there was a way to stay there, at that precise moment, for eternity. If only there was a way to make it stable, whatever that chemical reaction was. I liked it.

Before my trip, I had lunch with a sex worker called Mischa Maxwell in Sydney’s Kings Cross district to pick her brains about this book and the city she knows on a deeper level than many tourists. Much of her clientele is in Japan; the ‘loneliest men on the planet’ as she calls them. Theirs is a cultural malaise far deeper than my shallow performance as a solitary tourist.

‘When you’re working the life of a salaryman, which is 9 am to 9 pm, then you have to go out drinking with the boss for two or three hours,’ Maxwell told me. ‘You don’t want to go home drunk, so you’ll typically stay in a capsule hotel.’

The ubiquitous 711s or Lawson’s mini-marts and convenience stores on every corner of Tokyo’s streets are for this very reason stocked with entire work outfits for men. You can roll in drunk or hungover and walk out with a crisp white shirt, underwear, pants and socks.

The expectation imposed on the Japanese salaryman is to give over the child-rearing and home-management to his wife, to such a degree that he is provided a small stipend by her with which to go about his day. By the time the average family has its second kid, the wife and children have moved into the second bedroom to leave their working husband and father to his diminishing role as cog in machine.

There are no winners in the stultifying existence of the honour-bound Japanese family. Both women and men suffer, for different reasons no doubt, but the suffering has often defied categorisation.

‘So, at age forty-five, you’re getting no sex, you have no money to divorce,’ Maxwell told me. ‘So, the children of that generation are seeing how unhappy their parents are and are opting not to marry. They are opting not to marry at all because it is miserable; it’s a miserable lifestyle.’

Enter the sex industry, a sector as old as civilisation itself but honed to such an astonishing degree of efficiency and specificity in Japan, its single point of precision can peel open the most bizarre or fetid desires of a single person and sate them.

I consider myself especially open-minded, which is no small achievement for a kid from outback Queensland with heavy Protestant and Catholic influences, but the array of services for sexual fetishes, kink and garden-variety horniness in Japan is paralysing.

Sure, you can go to a blowjob bar where sex workers attend to you below while you’re being served drinks above the table, but what struck me about the myriad options on offer is that so many of them are more about providing attention than sexual release.

‘For single women, there are things called host bars where you go and buy drinks,’ Maxwell told me, ‘but there are hot blokes around that will flirt with you and encourage you to buy more and more and more drinks. And they get a cut of the drinks that they encourage you to buy. At a hostess bar, same thing. I’ll flirt with you outrageously, tell you how amazing you are and convince you to buy drinks. I’ll be drinking water, by the way; you’ll be drinking vodka or sake.

‘So that’s enough emotional interaction for you and then you’re happy to go home.’

If the going gets really tough, a tired salaryman can always duck into a Don Quijote mega-mart in Tokyo and pick up a six-pack of Tenga eggs for $30. A Tenga egg is essentially a single-use, lubed-up penis pocket – a Kinder Surprise for adults starved of affection.

Another option for release is to visit a sōpu, or soapland, a form of brothel that sprang up across Japan after prostitution was made illegal in the 1950s. Here the cover for sex services is a modern public bathhouse, where patrons can sit on chairs with holes in them – Sukebe Isu – and be washed top to bottom by attendants. If a client manages to reach climax under such trying circumstances, then that is just an unfortunate accident of biology.

Maxwell told me you can also opt for some ‘delivery health’ – health being sexual stimulation in this particular Japanese context – where a nurse will come to your apartment, take your temperature, give you the once over and then, if you pay her properly, go further.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Japan is a wonderland of sexual freedom, but its proliferation of kink happened in spite of a moralistic neoconservatism, not because its people are loose by design.

I don’t mean conservativism in the repressed Christian-right manner of speaking. Japanese people seek out this bewildering spectacle of sexual services precisely because they have been told over and over again by custom or decree that vulnerability is weakness, and love – the kind that can be fulfilling and beautiful in and outside of marriage – is only a species of duty. In such a culture, it becomes shameful to seek the reassurances of tenderness or affection with those you know. So, it is outsourced.

A further reason Japanese people have become so inflamed with loneliness and its terrifying dimensions is the same reason it has turned to a constellation of sexual enterprise: a crippling prudishness of the state. The sex industry is not a cure, per se, it is a symptom. That said, in lieu of a cure it is a terrifically necessary part of Japanese life.

The labyrinthine network of sex services in Japan is, in its strange way, the very thing keeping the charade of honour-bound men and women from falling apart completely.

If this natural human desire had nowhere else to live, the system would implode.

Now, teaching Japanese children sex education without assiduously avoiding the naughty bits (like showing penises and vaginas in the textbook for eight- to ten-year-olds in the curriculum that covers the headline ‘As the body approaches adulthood’) would help overcome some of the prudishness.

But I can hardly complain, having been on the receiving end of a Queensland state school sex education program as a young gay man, which is rather like being taught how to swim by a man who has already drowned.

You can see how these eddies of sexual conservatism turn into geysers of abandon among certain people. The great preoccupation with any kind of sex but especially gay sex – and particularly men who have sex with men – by the religious moral crusaders always scanned as morbid curiosity to me.

It is a titillation for them, a way to approach the fatal boundaries of an interesting sex life without tipping head first into moral destruction. I mean, good grief, at least the rest of us have the decency to be honest about it.

Anyway, this is a long (but sexy) way of making what I see as an essential point: I see no true love or genuine company in the spirit of our friendly neighbourhood moral crusaders. This is not meant as a nasty criticism for the sake of it. I see only destitution in their eyes, a light that burns so dimly and then only because the performance of absolutism throws out the occasional spark from the friction of weapons-grade cognitive dissonance.

To configure our true selves based on external whim is a tragedy.

And isn’t that, after all, the surest path to loneliness?

One of my most excruciating lonely moments came in the company of friends I professed to love and who on paper loved me too, but to whom I was utterly incapable of giving access.

I wish I had known then the cause of that ethereal distance. I had built the walls, how was it possible to be ignorant of their existence?

We make mistakes of authorship when we ascribe motives to other minds. In the throes of a dark, furious despair half a decade ago, I was told by a wise therapist, through a somewhat elaborate series of questions about the arrival of the First Fleet, that I was ‘colonising other peoples’ minds’.

It was me. I was turning up unannounced in their heads and forcing on them my customs and beliefs without any regard for what might have been there before. And then I turned that work on myself and imagined, or totally fabricated, their view of me.

The evidence of their alleged indifference or disdain towards me was planted. And I was the one who planted it.

I think this is how we become lonely. Certainly, those of us who have known loneliness have likely also experienced rejection and spite, apathy or indifference; the many vagaries of another person’s response to a sliver of our own vulnerability that disappoints us in ways we cannot quite define.

Perhaps we were greeted with too much emotion or not enough, or the tenor of their voice sounded accusatory or sarcastic, or there was too little reciprocity in the sharing of weakness, or we read our own shame on their words as they hung in the air between us.

It must be universal, this misalignment of our shame and its reception in others. We should not be deterred by it. For the five or ten people who for whatever reason are unable or unwilling to meet your shame – your peculiar underbelly of truth – there will be at least one who understands its measure. And this above all is an antidote to loneliness.

Though it works best at full participation. So many horrors of modern society could be softened, if not entirely banished, with a full-throated willingness to be open to the world. My mind here keeps coming back to politics and how few within its ranks can admit being wrong. I’m not naive. I know the system reinforces this blundering state of affairs that locks us into policy prescriptions that, sometimes, even public proponents concede privately will not work. Most of us punish error and ignore personal growth. Outside of the realm of power, imagine how many garden-variety bullies might find healing if we were all trained to respond to injustice and pain in good faith. It is a lesson I try, and fail, to learn every day. It is no easy thing to show a teetering world your open palm.

Back in Japan, the poison of cultural loneliness has been so pervasive that a whole category of the population – those who die alone – have had a word coined in their honour.

Kodokushi, quite literally ‘lonely death’, is not solely a Japanese phenomenon but it is one they have named.

‘A single-minded focus on economic growth, followed by painful economic stagnation over the past generation, had frayed families and communities, leaving them trapped in a demographic crucible of increasing age and declining births,’ Norimitsu Onishi wrote in the New York Times in 2017. ‘The extreme isolation of elderly Japanese is so common that an entire industry has emerged around it.’

When a person dies alone in Japan, employees from specialised cleaning companies are called in to wipe grime and dirt, the smell of death, from the apartment. These cleaners will also organise the mementos and belongings of the lonely death, kodokushi, partly because it needs to be done. They are compelled, also, by the idea that it is particularly intolerable for a human life to end without remark or memorial. Sorting the stuff of a life, then, is one way to honour the dead.

In the survey of Japan’s Changing Societal Structure and Support by Families and Communities (reporting in 2017), it emerged that in any two-week period 15 per cent of elderly men who lived alone spoke to someone else just once or even never. Almost 9 per cent of younger men who lived alone met the same criteria, two spurs in the data that are jarringly disproportionate. More than 30 per cent of elderly men who lived alone noted they had no ‘reliable person’ who could provide them with ‘a little help’.

Diagnosing the terra-forming nature of great economic upheaval – both on the way up and when it comes crashing back down – is only part of the story. I do worry about the ones who seem to think an economy is something that exists outside people, made only from raw numbers and adhesive tape. People are an economy. And just as they can shape it, economic forces can bend entire populations or groups to fit prevailing trends, the way trees grow almost horizontal in perpetually windswept valleys or plains.

At least one major bump in the graph for kodokushi happened after the collapse of the economy in the late 1980s when many senior Japanese salarymen were forced to retire early. Having given up on their families or jettisoned the idea of starting one entirely, these men managed to sacrifice themselves on the altar of corporate dominance.

If your god is fair and just, perhaps you could argue the trade-off. The great corporate deities in Japan, however, were capricious and beyond entreaty. Like Communist Romania’s dictatorial quest for dominance at the expense of the individual, Japan’s capitalist blood thirst came at enormous social and personal cost.

The case of kodokushi that catapulted the issue on to the national stage was that of a 69-year-old man who was found in the year 2000, having been dead for three years. As the New York Times reported, his rent and electricity had been paid directly from his bank account until his savings ran out. It was this that alerted the authorities who discovered a skeleton near the kitchen, just a metre or so away from the next-door neighbours. The bones had been picked clean by maggots and beetles.

As the economy railroaded entire generations, people like this man were increasingly isolated. Some families were forced to warehouse their elderly, or forget them entirely, and many men died alone because they prioritised work above all else.

Dark, I suppose, that this poor wretch was not alone in this kind of death. Not even in Japan.

In 2006, the skeletal remains of 38-year-old Joyce Carol Vincent were found in her north London bedsit. She had died in December 2003 in her kitchen, not far from the Christmas presents she had wrapped but never had the chance to deliver.

Vincent’s death was ultimately anything but private, becoming a national media sensation that sparked a docudrama series and even a poem in Joel Sadler-Puckering’s debut collection I Know Why the Gay Man Dances.

She did have family, however. By all accounts they were a nice family that loved her, but Vincent had also been the subject of domestic violence, and for reasons we will never truly understand she chose to gulp down the attendant shame on her own.

I use the word shame here advisedly because there ought to be none where a person has been targeted for violence or oppression. I can’t speak for Vincent, though from my own experience I crafted shame throughout my life from legion tiny insults and outrages, each one too small to prick me but which cumulatively became an insurgency of pain and embarrassment.

Each instance of pain was, for me, as they have been for countless others throughout history, another indication of how to measure worth.

This way loneliness lies.

I have been wondering about this complex intersection of shame and loneliness for longer than I care to admit. You’ll find no claim to wisdom here, just an extrapolation of the self. Intriguing research is beginning to emerge, at least as far as alcohol dependency and social deficits are concerned. Certainly, it’s no stretch to say that people who are serious alcoholics didn’t just fall into the habit out of casual curiosity. Having once been there myself and seen the scattered lives of others who know the terrain of drunken stupor well, it is as if they required alcohol above all else.

Leo Tolstoy had a similar notion, writing in his 1890 essay ‘Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?’, that alcohol – and other mind-altering substances – are employed to obscure cataclysmic fissures of the soul.

The diversions which might distract attention from the consciousness of this discord are insufficient, or have become stale, and so in order to be able to live on, disregarding the indications conscience gives of the wrongness of their life people (by poisoning it temporarily) stop the activity of the organ through which conscience manifests itself, as a man by covering his eyes hides from himself what he does not wish to see.

When a man is sober he is ashamed of what seems all right when he is drunk.

Over a hundred years after Tolstoy’s observations, Stanford University School of Medicine researcher Anne Pascale Le Berre published a paper in the journal Neuropsychology, in which she examined the potential causal links between heavy drinking and stunted personal skills.

Individuals with alcohol use disorder can suffer from emotional and social cognition defects that distort social interactions. The problem, Le Berre says, is that they do not have any ‘real insight’ or accurate metacognition as to the origins of these problems. Alcohol use, then, may be relied upon as a coping mechanism. They drink to ‘relieve the emotional and social burden, feeding the vicious cycle of addiction’.

We do not yet know, however, whether these deficits lead to alcoholism or whether it is the drinking itself that causes them. Currently, evidence can be found to support both theses.

Le Berre’s analysis looks at specific conditions such as alexithymia, which is often associated with poor wellbeing including low levels of happiness and life satisfaction. For a person with alexithymia, it means they have trouble identifying their own feelings in the self and separating those from the physical sensation of emotional arousal. They also have difficulty being able to describe their feelings to others and possess ‘restricted imaginative processes featured by limited fantasy life and an externally oriented style of thinking’.

Her paper also explores more general emotion decoding deficits in alcohol-dependent people and those with a faulty or misfiring theory of mind, which, when so damaged, makes it hard or impossible to ‘predict, anticipate, and interpret the behavior of others and facilitate appropriate social interactions’.

Loneliness creeps in through these shoddy building codes. Yes, there are other forces at play, such as demographic shifts in older age that compound the stratification of families, especially in the Western world, but the explanatory power of shame is compelling here.

In 2018, my then boss asked me to write a feature for the weekend paper about Britain’s decision to appoint the world’s first minister for loneliness. (It became something of a joke in the office as my amused colleagues pantomimed the thought-process of the commissioning editor who had to select perhaps the loneliest person in the building for the job.)

The ministry was created after the execution-style killing of British Labour MP Jo Cox by a right-wing extremist in the lead-up to Brexit. As it happened, Cox had just established a commission on loneliness.

In the end, her family acknowledged the fingerprints of loneliness across the life of Cox’s killer.

‘We feel nothing but pity for him that his life was so devoid of love and filled with hatred, his only way of finding meaning was to attack a woman who represented all that was good about the country in an act of supreme cowardice,’ Cox’s husband, Brendan, said at the time.

The theologian John O’Donohue evokes this fortress of hatred, or fear, in his book Eternal Echoes:

The way you think about your life can turn your soul into a haunted room. You are afraid to risk going in there anymore. Your fantasy peoples this room of the heart with sad presences which ultimately become disturbing and sinister. The haunted room in the mind installs a lonesome one at the heart of your life.

It would be devastating in the autumn of your life to look back and recognise that you had created a series of haunted rooms in your heart.

Loneliness is a form of mourning and loss, a quiet temple in which contemplations are performed without end or audience.

In the grief of our singular privation, we are left with the outline of things we once knew. I think this is where the difference between loneliness and solitude reveals itself: in the quality of the shading of that outline. In solitude we have knowledge of, and access to, the thing that is temporarily missing. It turns on an axis of choice. Imagine a bridge that you have chosen not to cross because you are happy on your riverbank. That’s solitude. Loneliness is a washed-away bridge in front of the woman who can no longer remember what the other side of the river looks like.

Certainly there were moments during my cognitive and social isolation in Japan when I wondered where that bridge had gone – desperate as I was for a way back to the other side – but it was largely a tour of the rest stops on the highway outside of loneliness itself.

I found myself transfixed by the lights, an unsettling diorama that I knew to contain the most number of people living anywhere in one place that I had ever visited – and yet I felt more alone there than even on the 1000-square-kilometre cattle station I once called home and shared with just three other people.

In her book The Lonely City, Olivia Laing captures this jarring inversion of expectation, the way the lighted windows of other people’s lives can move you to dissonance. She writes:

You can see them, but you can’t reach them and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.

You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.

At the opposite end of the age spectrum in Japan, an alternative reality of loneliness has been developing for decades, first described by clinicians in 1978 as a type of ‘withdrawal neurosis’.

A few years later the term hikikomori was coined to describe these voluntary shut-ins, almost always children or young adults, who turned their backs on society and remained living in their parents’ basements or spare rooms for years at a time. Even indefinitely.

A 2010 paper in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease by University of California researchers Alan Teo and Albert Gaw recounted the empirical evidence thus far. While the majority of so-called hikikomori cases actually had well-defined mental conditions already known to science, the researchers found that ‘a notable subset of cases with substantial psychopathology do not meet criteria for any existing psychiatric disorder’. They suggest hikikomori is a culture-bound syndrome that may warrant classification as a totally new psychiatric disorder.

The paper includes the case study of a fourteen-year-old Japanese boy who decided, without warning nor apparent cause, that he no longer wanted to attend school. He had normal results on a battery of laboratory tests, a mid-range IQ score and no medical history of note.

The boy left home just once a week, each Sunday, to rent a DVD with his father at the local video store.

This living situation continued for two years. Then, at the time of entrance into high school, the patient suddenly reported that he wanted to return to school. He entered a vocational school specialising in design and since then has regularly attended classes.

The psychiatrist providing therapy to the patient reported that the boy’s decision happened gradually, although it appeared sudden. The patient spent two years in social withdrawal and apparently spent much of that time interrogating the conditions of his life and what he might want to achieve in the future.

Estimates for the condition, which is recognised by the nation’s ministry at least as a mysterious phenomenon if not a defined illness, range from 0.9 to 3.8 per cent of the population having some history of hikikomori. Other studies suggest as many as 14,000 cases are recorded in any given year.

These curious cases have been likened to modern hermits, and they are only counted officially if they stay away from society – including no longer maintaining their own friendships and outside connections – for six months or more.

What would possess you?

I once thought I was made for a life in the hermitage, on account of having grown up somewhere west of elsewhere on a broad sweep of land that approached Luxembourg in size.

But what I actually wanted, at my core, was to feel the pulse of compatibility with others and, frustrated by my inability to make it so, the purgatory of being alone seemed as good a way as any to save face.

The information that finally killed off my notion of hermitude was reading the story of Christopher Thomas Knight, a man who disappeared from normal society sometime after the Chernobyl nuclear power station blew its core through the roof and sent radiation over half of Europe.

Knight lived in the woods around Maine in the United States for almost thirty years, neither speaking to nor interacting with a single human soul. When I read the account of his astonishing disappearance in GQ Magazine in 2014, the thing that struck me almost immediately was that, later, Knight could not, at all, explain why he did it.

The closest he came was conceding to a long period of self-reflection.

‘I did examine myself,’ he told the writer Michael Finkel. ‘Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing – when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.’

Knight suffered for his decades lost to the world, but not because he was gone. Only because, eventually, he was found, arrested and dragged to jail for the years he spent stealing food and other items with which to sustain himself in the wilderness.

He had always vowed to spend the rest of his life as a single, inconsequential element against the backdrop of everything. Instead, the world dragged him back.

I’ve never been one to speak ill of modern society – apart from frequent and half-serious detours into condemning the Agrarian Revolution as the worst act of folly in human history – but I will do so here.

Part of the uneasiness of being really, truly lonely, I think, is the gap between the expectations we have for ourselves and the reality of our achievements. This shortfall, as we often perceive it even if we argue otherwise, is the fuel for inadequacies that contribute to our feeling of shame and lead to us distancing ourselves from others.

Sure, some people handle this better than others. And I don’t believe it’s the billionaires or world-renowned artists or champion dog breeders (probably especially not them), but rather people like Christopher Knight. There are those who know enough to shut out as much of the noise as possible, like Odysseus’s sailors who were commanded to plug their ears with beeswax as they approached the legendary but deadly Sirens.

What we could do and be and have has never been bigger or more accessible. To an overwhelming extent we are required to participate in this infinite regress and, dear reader, I do not say this from a position of practised enlightenment.

I am more ensnared by the apparatus of modernity than almost anyone else I can think of, save for the poor souls who must, for obscenely low pay, watch videos and images of war, torture, paedophilia and countless other acts of depravity in order to remove them from social media websites. But as a day-to-day proposition, my life is wired into the electric everything of this existence and, essentially without pause, its stimuli are slingshot into my brain like one of those fish cannons that shoot salmon over dam walls.

To move through the world like this is as disorienting for me as I suspect it is for the poor salmon who find themselves sucked into what looks like a pneumatic tube but which is actually just a big, enclosed waterslide.

To the salmon, it would appear very much as if they were at one moment in their living room and, the next, being shot into the sun.

I saw one fish get put into the cannon upside down so that its pink little belly pointed towards the ceiling of the tube in what must have been an experience rather like the night I ‘lost’ my virginity; a vignette that was at once harrowing and bizarre, although with slightly more legs.

I told you I could joke about it.

Discombobulating is both the appropriate word to describe this salmon-tube sensation and also, as it turns out, onomatopoeic for the sound of the process.

Exposure to all this, all day has a tendency to distort the dimensions of our reality to the point where we have almost, without even knowing it, created a hyper-networked version of the Total Perspective Vortex machine in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Keen students of the series will remember that a man, Trin Tragula, built the machine as a way of finally getting back at his wife who constantly grilled him about spending his time dithering and dreaming. ‘Have a sense of proportion,’ she told him as many as thirty-eight times a day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex – just to show her. And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realised that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

Of course the only being to ever survive the machine, Zaphod Beeblebrox, did so because when he entered the machine he was, in fact, the most important thing alive in the universe at that point and the power of perspective simply confirmed his own already impressive ego.

We cannot hope to be Zaphod, in the grand scheme of our own actuality.

I’d venture that it would be foolish to try it out and yet, here we are, day after day and hour after hour, plugged into the totality of us through social media and we are drunk with the insanity of it.

Please know that when I say all of this I do so with the knowledge that, in many ways, the internet and in particular social media has made me a better person. In the vacuum that was my youth and early adulthood – a void made so by poverty and a cultural barrenness that was obvious to everyone else except myself – networking sites with real people from all around the world have granted me an education that otherwise simply was not there.

However, I’ve never been one for moderation.

I participate in platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and (once upon a time) Tumblr – or in flashes of particular desperation, TikTok and Snapchat – the way I once drank, played the pokies and routinely visited the local KFC in Surfers Paradise. All in.

That can’t be good for the head.

I mean, think about it. Our brains are not substantially different to the ones our ancestors hauled around in their skulls and all they had to do with theirs was fashion some tools, maintain a baseline level of social grace with the rest of a small tribe and avoid death, an end about which they were aware but only dimly.

Go further back with essentially the same neural architecture and they didn’t even have to contemplate inevitable nothingness. We were once, like every other animal, in a state of blissful ignorance about our certain demise.

In 2009, the neuroscientist David Eagleman published his slim book Sum in which he offered forty short stories about possible afterlives, one of which has stayed with me for the decade since I first read it.

In the story ‘Metamorphosis’, Eagleman writes:

There are three deaths. Now the first is when the body ceases to function, of course. And the second is when the body is consigned, or you know, put in the grave. The third is that moment sometime in the future when your name is spoken for the last time.

Eagleman imagines a sort of lobby where people who have died are kept in a holding pattern until the last person with any knowledge or link to you on earth speaks your name and there are no more people to remember you.

Depending on a person’s stature or family networks, this could be a relatively quick process – perhaps within a generation or two – or it could stretch on for centuries.

When I first read this story it felt like a gut punch because it enunciated a sense, until then ill-defined, that I longed to leave a legacy in the world and it wasn’t clear at all what that would be.

Not as a vehicle for ego, though I suppose the desire to exist is an extreme act of arrogance, but as a final push against being forgotten and the loneliness that springs from that fertile soil. After my mum, sister and brother are gone from this plane of existence, who would or could speak my name? I had no children (and the prospect still seems unlikely for reasons of biology and poor organisational skills) and no thing that would commend my name to others.

The average person alive today has access to more information about the cosmos and people’s lives than the sum total of all human beings alive in, say, the 600s AD had access to. Our power, as individuals, to change anything about that state of affairs, however, has grown marginally and nowhere near at the pace of the uplift in our cognition.

To possess information without power is to wander the streets of Tokyo, or any big city, and to feel utterly, inexplicably alone against the fact of those overwhelming numbers, those unknowable lives behind illuminated panes of glass.

On any given day, in the forest of social media interactions to which I have become almost ritually ordained, I can view a mind-boggling slice of humanity at its best and worst. Here’s just a taste of what I’ve recently seen: thousands of my countrymen and women banding together to help people during the hellish bushfire season of 2019–20; arguments about whether Australians ought to spell it ‘maths’ or ‘math’ and whether the latter is treasonous; a dog, interviewed on TikTok, that breathes air heavily into a microphone in rapid bursts; a series of increasingly absurd memes riffing on dancing Ghanaian funeral directors as a portent of death; a poet who tweeted, in a moment of discovery, that ‘hold your horses’ might in fact mean ‘be stable’; political malcontents accusing every politician of being corrupt except the ones from their own tribe; an actual convicted paedophile winning plaudits for his own partisan tweeting; a man shamed on the internet into not dancing because he was overweight and then being invited to a dance party with a thousand people so that he could feel free to express himself; people advocating for the death of the elderly in a pandemic; and any manner of wry commentary about the granular detail of ordinary life that makes you stop and say, ‘Hey, I do that, too.’

This is not an argument one way or the other for the inherent goodness or badness of social media. It’s the sheer onslaught of stuff that makes us lonely. And if you even dip a toe in the puddle of that world, which increasing numbers of us do, it is difficult to avoid being inundated by it.

If there were any doubt about this thesis, certainly in my world, it was laid to rest when the coronavirus pandemic reached Australia’s shores with force just days after I returned home from my trip to New York.

As the nation was put into lockdown, Séamus and I adhered to even stricter rules. While other people in New South Wales were meeting a friend for a socially distanced walk and visiting family members for carefully spaced picnics, there was a period of five weeks when I wasn’t in close proximity to anyone except Séamus.

Thanks to his job as an intensive care nurse, our world became incredibly small. Even with the proliferation of video calls and the same social media infrastructure we enjoyed pre-pandemic, the world shrank. I had essentially the same access to all those lives and all those people I had before, but the loneliness descended like an especially plump turkey on the end of a fishing rod. I was confused. I did not want it and it scared me.

Just a week into the worst of it, when fear still cut through the air like a loosed arrow, I tweeted to no one in particular: ‘Happy Wednesday everyone! It’s like I can feel each individual synapse of my brain misfire as it happens in real time, as if I’m walking over a frayed rope bridge in a jungle and watching the fibres snap.’

In my case at least, the feeling came because I was forced to confront who I was, really, at my most elemental.

This is another way to see loneliness: it is who we are when the world falls away and we are left as a single point in infinite space, scrubbed of all edifice. This was all well and good for Christopher Thomas Knight, who deliberately turned his back on society, but for those of us who have yet to adapt – or who are thrust suddenly into a pared-back version of reality from which we hope to rebound – our diminishment can be a source of terror.

It’s not as simple as saying I am bad at being on my own. I prefer it most often on most days. The mandatory shut-in of 2020, however, made me realise that solitude was only a preference after (or perhaps because) I had already had my weekly or daily fill of social contact.

The abject pleasure I took in my own quiet nothingness was possible only because it was mine to embrace.

Having the removalist of isolation turn up and acquire all of my distractions – the travel, the work trips, festivals, speaking engagements, visits to the pub, dinner parties, brunches; hell, even the gym – made me understand, against my will, how empty my life seemed below the surface.

The contentment I thought I was cultivating was an illusion.

It was a booking system, actually – a way to delay further examination of the heart and mind while staying so occupied it was almost impossible to discover the deceit. At least, as long as the pyramid scheme of my own happiness kept growing.

My hope, then, was a great fraud that revealed itself only when the world and I stopped moving.

I’m not sure if we are meant to break the fourth wall of our writing, but my publisher Catherine Milne sent a little snippet from a Vanity Fair interview with US poet laureate Joy Harjo, after we discussed the delicate matter of my having finally understood what was expected of me in writing this manuscript and becoming completely frozen in fear.

Harjo told Vanity Fair that ‘you wind up sitting there at the kitchen table with your demons who have haunted you and harassed you from day one. You’re confined, so you either have to make friends with them or continue the fight.’

Yes, I thought, that is precisely what is happening. Social distancing be damned, I was holding a cocktail party for my demons. A carousing, ebullient knees-up from which we would emerge as friends or continue in bitter enmity.

The hyper-connection of my online life did not salve this loneliness, it reinforced it. Whatever hits of relief the chaos of being extremely online offered were ephemeral, its lashes and psychological whiplash longer lasting, more internally divisive and ultimately corrupting.

I even gave up on the direct video calls with groups of friends, in the end. Mostly because the angles involved kinked my neck, but partly on account of the slipperiness of the encounters; they never felt quite real. Writing in The Conversation in May 2020, Bond University assistant professor in organisational psychology Libby Sander and school of psychology assistant professor Oliver Bauman explain that this is because we miss the most important part of social interaction.

‘We need to work harder to process non-verbal cues. Paying more attention to these consumes a lot of energy,’ they write.

Moreover, they say, silence provides a ‘natural rhythm’ in real-life conversations but online we can never be quite sure if it is intended or a glitch in the service.

What these video sessions could never re-create, what I longed for most, was the calm togetherness you feel with close friends, where neither feels the need to talk but you can sunbake in their company nonetheless, even at opposite ends of a table or lounge. Those are the moments that pass as the most true.

There is no performance, no urgent need for the trade of information or stories. Just you and them, the sight of their skin and knowing that it would be warm to the touch – and then reaching over and confirming it. Nothing between you but a palpable love, the kind you could stretch around your shoulders like a coat when the chill sets in.