ANXIETY ABOUT BEING DISCONNECTED is an age-old condition. It’s in Genesis, when God, concerned about the potential power of a unified human community, “confounds” the language shared among residents in the Tower of Babel, leaving them unable to communicate or understand each other. It’s in Plato’s Symposium, when Aristophanes explains that Zeus, who also feared the power of a united human species, split us in half. Before then, the story goes, every person had four arms, four legs, and a two-sided face, with integrated male and female qualities. Now each of us is an incomplete individual, condemned to feel alone unless we find the companion who makes us whole.
Concerns about various forms of alienation and social fragmentation are also hallmarks of modern culture, as are debates on why we wound up this way and how we might come together again. In fact, inquiries into these very issues helped inspire the first major works of social science, including canonical works in economics, psychology, political science, and sociology, by big thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud.
Contemporary social scientists have taken the study of human disconnection in new directions. Instead of grand philosophical theories, today’s number-crunching academics traffic in surveys, using powerful statistics to convey who we are and what troubles us now. In recent years, blockbuster findings about our purportedly heightened social isolation have sent commentators into a new cycle of anxiety-laden debates about the reasons we’ve become so atomized. Some, such as the startling discovery that one in four Americans has no one with whom they can discuss important matters, turn out to be unfounded. Others, like those documenting the number of hours we spend in front of screens rather than in face-to-face interaction, seem to discount the social nature of what we do online. But if we often exaggerate the extent of our disconnection, there is no mistaking the fact that today more people throughout the world live alone than ever before, and that even more will likely join them when they are affluent and secure enough to pull it off.
The meaning of these facts can be debated, however, and making sense of them requires looking beyond the numbers. The cultural critics and political officials who worry about the rise of living alone don’t acknowledge that living alone is an individual choice that’s as valid as the choice to get married or live with a domestic partner. Nor do they recognize that it’s a collective achievement—which is why it’s common in developed nations but not in poor ones. They tend to overlook the fact that neither individuals nor societies see living alone as a goal or an end point—which is why social movements to promote the interests of singletons are so difficult to organize. And they don’t admit that living alone has not led to the “decomposition” of collective life and the end of meaningful social commitments, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter and many others feared.
More pragmatically, those who caution against the shift toward living alone need to grapple with the fact that the social changes driving it—the emergence of the individual, the rising status of women, the growth of cities, the development of communications technologies, and the expansion of the life course—are unlikely to be reversed. At this point in history it’s clear that living alone will be an enduring feature of the contemporary developed world. States and societies that recognize this, and particularly those that give singletons the kinds of support that they now offer to those who are married, will be better able to meet their citizens’ needs.
CONSIDER SWEDEN, where about 47 percent of all households have just one resident (compared to about 28 percent in the United States), or more specifically Stockholm, where a staggering 60 percent of all dwellings are occupied by someone who lives alone. Like the United States, Sweden has a deep-seated cultural legacy of individualism and self-reliance. But it’s the nation’s ongoing commitment to collectivism, not its problems with atomization or social isolation, that most impressed me when I traveled there to learn about how and why so many Swedes live alone today.1
For decades, scholars of the modern world—and of the family in particular—have turned to Sweden for a preview of trends (the bad as well as the good) that may emerge in their own societies. In the 1980s, the American sociologist and marriage proponent David Popenoe noted that Sweden had made a “world-leading move away from the nuclear family.” Popenoe highlighted the fact that Swedish marriage rates were down and nonmarital cohabitation was up, as well as the fact that family dissolution, whether from divorce or nonmarital separation, happened more frequently than before. But he also called attention to another surprising social change: that the number of one-person households had more than doubled between 1960 and 1980, with young adults leading the way. Popenoe questioned what would happen when the once universal human experience of living in groups was no longer assured. He worried about whether the rise of living alone would change the quality and character of social relationships, resulting in more loneliness or anomie. But he also acknowledged that this seemed unlikely: “It is not that Swedes are misanthropes, living their adult lives with no intimates. The evidence suggests that the propensity of adult Swedes to form a dyad with another person, at least for part of their lives, is as strong if not stronger than elsewhere . . . Nor is it that Swedes necessarily lack intimate social contacts, even if many of these contacts are outside of their immediate household.”2
The intensity of Swedish social life is most evident in Stockholm, a prosperous city that is also the global capital of living alone. I arrived there during a damp and cloudy week in the fall of 2010, but the weather did nothing to diminish the vitality of the city’s sidewalks, waterways, parks, restaurants, and cafés. More remarkable than the crowds of people, though, was the density of the city’s handsome, functional residential buildings, including prewar complexes designed specifically to promote communal living among singletons and postwar high-rises that, if not especially attractive, created an abundant supply of decent places to live.
These buildings were not developed by commercial realty companies for which success is measured solely by revenues. They were designed to meet the needs of quite specific populations, including the ranks of those who live alone. In the 1930s, for instance, a group of modern architects, social planners, and feminists conceived a new style of collective housing, one that offered single women (young and old) a private residence within a building that also supplied services such as cooking, cleaning, and child care. The “collective house,” designed by architect Sven Markelius and social welfare champion Alva Myrdal (who won the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize), opened its doors to single women and single mothers in 1935. Located in central Stockholm’s Kungsholmen district, the building contained a restaurant (with a small elevator system that could deliver meals into every unit), a communal kitchen, a laundry (with chutes for sending down dirty clothing and a paid staff of launderers), and a nursery. It was a resounding success, perhaps too much so, because demand for a place there has always exceeded the modest supply of fifty-seven units (eighteen with one room, thirty-five with two rooms, and four four-room “mansionettes”). Fortunately, there are several similar buildings in the same neighborhood, some catering to single mothers, others to all singletons regardless of sex or age. And while in some the services are no longer available, the restaurant and pastry shop in the Markelius and Myrdal collective house remain extremely popular. After I sampled the fare there, the outgoing staff delighted in showing me that the meal delivery elevator still works.
Between 1965 and 1974, Sweden embarked on a far more ambitious housing project: the Miljonprogrammet, or Million Program. At the direction of the Social Democratic Party, the government invested in the construction of roughly one million new residential units (and the demolition of about 350,000 others), including high-rise apartment complexes, many of which were packed together in inner suburbs, as well as less conspicuous, small-scale developments scattered throughout the city. The Social Democrats initiated the program because Swedish cities lacked sufficient housing for the continuous stream of migrants who had abandoned their rural and small-town communities in the previous two decades. Social planners believed that the massive construction project would assure Sweden its role as an ultramodern nation, a place where citizens would benefit from their nation’s collective prosperity and the privileges it afforded.3 Thereafter, one of those privileges would be the chance to live alone.
The abundance of small apartments available in cities like Stockholm is just one reason that going solo is so pervasive. Like the other Scandinavian nations, all of which have unusually high rates of people who live alone, Sweden has both a dynamic market economy and a strong welfare state, and citizens can pursue their autonomy with confidence that the safety net will catch them if they fall. “Do you know why so many of us live alone?” a Swedish statistician I interview in the charming Old Town district asks me. He quickly answers his own question: “Because we can.”
For middle-class Swedes who came of age after the Million Program, moving into a place of their own after leaving their childhood home has become a rite of passage into adulthood, a luxury that sometimes feels like a social right. Until recently, when the government changed the system for allocating apartments, parents would register their newborn children on the waiting list for a small apartment (in the same way that Manhattan parents sign up their infants for nursery schools), to assure that there would be one available when they graduated from gymnasium (high school). What’s more, Swedish parents will often exchange their own family-size apartments for a smaller, “empty-nest” unit so that they can help pay for their child’s first go at domestic autonomy. “It’s our responsibility,” the father of a teenager who’s approaching graduation tells me. “And we’re trying to figure out how to make it work.”
During my visit to Stockholm I interviewed a dozen middle-class men and women between the ages of twenty-nine and forty-seven. It was by no means a large or random or remotely scientific sample, but I was still impressed and surprised by what I learned from them. Not only had every single one of them begun living alone in their late teens or early twenties, but nearly all of their friends and family members had, too. Under these conditions, going solo is a tremendously social experience. “I got my first apartment when I turned twenty,” a forty-three-year-old man in Stockholm recounts, “and so did just about all of my friends. That was one of the best times of my life. Most nights we’d meet up at someone’s apartment and drink for a while, because we didn’t have enough money for more than one drink in a bar, then go out somewhere to meet women and other friends.” A thirty-year-old woman who’s studying anthropology reports a similar experience. “We all kept our own places, even when we were dating someone seriously and spending a lot of nights together. It’s only recently, now that we’re all turning thirty and moving in with partners, that my friends are starting to sell or give up their apartments. But even that’s hard, because so many of the people who are just a little older than us have already divorced or separated. And we all want a place that’s ours.”
Just as Swedish social planners like Alva Myrdal built special housing complexes for female singletons in the 1930s, contemporary planners are designing new collective dwellings for the growing ranks of young people, divorcés and divorcées, and seniors who live alone. In Stockholm, I spent one afternoon with Ingela Lindh, the CEO of Stockholmshem, which manages more than 25,000 residential units from the city’s public housing stock, and her colleague Björn Ljung, who is also a liberal (of the free-market variety) representative in the municipal government. (He is a distinctively Swedish free-market liberal, though, which means he says things such as “We pay a lot of taxes and we think that’s a good thing, because it allows us to take care of each other.”)4 Lindh is petite but has a commanding presence, which she honed during her ten years’ tenure as Stockholm’s chief urban planner. Since taking over Stockholmshem, she has pledged to develop more housing for young adults and students, as well as for the growing number of elderly Swedes who have aged in place but now seek a more communal way to live alone. “Housing has gotten too expensive here in the past decade,” Lindh tells me. “Stockholm residents used to spend a quarter or a third of their income on their apartment. Now people who are getting into the market are paying 40 or 45 percent, and a lot of young and old people won’t be able to afford it unless we do something.”
As we sit around her conference table, Lindh and Ljung show off the architectural plans for a number of projects, including an office tower they’ve converted into an apartment building full of “starter” units for young singles. “We want to make sure that young people have the chance to get their own apartment,” Lindh says. “Because if they have that experience, they’ll have a fuller life, a more social life, and they’ll develop closer connections to friends.” Sweden’s Social Democrats, who until recently controlled the national government as well as many municipal ones, took the same position in a report issued before the 2010 elections. The party called for the immediate construction of 50,000 units of housing, including 3,000 apartments for students and 11,000 one- and two-room apartments for young adults. The housing shortage, it claimed, is “a serious problem for young people who are prevented from moving away from home, and for students who are not infrequently forced to abstain from studying in the Stockholm region.”5
Stockholm’s municipal government has also acknowledged that it lacks enough housing for the poor and the sick, as well as for the rising population of immigrants and refugees. Stockholmshem is trying to build some. Lindh and Ljung pull out the design for the Swedish equivalent of an SRO, as well as a complex designed and located to allow the children of Somali refugees to move into their own places without leaving their family’s neighborhood. “It’s not a very Swedish idea, because it treats the Somalis as if they are different from all others. And at first we didn’t like it,” Lindh acknowledges. “But when they explained how important it was for the families to be connected, I understood that it was the right thing to do.”
Lindh seems most excited about a building that she doesn’t manage: Färdknäppen, a community-owned facility for Stockholm residents who are above age forty, with no children living at home, and an interest in being alone together during the second half of their lives. “You can move into Färdknäppen when your needs are no longer dictated by family and children,” the building’s Web site explains. “How much social contact and ‘togetherness’ one desires varies, from person to person and from one period to another.”6 “It’s important that someone can move in at forty, not sixty-five,” Lindh adds, “because that means there’s real age diversity, with middle-age adults who work full-time as well as retired people. You can see how different it is from a retirement home the moment you walk in.” I tell her I’d like to see it sometime, perhaps on another visit. “How about now?” she asks me. “We can visit my mother, who’s lived there for fifteen years.”
A few minutes later we’re in a taxi heading to Stockholm’s Södermalm district, a leafy, densely populated area where Färdknäppen, with seven floors and forty-three residential units, blends in neatly. The building, which was designed in 1989, is clean and modern, with large windows, a brick exterior at street level, and white walls with red trim above. The ground floor is spacious and inviting. Lindh’s mother, Siv, who’s lively at eighty-five, greets us at the front door and offers me a tour. We begin in the bright dining room, with seating for sixty people, where on most nights the majority of the residents eat together (for about four dollars), next to the large, open kitchen where four people are busily preparing dinner. There’s also a library and television room, a computer room, a laundry room, a weaving area, a carpentry and hobby room, and an entry to the communal garden and outdoor seating area. We take the elevator to the top floor, where there’s a roof deck and a party room; then we descend to the basement, which features an exercise room large enough for group classes as well as a sauna, before we head up to a residential floor, where a group photograph of the floor’s residents hangs prominently in the hall. Siv lives in an airy corner unit, with a bedroom, a living room, and a compact kitchen. “I have enough space to cook for myself,” she tells me. “But usually I eat downstairs in the dining room and spend an hour or so after dinner talking with friends. Of course I don’t have to, which is what makes being here so nice.”
Residents of Färdknäppen are obligated to participate in some activities, however. Every six weeks each resident must help with the cooking and cleaning. “This doesn’t mean, though, that everyone must be a good cook or that everyone must do exactly as much as everyone else,” the building’s Web site explains. “‘From each according to their ability’ as it’s stated in the rules of the association.” Occasionally, residents may experience these tasks as onerous, but there’s little question about whether they detract from or enhance the appeal of the place. Today there is a long waiting list of Stockholm singles who are eager for a spot in the building. “We obviously need a lot more places like this,” Lindh tells me. “It’s a great model for bringing people who live alone into a real community. Now the question is whether it can be replicated on a bigger scale, because more and more of us are going to want what it offers.”
Lindh, who’s divorced, has two children, and as they reach the age where they expect to move into their own apartments, she is thinking more about what kind of arrangement will suit her best. “They will both be out of my apartment soon,” she explains. “But I’ve realized that the way we live is never permanent. Sometimes we’re with a partner, sometimes with children, sometimes alone. In Sweden we know that the family is always changing, and so are our own lives. We’re not especially lonely—not at all. We’re actually quite social, and we’ve learned how to be okay when we’re on our own.”
IN SWEDEN, as in many other nations where singletons are now ubiquitous, living alone is not merely a condition to be okay with. It’s an arrangement that people have come to appreciate, value, and even pursue. Young people believe that moving into a home of their own is essential for becoming an adult, because the experience will help them grow more mature and self-reliant. Middle-age adults believe that living alone is important after a divorce or separation, because it helps them regain their autonomy and self-control. The elderly believe that living alone allows them to maintain their dignity, integrity, and autonomy, and to determine how they will live.
One reason that so many find living alone appealing is that the choice is hardly binding. Most people could find roommates, from strangers on Craigslist to friends, family, prospective romantic partners, or coresidents in a group-living facility. But the fact is, most of us prefer living alone to these other options, and—since we’ve all been shaped by the cult of the individual—we’re unlikely to change our minds.
What if, instead of indulging the social reformer’s fantasy that we would all just be better off together, we accepted the fact that living alone is a fundamental feature of modern societies and we simply did more to shield those who go solo from the main hazards of the condition? Isolation and insufficient care for frail, old, or impoverished singletons. Disconnection for those who want to participate in social activities but have lost their companions and don’t know how or where to find others. Stress and anxiety for single women who want a child but are nearing the limits of their reproductive years. Economic insecurity for those who lose a job and have no partner to support them. These are practical problems for which there are good solutions, not causes for vague and fuzzy proclamations—the death of community! the collapse of civil society!—which are notoriously difficult to assess.
One reason that singletons are so prevalent in the Scandinavian countries is that their welfare states protect most citizens from the most difficult aspects of living alone. Consider one of the issues that makes going solo so much more stressful for young women than it is for young men: planning one’s life around the biological clock. In my interviews, American women in their late thirties and early forties consistently reported that their anxieties around reproduction led them to wonder whether they had made good decisions about their personal and professional lives. They tear themselves up asking questions that few young American men who live alone ponder: Should they have settled, or settled down, earlier? Would they have been happier if they had lowered their professional ambitions and invested more time in their personal lives? Young Swedish women who live alone share some of these anxieties, but for them finding the right partner feels less urgent or consequential, because they know that if they have a child on their own they are entitled to meaningful support: sixteen months of paid parental leave, with costs shared by employers and the state; heavily subsidized child care, for which no family can pay more than 1 to 3 percent of their income; and public health care that ranks among the finest in the world.
It is, of course, unlikely that the United States would adopt such generous social policies in the foreseeable future, and perhaps it is folly to suggest that we emulate them now that nations throughout the developed world are trimming down their welfare programs. But it’s important to note that the social rights of citizenship in places like Sweden dramatically improve life for all young women and provide even more benefits for those who live alone. It’s also important to identify the costs of relying on the market to satisfy the needs of individuals and societies in which so many people live alone. One of these costs is the problem of overwork among aspiring young professionals whose security hinges on their professional achievements and who often end up “married” to their job. Another, as we have seen, is that the private sector, whose innovations enhance and even enable the lives of successful singletons—consider smart phones, solo vacation packages, prepackaged meals, and luxury condominium complexes, among others—has done far less to help the sick, the poor, and the elderly, all of whom need the kinds of support that even “socially responsible” corporations are unlikely to provide.
What should societies adapting to the emergence of singletons ask of the private and public sectors? To what extent could our policies promote or demand genuine social responsibility for those who live alone? Citizens and political leaders in the United States have asked these kinds of questions during previous historical moments when they faced up to the challenges posed by major demographic changes. Think of the post–World War II baby boom, when public support for suburban home development and highway construction to accommodate the growing population of middle-class families reshaped the urban landscape. Or the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when progressive reformers invested in municipal services and public health agencies in response to the wave of immigrants who had settled in centralized cities. The extraordinary rise of living alone is a less publicly visible but equally dramatic transformation, and it will be impossible to manage it well without bold policy initiatives. In the United States, we’ve discussed “settling” as if it is exclusively a personal matter concerning our choice of a partner. In fact it is also a political issue, concerning what we expect from our public and private institutions, today and in the future.
The question of what we expect from the state and society extends to the domain of housing, and our answer will affect the future of all of us who might live alone someday. There’s little question that residential environments that are better designed for singleton societies could greatly reduce the most serious risks related to going solo. People who live alone do not need as much interior space as nuclear families. As Alva Myrdal recognized in the 1930s, young adults as well as the elderly are often willing to live in relatively small but functional apartments if they are located in buildings with well-designed public spaces and common facilities for eating, socializing, exercising, and the like. And when people choose to live in these places, they increase the available supply of family-size housing, bringing down the price for those who could use some extra room.
There are some buildings that are laid out this way in contemporary America, particularly high-end condominium developments for urban professionals and assisted living facilities for retirees. But these tend to be exclusive enclaves for the nation’s most affluent people, inaccessible to those who would benefit most from the social integration and high-quality services they offer. These places so thoroughly segregate—especially by age and by class—that they impoverish the experience of those fortunate enough to inhabit them. Better architectural designs for today’s singleton societies are therefore necessary but not sufficient. We also need new models for integrating people of different life stages and social positions. And of course we need more buildings, too.
This is the insight that helped Rosanne Haggerty and Common Ground develop SROs that are more successful than any others in New York City. Their best projects are not merely well crafted, with the kinds of handsome public spaces we associate with opulent hotels and prewar apartment buildings, they are also centrally located, professionally managed, and exceptionally diverse. The Times Square, for instance, houses struggling young actors and professionals as well as the retired elderly, the unemployed, and those who are coping with illness and substance abuse. It offers high-quality services for those who need them, and encourages those who don’t to lend a hand when they can. It’s not for everyone. But it’s far more attractive than the other alternatives for people who live alone and need low-cost housing in New York City.
Supportive housing facilities like those built by Common Ground are cost-effective and, as a number of scientific studies have shown, cost-saving ways to help people who are on their own and in trouble; they can even produce benefits for the communities in which they are located. Consider findings published in two top medical journals, Psychiatric Services and JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. One article, an analysis of homeless single adults with psychiatric and substance abuse disorders in San Francisco, reports, “Providing permanent supportive housing . . . reduced their use of costly hospital emergency department and inpatient services, which are publicly provided.” A second, which tracks chronically homeless singles with severe alcohol problems in Seattle, reports that those who were placed in a supportive housing complex—one that allows residents to drink in their rooms and offers a range of voluntary services—cut their consumption of alcohol, their encounters with the criminal justice system, and their use of expensive health services. The authors, researchers at the University of Washington, conclude that the savings from these changes—specifically, the reduction in overnight visits to hospitals, mental health and substance abuse clinics, jails, and shelters—more than offset the costs of the housing program: “At twelve months, the ninety-five housed individuals had reduced their total medical costs by more than $4 million, compared with the year prior to enrollment, or $42,964 per person per year, as compared with a cost of $13,440 per person per year to administer the housing program.”7
Surprisingly, these facilities can also contribute to local economic development. A study of supportive housing in New York City by NYU’s Furman Center for the Study of Real Estate and Urban Policy reports that properties within five hundred feet of a facility “show steady growth relative to other properties in the neighborhood in the years after supportive housing opens,” while those between five hundred and a thousand feet away decline initially “but then increase steadily, perhaps as the market realizes that fears about the supportive housing turned out to be wrong.”8
Supportive housing for solidly middle-class people produces a different set of benefits. Recall Stockholm’s Färdknäppen, which integrates people of different ages and life stages, and the city’s historic collective houses made for singletons living en masse. Alas, these kinds of facilities are even more uncommon than supportive housing programs for the formerly homeless. Even in Sweden, the supply of cooperative housing like Färdknäppen is not nearly large enough to meet the demand, and today the state housing agency lacks the budget it needs to replicate the model on a large scale. But the current economic crisis will not last forever, and when government agencies around the world regain their fiscal health they should be encouraged to develop housing that’s appropriate for the way we live now. These need not be exclusively public endeavors. After the housing bubble burst, real estate developers regained some incentive to collaborate on projects for which there is both market demand and a clear social need. And all of us have an interest in increasing the supply of housing that works for people who live alone, because whether or not we need it for ourselves, the odds are that someone we love—a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a child—will.
Of all the people who live alone, those who are old and infirm face the most difficult challenges, and finding affordable housing that connects them with sources of social support is one of them. Most elderly singletons haven’t been fortunate enough to live in a naturally occurring retirement community or to have aged in a place that continues to suit their needs. Those who could use more help usually find that high-quality assisted living facilities—those providing extensive personal and social services, a communal environment, and private apartments—are prohibitively expensive. (In some states, those who are eligible for Medicare and Medicaid are guaranteed funding for a spot in an assisted living facility. Yet they are typically given a bed in a shared room of a lower-quality institution, and they are not assured readmission if they are hospitalized or otherwise forced to leave.)9 It’s unlikely that many viable alternatives, let alone attractive ones, will come from for-profit corporations competing in the free market. In fact, what’s happened when for-profit corporations enter the nursing home business suggests that, left to their own devices, they might only make things worse.
The market’s failure to provide decent care or attractive housing options for older people who live alone has generated a serious social problem. Today we live longer than any generation before us, yet none of us can be certain of whether we will age on our own or with a companion, and few of us know whether we will be financially stable or insecure (as millions of retirees who planned on living off their investments before 2008 can attest). Wouldn’t everyone feel less anxious if they knew that their loved ones would have a place where they’d be comfortable and well cared for if they wound up old and alone someday? Wouldn’t we all feel more secure if we knew there were residential options for elderly seniors beyond the solitary private apartment or the lifeless nursing home?
One relatively simple way to begin addressing this problem involves increasing the public support for caregivers, including some of the 38 million Americans who provide uncompensated care to aging family members. I say simple because the U.S. Congress has already passed a bill that authorizes this very thing. The Lifespan Respite Care Act, which Congress passed in late 2006, created a modest pool of funds—about $290 million over five years—for states that were interested in building coordinated systems of community-based services for those who take care of people with special needs. (Although the term “respite” suggests otherwise, care for old adults who live alone but are not near death is covered by the legislation.) President George W. Bush signed the bill into law in December 2006, but neither he nor Congress funded it beyond a onetime $2.5 million appropriation. The Obama administration and the Democratic Congress reversed this decision, opting to fund it “on level” for 2010 and 2011, at $70 million and $95 million, respectively. The Obama administration also introduced a new, $102 million caregiver initiative designed to “ease the burden on families with elder care responsibilities and allow seniors to live in the community for as long as possible.”10
There’s no doubt that these programs will help generate better care and support for the millions of Americans who are aging alone. But there’s also no doubt that they will do little or nothing for the majority of people in this situation. The problem is not only that this level of funding is woefully inadequate for addressing the American care crisis, it’s also that these programs fail to address the more difficult (and expensive) problem: the shortage of housing where older people who live alone can come together and get support. Building the kinds of assisted living facilities that are now available only to the affluent elderly would require an enormous investment, and in some respects this is a terrible time to advocate for it. The economy is sluggish. The federal government faces record deficits. The cost of other benefits, for things like health and prescription drugs, is already high. But there are other reasons to believe that the timing isn’t too bad. After all, building new housing is a useful way to improve our physical infrastructure and create jobs, and managing an assisted living facility will also entail putting more social service providers to work. Moreover, today the baby boomers are beginning to experience the challenges of growing old, and millions of them are learning firsthand that aging alone is much easier when they have good support. If, as it’s often alleged, the baby boomers are a distinctively self-interested generation, they may well use their political clout to promote housing programs that benefit them first.11 But in this case they could be forgiven, maybe even appreciated, because by building better places for themselves today they’ll give younger Americans better choices tomorrow. We’ll need them, too, since so many of us will be living alone.
ULTIMATELY, the question is not how many of us live alone but how we live with the fact that so many people in so many societies do. It’s too early to say how any particular society will respond to either the problems or the opportunities generated by this extraordinary social transformation. After all, our experiment with going solo is still in its earliest stages, and we are just beginning to understand how it affects our own lives, as well as our families, communities, cities, and states.
In theory, the rise of living alone could lead to any number of outcomes, from the decline of community to a more socially active citizenry, from rampant isolation to a more robust public life. I began my exploration of the world’s first singleton societies with an eye for their most dangerous and disturbing features, including selfishness, loneliness, reclusiveness, and the horrors of getting sick or dying alone. I found some measure of all of these things in the cities where living alone has become common, and in the pages above I’ve suggested several ways that we could address them more effectively than we do today. On balance, however, I came away from my fieldwork convinced that the problems related to living alone do not and should not define the condition, because the great majority of those who go solo have a more rich and varied experience. Sometimes, indeed, they feel lonely, anxious, and uncertain about whether they would be happier in another arrangement. But so, too, do those who are married or live with others, and the widespread, often firsthand knowledge of this fact is just one of the reasons that, in my interviews, nearly everyone who lives alone said that they prefer it to their other available options.
Today there is an abundance of pop sociology that associates living alone with the rise of loneliness, the collapse of civil society, and the demise of the common good. I find this line of argument to be worse than misleading. It’s damaging, because its vague generalities distract us from the urgent challenge of calling attention to truly isolated people and to the places that most need help.
Moreover, when we treat living alone exclusively as a social problem, we cannot help but overlook the fact that its rapid emergence has also created new possibilities for our personal, romantic, and social lives. The rise of living alone has produced some significant social benefits, too. We have seen, for instance, that young and middle-age singletons have helped to revitalize the public life of cities, because they are more likely than those who live with others to spend time with friends and neighbors, to frequent bars, cafés, and restaurants, and to participate in informal social activities as well as in civic groups.12 We have seen that cultural acceptance of living alone has helped to liberate women from bad marriages and oppressive families, allowing them not only to reassert control of their personal lives but also to make a spirited return to civic life, where a world of other singletons will welcome them. We have seen that, despite fears that living alone may be environmentally unsustainable, solos tend to live in apartments rather than in big houses, and in relatively green cities rather than in auto-dependent suburbs. So there’s good reason to believe that people who live alone in cities actually consume less energy than they would if they coupled up and decamped to pursue a single-family home. And we have seen that living alone has given people a way to achieve restorative solitude as well as the freedom to engage in intensely social experiences. Surprisingly, it has given people the personal time and space that we sometimes need to make deep and meaningful connections—whether with another person, a community, a cause, or our selves.
COUNTLESS CULTURAL TRADITIONS, from the Stoics to the monastics to the transcendentalists, have emphasized the value of spending time in a place of one’s own. So, too, have modern social scientists, from Émile Durkheim, the French sociologist who coined the expression “cult of the individual,” to John Cacioppo, the University of Chicago psychologist who, in his innovative studies of loneliness, has noted that the lack of time for oneself “is one of the great complaints of men and women in today’s harried marriages” and that “those who feel lonely actually spend no more time alone than do those who feel more connected.”13
Durkheim argued that the private time that individuals spend on their own allows them to preserve energy and build an appetite for social participation. He recognized the allure of autonomy and independence, but he had a deep and abiding faith in the fundamental human need to come together, and he insisted that individuals, once liberated, would begin searching for something that transcended themselves. The Americans Emerson and Thoreau shared a similar vision. They argued that being alone, and sometimes living alone, was necessary not because solitude grants us freedom from the burden of intimate social ties, which are, in the end, a source of deep meaning and security, but because it allows us the freedom to cultivate our selves, develop original ideas, and make a productive return to the world.
People who live in the world’s busiest and most modern societies can easily forget that it’s vital to learn how to be alone. But finding solitude is particularly important for those of us who spend ever more of our time online and in social media. Today “friends” are everywhere, distractions are ubiquitous, and all too often our minds are exactly where we are not. Whether online or offline, we are so immersed in social networks that, as Connected authors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler put it, we have begun “to form a human superorganism.” In this state, they claim, “we necessarily lose some of our individuality.”14 This is precisely the kind of loss that would have worried the philosophers Emerson and Thoreau, the sociologists Durkheim and Simmel, or the psychologist Anthony Storr, each of whom, in his own distinctive way, viewed individuality as sacred because it enhances collective life.
Living alone is by no means the only way to reassert our individuality or to discover how and where and on what terms we want to engage the world. But an unprecedented number of people in our hypernetworked, ultra-active, 24/7 culture have discovered that, instead of leading to loneliness or isolation, having a place of one’s own gives us time and space for a productive retreat. Solitude, once we learn how to use it, does more than restore our personal energy; it also sparks new ideas about how we might better live together. No matter who we are or how we live at the moment, isn’t this our most pressing need?