#164: Lonely City II

On urban alienation (part 2)

This week’s newsletter is the second of a two-part series on the loneliness of the big city. Read part one here.

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“Loneliness grows around them like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact no matter how badly contact is desired.” - Olivia Laing

In October 2024 I went to hear Olivia Laing speak at an event in Bozar. They were there to talk about their latest book, which was about gardening and its effect on them. The talk covered the book’s subject, but it was much more besides, being in the end an engaging conversation about their life, work and artistic practice. I enjoyed it, and when I went home I bought Laing’s The Lonely City, a book which I had been meaning to read for some time, and which the talk convinced me I should finally get around to.

As for the event itself, I approached it as I usually approach these kinds of social occasions - visiting more museums, other talks, and trips to the cinema. I arrived a quarter of an hour before the stated start time. I dawdled in the toilets until it was almost time to go into the hall, finding myself an end-of-row aisle seat. I spoke to no one, made eye contact with no one, and when it was over I picked up my hat and my scarf and my big winter coat and made immediately for the exit. Mission accomplished: I had successfully avoided any social interaction whatsoever.

I started reading the book - which covers Laing’s efforts to understand a profound period of loneliness she felt while living in New York City in their 30s - once it arrived, and shortly after Laing’s talk, in early January last year I began writing a newsletter entry about my own experiences of loneliness and alienation in Brussels. I never published it, never even finished it, and reading back through that draft now I can see why; some of the language - describing myself, for instance, as “desperately lonely” - comes across as somewhat hysterical, written as it was in literally the darkest, most miserable month of the year when in my memory it hardly spotted raining until the Spring. It would also, I can imagine, have been a hurtful thing for people close to me to have read.

Reconsidering what I wrote over a year ago, I can’t say that I am feeling desperately lonely right now, but I do recognise in those words the sense of a profound, ever-present experience of loneliness that has accompanied me for most of my life. What I appreciated so much about Laing’s writing on loneliness was that it spoke exactly to this feeling of alienation, of not quite experiencing the world as it should be - and other people have - lived. I found myself nodding along vigorously to passages like the following: “...the revelation of loneliness, the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn’t have what people were supposed to, and that this was down to some grave and no doubt externally unmistakeable failing on my part.”

I was always a solitary child; one of my clearer pre-teen memories is of my mother, fed up of seeing me on the couch in our living watching TV day after day of the summer holidays, chivvying me to go and knock on the door of some friends who lived down the road so I would be out of the house for a couple of hours. I would get my bike, and I would leave the house, and I would cycle around the neighbourhood, but I wouldn’t go and knock on anyone’s door, and I wouldn’t see if anyone was free to come out and play. I would just ride around until a period of time had passed that I thought would satisfy my mother, and then return home and tell her that no one was home. I am no longer quite as averse, nor as conniving, these days - I don’t think that would be appropriate for a married man with two kids who is about to turn 40 - but it would be a lie to say that those same social impulses have gone away completely. I still struggle with that “lack” that Laing so accurately describes, that feeling that you are somehow missing something that is so obviously innate in other people. It’s still with me in every unanswered phonecall, every drinks cancelled last minute, every unread email in my inbox and WhatsApp message left unresponded-too for weeks, until such time has passed that a response by my will not engender any social obligations on my part.

For readers among you who have never experienced this feeling, it may seem paradoxical to both feel lonely and simultaneously fail to grasp with the fervour of a thirsty man in the desert any and all opportunities the world presents to engage with it. I am sure there are people reading this now, furrowing their brows at the memory of their own efforts to arrange drinks that went nowhere, contact scorned, or the prolonged periods where it appears I just disappear for weeks on end. It’s important for me to say, as I already did above, that I do not feel as lonely as I wrote in January 2025, I have a loving family and good close friends. But that gnawing feeling that you’re doing it wrong never quite goes away.

That’s what prolonged periods of loneliness does to a person, as Laing rightly says: ““The lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents…Loneliness grows around them like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact no matter how badly contact is desired.” You try to make it happen, even to force it, only to find that the muscles you once used are atrophied, that you have let them atrophy, and now they won’t do what you want, and you become paranoid that everyone can see what you are struggling with. Loneliness compounds with social anxiety leading you - to quote Marx (Groucho, not Karl) - to not want to be part of a club that would have you as a member. I just can’t seem to get out of my own way, and rather than glorying in the solitude of Virgina Woolf’s “anonymous tramper”, my solo walks around Brussels are freighted with shame that I am not living life as it’s supposed to be led: among people.

This is what sets solitude apart from loneliness: the shame of that “lack” in you, the inability to engage with the world and with people as you should and others do, and the guilt that it is a failing of your own making. That’s why I can remember so vividly those lost summer days riding aimlessly around our housing estate waiting for the time to pass; the shame of it. Earlier this year I tagged along to post-reception drinks with some acquaintances, people who I know loosely. When we arrived at the venue I excused myself and went to the toilets. I picked up a beer at the bar on the way back and went towards the group I had come with. But seeing I knew no one other than the people with which I had come, I turned around, placed my beer on the counter, and walked back out of the bar without saying a word to anyone. I found a bench nearby and sat on it for some time, berating myself for my cowardice. Still that little, lonely, socially maladroit kid.

That there is a taboo around admitting to all of this is something that Laing acknowledges too, fearful that their confession of loneliness will “cause others to turn and flee”. But what is so invigorating about their writing is that, by the end of the book, they address this taboo head-on, arguing that loneliness is something that everyone experiences - some more intensely than others, that it is a collective, it is a city…there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame.” They embrace their loneliness as just another way to experience life, art, and living in the city. It’s a statement I’ve tried to remind myself on my lonely walks around Brussels, or when I’m out and about and feeling awkward in a crowd. I don’t want to end up as one of Joseph Roth’s “lonely people”, drowned by urban alienation and atomisation. And I don’t think, even in my saddest days, that I will. And maybe some day too I will, like Olivia Laing, embrace loneliness as just another part of who I am, and leave the shame of it behind.

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