Many members of Japan’s rapidly aging population live isolated, solitary lives in massive apartment communities filled with people.
loneliness
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Hundred
Beth Ann Fennelly suggests that to fully embrace the beauty of poetry, one must memorize it. Once committed to memory — a process that gets easier with practice — a poem forever becomes prophylactic against stressful days and lonely times: “We’ve all known solitary confinement. We’ve all inhabited isolation rooms. But the poems we know […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Loneliness of Donald Trump
“But the opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up. It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing.”
Posted inReading List
Adventures in Solitude: A Reading List
Being alone, free of distraction, can be both a writer’s dream and a nightmare.
Posted inFood, Nonfiction, Quotes
What it Means to be Korean in the West
While searching for a Korean radish to make her grandmother’s soup, Vivien Lee meditates on family and food.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Loneliness and Isolation: Necessary Ingredients of Creativity?
(Vincent) Van Gogh likely had a cadre of mental issues, none of which were suitably diagnosed while he was alive. Yet what seemed to weigh heaviest on him was the inevitability of his loneliness. According to his letters to Theo, he felt he had one of two options: content himself with loneliness or try to […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Shut-Ins and the Sharing Economy
With Alfred, you no longer have to open the door for the Instacart delivery: A worker comes into your apartment and stocks food in your fridge. You don’t hand off your dirty undies to a Washio messenger; Alfred puts the laundered undies in the drawer. This all happens by paying your Alfred $99 a month, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List
When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List
When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to […]