Loneliness: Canary in the Coalmine

In this reflection, Olivia Sagan situates her critical practice on loneliness in conversation with research on epistemic injustice.

Loneliness started getting a bad rap some time ago, accused of being the antithesis of happiness and labelled an epidemic, a public health issue and a lurking, silent killer. Two decades of research activity into this dark menace has linked loneliness to negative outcomes that run from depression to cardiovascular disease to premature death. Alarm bells clang about the rising rates of loneliness amongst the old, the young, and those in between. 

Meanwhile, governments scramble to develop policy and loneliness interventions. These appear to have dubious efficacy and in most cases pop a band aid over the deep gashes of a retreating welfare state which once provided amenities known to alleviate - if not circumvent - loneliness in the first place. I am not suggesting loneliness doesn’t exist. Given the multi-directional pressures of this quarter of the 21st century, however, my pitch is that the ‘loneliness pandemic’ is not about not having enough pals, but more a deeply discomposing existential ache: a heavy dose of Kierkegaardian anxiety, the dizziness of freedom, as we, free-floating fragmented ‘subjects’, try and make sense of multiple seismic changes to the Way Things Were. An uncertainty; a new malaise in the time of monsters, and one that we need to find new ways of negotiating. 

My main worry, meanwhile, is how alarmist discourses on loneliness may, via contagion, be nudging us to think ourselves into it. We know the stories we construct and hold on to about who and how we are become further enscripted into us, courtesy of our brain’s plasticity. In thinking ourselves into loneliness, succumbing to its vicious loop, we fall into another pathologized, medicalised, and individualised state of lack of agency. Such lack of agency and attendant anomie and torpor has alluring psychic and financial ramifications for Big Pharma, the burgeoning loneliness industry, and, as many commentators from Hannah Arendt on have grimly noted, political polarisation. 

Part of how we actually become lonely may be a feeling of not mattering - a deceptively trivial-sounding experience that has more than a bit to do with feeling unseen and unheard. An army of commentators have argued that the loss of trust in politics and a slide towards populism, a ‘thin-centred ideology’, are in part due to feeling overlooked and undervalued. At a time when it is apparently easier than ever to voice opinions, we are less likely to be heard, or to hear others. Third spaces, actual physical locations where people can convene, see, be seen, heard, matter - are in fast decline. Emerging accounts of people falling for the flattery of AI are telling – the “social sycophancy” of AI chatbots being an unanticipated offshoot of our hardwired need to be seen, recognised, and valued. 

Although not without its well-argued weaknesses, research on epistemic injustice has a role to play in constructing the uber-lonely subject in our sociopolitical moment. Testimonial injustice may indeed contribute to a sense of exclusion, thwarting the construction of a shared world: the very foundation Hannah Arendt saw as necessary for preventing loneliness. Working in tandem with hermeneutical injustice, epistemic loneliness is solidified through an inability to make one's own experiences intelligible even to oneself. 

When testimony and knowledge are discredited, we cannot establish the ‘web of human relationships’ that Arendt identified as constituting the realm of human affairs. The lonely person, like the epistemically marginalised, speaks into a void where our words cannot build shared reality, a form of ‘epistemic death’ where one's capacity to know and be known is fundamentally compromised. 

On the upside, this ‘loneliness crisis’ may help inspire us into a re-reckoning: about the essentially lonely business of being human at a particular moment of dehumanisation, which, even if we don’t fully endorse an ecological and spiritual collapse-ridden vision of, we can surely recognise. And about the need for moral transformation and overdue revisiting of human kindness. The kindness in that micro-ethic moment when we look at another human being and see them, and they speak to us and we listen and we disagree with them and we still listen. Not with epistemic justice, but with epistemic humility.

To know more: The ontological dislocation of loneliness. 

Reidpath, D. D. (2025). Decolonising epistemic injustice in global health. SocArxiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/s2e8q_v1

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.

Medina, J. (2013). The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. Oxford University Press.

Professor Sagan is Director of the Centre for Applied Social Sciences at Queen Margaret University Edinburgh, a chartered psychologist and former psychodynamic counsellor with 20 years’ experience of working with adults with long term mental health difficulties. Taking a critical perspective of the biomedical model of human distress, Olivia’s phenomenological research foregrounds explorations of autonomous strategies that people develop through which they confront, negotiate and make meaning of their conditions and experiences. Her work thus explores the resilience and creativity of the ‘ill’ – in the face of discrimination, stigma, isolation and structural inequality.

Olivia Sagan