The Struggle of American Loneliness

This project aims to trace the cultural, historical, political, and economic roots of what in recent years has become called “American Loneliness”; a peculiar form of loneliness that seems inherent to the American nation. This project starts from Hannah Arendt’s conceptualisation of loneliness as set out in her seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) in order to examine the cause and effect of the loneliness epidemic that has been sweeping the US in recent years. The acceleration of loneliness in recent years is often accredited to social media—as is the rise of more extremist political positions—but this seems like an insufficient answer; or rather, an incomplete one.

Following a major tradition of social and cultural criticism, from the 1950s onwards that focuses on how the particularities of America’s post-war, postmodern neoliberal consumerist society of apparent unlimited abundance gave rise to an increase in (problematic) individualism, this project wants to trace loneliness in American cultural production in order to draw attention to the very specific and destructive character of “American Loneliness”. The starting point will be the revered Netflix show BoJack Horseman (2014), after which the project will work its way backwards through America’s cultural history all the way back to the American Transcendentalists—arguably, the founders of “American Loneliness”.

(Early research for this project was already met with accolades through the reception of the 2023 IAFOR Scholarship).