The Loneliness Nobody Photographs

There is a particular kind of loneliness that completely misses the evening news, mostly because it lacks the good decency to produce any camera-ready rubble. It is not the loneliness of a refugee camp or a grand, prize-winning exile, both of which possess the distinct advantage of geographical coordinates. You can point a camera at those places. You can call them tragedies and feel quite bad about them.

The loneliness I am thinking of has no coordinates at all. It simply sets up shop in ordinary bedrooms, inside ordinary towns, right here in the wealthiest, loudest, most relentlessly self-congratulatory nation on the face of the earth. And having seen things in other parts of this world that would make America's current culture wars look like a mild disagreement over living room curtains, I can tell you this quiet brand of misery is much harder to cure. It offers no convenient villain. There is no hostile army to withdraw, no treaty to sign, no villain to hang in effigy. It just sits there. And the country, being busy with other things, mostly looks away.

America's grand founding promise was individual liberty, and it delivered on that promise spectacularly. What the founders forgot to mention, however, was the rather large shadow that liberty casts. The freedom to be left entirely alone is a double-edged sword. As it turns out, nobody is required to include you. Nobody is under any legal obligation to notice you are breathing. Community, in the great American arrangement, is strictly optional—a luxury item you must either earn, stumble into, or purchase outright.

And so, a truly remarkable number of people fall. Not into mass graves, which would at least make the papers, but into the perfectly neat, completely undramatic gap between one human life and all the others. They are surrounded by roughly 330 million people who have collectively, and without any malice, simply opted out of the whole arrangement.

In most of the societies I used to report from, community wasn't an optional lifestyle choice. It was structural, woven tightly into the fabric of daily obligation, kinship, and the baseline understanding of what human beings owed to one another. The cruelties I witnessed in those places were almost always state-sponsored cruelties—organized, purposeful, and monstrously large. But underneath all that grand monstrousness, there was usually—not always, but usually—a stubborn social tissue that reconstituted itself the very second the violence passed. People actually returned to each other, mostly because there was still an "each other" left to return to.

In America, of course, the violence is much quieter, the social tissue is paper-thin, and the things we lose are terribly hard to name.

Consider, if you will, what it means to move through a civilization that has collectively decided your very existence is a political issue. Not a life, mind you. Not a real human person with a messy history, a collection of harmless curiosities, a specific preference for how they take their morning coffee, or a capacity for grand wonder and daily dullness. No, you are a position. You are something to be stubbornly held or furiously opposed. You are a set of culture war coordinates, assigned to you entirely without your consent, defended or attacked by people who have never once paused to wonder what it costs a person to simply get through a Tuesday.

There are entire groups of citizens for whom this is not an academic exercise. For them, the simple act of existing in public—of trying to make a friend, of reaching out to another human being with the most basic request imaginable—comes pre-loaded with a grim piece of knowledge. They know a significant number of their countrymen consider them a problem to be solved, a debate to be won, or a minor inconvenience in a grand political project.

And so, the request gets very small indeed. Not acceptance, necessarily. Not a parade. Just: Could you possibly be kind? Could you manage to be curious rather than entirely decided? Could you talk to me like a person instead of a talking point?

That this needs to be asked at all—carefully, with an apology already polished for the people who will inevitably refuse—is not a footnote to the American story. It is the whole damn book.

I have spent time in places where the machinery of dehumanization was perfectly explicit. It had a name, a uniform, and a neatly typed policy document. Those places were terrible, to be sure. But in their terribleness, they had the advantage of being legible. The enemy was right there. The transgression could be named. History, you felt, would eventually arrive with a verdict and perhaps a few handcuffs.

What is much harder to indict is a culture that dehumanizes its citizens through pure indifference. It doesn't tell you that you don't belong here—that would at least be a statement. It says absolutely nothing at all. It is the slow, heavy experience of being entirely present and completely unseen. You exist in a country that prizes freedom so highly it has quietly absolved itself of any obligation to actually show up for the people that freedom was supposed to serve.

The loneliness this produces is entirely real, it is everywhere, and it looks terrible on camera. There are no images. No coordinates. Just ordinary people sitting in ordinary rooms, wondering why the distance between themselves and everyone else feels so much wider than the maps say it should.

Chickenlist exists because some of us think the opt-out has gone on quite long enough. The things that actually connect people—curiosity, openness, the bizarre willingness to sit with a stranger and say, "Tell me something I don't know"—are not complicated. They are just exceedingly rare. And rarity, in this particular case, is not a natural disaster. It is a choice our culture keeps making, over and over, while stubbornly refusing to look in the mirror.

We are not offering a solution. God help us if we tried. We are simply offering a room. A small, unhurried room where the requirement is no more sophisticated than this: be a person, and find another one.

Some people have been waiting a very long time for a room like that to exist.

The door is open.