I first had the idea of writing a book about loneliness in 2012. I was 35 and had just moved to New York City when I became lost in a labyrinth of isolation and misery. A love affair had ended abruptly while I was still sky-high with expectation, buoyant with relief that I was finally entering settled coupledom. To have failed in this transition, to have been rejected and left alone, filled me with a shame that felt literally unspeakable.

So there I was: alone in the city, an exile condemned to watch the world go by. It was a humiliating and very frightening feeling. The pain was intensified, as a broken leg or even a broken heart would not have been, by the fact that my loneliness felt inadmissible, a thing that could not be said for fear of repelling other people. This was the most alarming aspect of the experience, in that the need for concealment further entrenched the isolation, so that loneliness grew ever more inescapable, a fortress of solitude whose bulwarks and ramparts would not stop growing.

But as soon as I realised that loneliness functioned in this strange, accretive way, it became weirdly interesting to me. What was it, this emotion that felt so radioactive, so shameful it could not be acknowledged? What did it look like, what were its attributes? Were other people also experiencing it, as silently as me? If as a person I was basically desperate, the writer in me was starting to realise that I had blundered into unmapped territory.

The simplest definition of loneliness is a state of longing for more connection and intimacy than you have. It is not the same as solitude, which can be pleasant and satisfying, and nor does it require total physical isolation. You can be lonely at a party; lonely in a marriage. The sensation is acutely painful, and brings with it profound physical consequences. Loneliness raises blood pressure, accelerates ageing and cognitive decline. It causes insomnia, weakens the immune system and predicts increased morbidity and mortality. To put this in ordinary language, it can prove fatal.

As to whether other people experienced it, I quickly realised that the lonely city was a very populated space indeed. I conducted my investigations by way of visual artists, among them David Wojnarowicz, Andy Warhol and Henry Darger. While we assume loneliness is the result of personal failure, a lack of attractiveness in some way, what I discovered by way of examining their lives is that loneliness is often a consequence of larger social forces of stigma and exclusion, which serve to isolate vulnerable populations of many kinds. Being poor, an immigrant, ill, transgender, a person of colour or of divergent sexuality: these were the drivers of isolation. If The Lonely City had a takeaway message, it was that loneliness is political and should never be a source of shame.

At least some of that shame has fallen away since my book was first published in 2016. Loneliness is no longer a taboo state. It is widely discussed, both as an emotional experience akin to depression or anxiety, and as a social problem, the subject of academic research and government policy. It is even regarded as a global public health concern. The 2024 Health Survey for England reported that 22% of the adult population felt lonely at least some of the time, with 6% – around 4 million people – feeling lonely often or always, while the 2025 World Health Organization report on social connection found that one in six people around the globe are lonely.

Though Theresa May appointed the world’s first minister for loneliness in 2018, I suspect the diminished stigma is in large part a consequence of the mass encounter with loneliness that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, affecting even people previously inoculated by a wealth of social connections. According to the British Red Cross, 41% of people reported feeling lonelier during the pandemic.

Even the lonely have a tendency to believe that loneliness is their own fault, a product of something essentially dislikable in their own being. It is hard, when suffering something so culturally despised, not to blame oneself. But loneliness is often contingent on circumstances such as new motherhood, house moves, loss or bereavement. The lockdowns served as a global demonstration of this essential randomness, confronting many previously socially secure people with evidence that life can change, ushering in a frightening isolation.

But by far the greatest change in loneliness over the past decade is to do with the internet. Social media has weaponised loneliness, manipulating it in ways I could not have imagined 10 years ago. During my loneliest times, the internet was a source of solace to an extent that I find flabbergasting now. Twitter in particular was a place of contact and community, not the trolling and death threats that characterise X under Elon Musk’s ownership.Although I was sceptical about tech’s capacity to alleviate isolation, I did not foresee how social media would facilitate the rise of the far right, inaugurating a new era of violent exclusion, in which the right to belong is perpetually being rescinded. Nor did I suspect the role that loneliness would play in this process – though it doesn’t surprise me that loneliness is also among the consequences of this ugly new landscape of hatred and division..

Reports on the “loneliness epidemic” have long discussed the alienating and atomising effect that our migration online has had on the public realm. While 10 years ago the focus was on the loss of physical togetherness in favour of screens, attention has now shifted to the powerful algorithms that herd us into digital pens, information silos that mean people inhabit divergent and increasingly extreme realities, with distorting effects on our shared civic society.

Loneliness isn’t just a consequence of an ever more digital world. It is also an exploitable vulnerability that lies behind much of the violent extremism that proliferates online. As Hannah Arendt puts it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “loneliness is the common ground of terror”. The process by which it curdles into rage and a desire for retribution does not happen in a vacuum.

Far-right groups prey on loneliness, using the feelings of being left behind, isolated, disregarded and ignored as a recruitment tool, and offering potent narratives that stoke grievances and displace vulnerability on to other bodies that can be hated and attacked. Even Tommy Robinson’s outspokenly racist and Islamophobic Unite the Kingdom rallies promise to “strengthen community bonds” and “bring people together regardless of background, belief or circumstance”.

One of the many spaces in which this process occurs is the manosphere. The mass murderer Elliot Rodger, an “incel” and self-described “lonely virgin”, explicitly blamed loneliness for his actions in his misogynistic manifesto My Twisted World, describing the 2014 Isla Vista attack as an act of retribution against those who had rejected him. As his manifesto demonstrates, the manosphere attracts the lonely by offering a compelling ideology that reframes personal rejection and isolation as deliberate and systematic exclusion, providing a ready-made enemy to blame in the form of women. Like many far-right movements, the language is of grievance and entitlement. While no cure is offered apart from the violent punishment of those who refuse the incel’s self-proclaimed right to sex, there is a sense of belonging and meaning, however warped.

These ideas have filtered into the mainstream by way of influencers like Andrew Tate, who promote toxic masculinity as a solution to loneliness in a cartoonish way that particularly appeals to boys and young men. The problem with this supposed cure can be seen by way of Tate’s recent absurd assertion on X: “If you’re a straight man with a girlfriend in 2025, you’re gay.” In promoting such totalising levels of hatred and suspicion of women, toxic masculinity actually entrenches loneliness, shutting down the vulnerability and empathy that are the prerequisites of love and intimacy; even friendship.

If big tech has generated alarming new forms of loneliness, it also promises new solutions. AI chatbots and avatars such as MyAI, Replika and Gylvessa are aggressively marketed as cures for isolation: endlessly flattering replacements for human friends and lovers. Hyper-realistic AI girlfriends with names like DreamGF, Candy, and Grok’s “Lolita-style” Ani are perpetually available and compliant, with no needs or demands of their own. While these simulacra of relationships might provide comfort and consolation, they again risk entrenching loneliness, this time by deskilling the user in the two-way demands of intimacy, reducing their tolerance for the necessary give-and-take, the hard work and potential disappointment incumbent upon any human relationship.

This might be a surprising thing to say, but I don’t think a romantic partner is necessarily the answer to loneliness anyway. I was determined that The Lonely City wouldn’t end with me solving the “problem” of loneliness by meeting someone and thus gaining my passport out of unhappiness. If loneliness is political, a consequence of stigma and exclusion, then the solution is not a partner, be it human or AI. Instead, what’s needed is a solidarity of difference. We make the world less lonely by refusing stigma. We do not defeat it by stigmatising others. The real lesson of loneliness is one of collective vulnerability and shared obligations of care.

One of the most interesting findings of the 2024 Health Survey for England was that loneliness shows a strong correlation with area deprivation. The practical solutions put forward by bodies such as the Red Cross, the Campaign to End Loneliness and the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness focus not on dating or friendship so much as community assets such as transport, green space, social centres and activities.

These are places where people can experience what sociologists call “weak ties”, a sense of being connected and visible, a person who matters inside a sustaining community. But these spaces and resources – from mother and baby groups, parks and libraries to rural bus routes, youth clubs and surgeries – have been decimated by austerity and years of systematic underfunding.

It’s no coincidence that the areas of the country experiencing the highest levels of loneliness are also the ones where the far right is gaining in popularity. Over the past few years, I’ve come to think of loneliness as the key to our turbulent politics, the root cause that needs to be addressed if we are to avoid a growing wave of violence and mistrust. Focusing on it as an underlying wound is a way to sidestep the relentless polarisation of issue-based positions. And if loneliness is best treated by repairing the tears in the social fabric, then that work might be one of the most powerful tools we have for resisting the far right.