A Year-End Reflection
Plus a recap of our café on loneliness, a contribution from co-moderator Sophia Whicher, suggested readings and resources, and more.
A Year-End Reflection
As the year draws to a close, we would like to send a heartfelt thanks to you, the Being and Becoming community, for your curiosity, openness and continued support. It is hard to believe that about a year ago, this community was just a Telegram group chat, a website wireframe, and a group of you who took a chance on an event that had a cliché 90s lyric as its title. A year later, we’ve held almost 30 different Curiosity Cafés on topics ranging from “Friendship” to “Death and the End of the World” to (most recently) “Loneliness.” (To say nothing of our lively WhatsApp group chat, functioning website, ad-free newsletter, and experimental event series).
Recently, we also held a week-long festival to celebrate World Philosophy Day. The festival featured daily evening lectures and workshops on topics including Philosophical Disagreement, Virtue, Phenomenology, and the Meaning(s) of Race and Culture. The week concluded with a social where our community members met and conversed over drinks and food, and connected through a facilitated workshop on Collaborative Dialogue. We are enormously grateful to our workshop leads, Ellie Anderson, David Peña-Guzman, Christopher Mastropietro, Taylor Barratt, David Suarez, William Paris, and our very own Alexandra Gustafson (in order of the workshops). And, of course, to those of you who came out to participate: thank you so much for your invaluable insights, for your curiosity and eagerness to learn from one another, and for helping make our dream of holding a philosophy festival come true.
We started with the mission of making philosophy accessible and inclusive, because we believe that its practice can help us build more meaningful, intentional, and connected lives. We still have a long way to go, and we strive to continue this work for years to come. Your continued participation, engagement, and feedback, whether in person or online, tell us we’re on the right track. While our programming will return early next year (with exciting new additions!), we encourage you to stay in touch with fellow community members and indulge your curiosity in our WhatsApp group chat over the winter break. Have a wonderful holiday season!
Yours in curiosity and gratitude,
The Being and Becoming Team
Featured Content:
Curiosity Café Recap: Loneliness
Community Survey
“Lonely with You: Loneliness as a Result of Hermeneutical Injustice” by Sophia Whicher
Toronto Events
Readings & Resources
Curiosity Café Recap: Loneliness
By Adrian Ma
With 2025 just around the corner, you have likely seen announcements from dictionaries, publishers, and newspapers revealing their 2024 “Word of the Year.” For Oxford University Press, it was “brain rot.” For The Economist, it was a word whose sound conveys the impression of downing a bag of popcorn without a drink: “kakistocracy” (“the rule of the worst”). Other words that were dignified with the title include “demure” (Dictionary.com), “manifest” (Cambridge Dictionary), and “polarization”—which, as Merriam-Webster wryly observes, “happens to be one idea that both sides of the political spectrum agree on.”
But for many people, there is another headline-making (though not award-winning) word that is likely to dominate the holiday season: loneliness. Over the past few years, many experts have raised alarms about an ongoing “crisis” of loneliness—although the extent of the problem and its uniqueness to contemporary society remain subjects of debate. The World Health Organization reports that “[p]eople lacking social connection face a higher risk of early death,” and that “[s]ocial isolation and loneliness are … linked to anxiety, depression, suicide, and dementia and can increase risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke.” A survey from 2021 revealed that more than one in 10 people in Canada aged 15 and older “always or often felt lonely,” while three in 10 said they “sometimes felt lonely.” Last year, the US Surgeon General called attention to the ongoing “epidemic” of “loneliness and isolation,” writing: “[W]e have an opportunity, and an obligation, to make the same investments in addressing social connection that we have made in addressing tobacco use, obesity, and the addiction crisis.” Britain and Japan even went so far as to appoint Ministers of Loneliness in 2018 and 2021, respectively.
Adding to these large-scale efforts, Being and Becoming, a once obscure non-profit organization that has quickly become a household name, organized last Tuesday a Curiosity Café on the subject of loneliness. The café was anything but lonely:
Our collaborative two-hour discussion, moderated by Sophia Whicher and yours truly, began as our cafés often do—with an appeal to personal experience. In groups of three to four, we took turns sharing our past experiences of loneliness and reflected on what our experiences had in common. Then, using our experiences as a starting point, we proceeded to examine loneliness on a conceptual level, asking:
Which of the conceptions of loneliness below resonates with your experiences of loneliness? Is there still something missing?
We know that social connection is important, and loneliness sucks. But we also crave alone time. What’s the difference between being lonely and being alone? What’s the difference between loneliness and solitude?
What does our capacity to be lonely say about who we are as individuals, and as a species?
Our discussion was supplemented by philosophical conceptions of loneliness from two (co-authored, as is only appropriate) papers. In the first, “Loneliness and the Emotional Experience of Absence,” Tom Roberts and Joel Krueger define loneliness as an “emotion of absence,” which is characterized by a desire for certain social goods, such as friendship and romance, and the belief that these goods are not available. The second paper, “Loneliness, Love, and the Limits of Language” by Ruth Rebecca Tietjen and Rick Anthony Furtak, offers a more multifaceted picture of loneliness, which the authors divide into three types: unfelt loneliness, existential loneliness, and loneliness in intimate relationships. These can be roughly summarized thus:
Unfelt loneliness occurs when someone doesn’t give themselves “room” to feel lonely. Consider someone who is so immersed in their role at work that they’ve kind of “become” their role—that is, they don’t “have a life” outside of work. This person might not “feel” lonely, because to feel lonely, or at least to know one is feeling lonely, one must acknowledge one’s existence as a self that’s separate from just this job.
Existential loneliness occurs when someone denies the possibility of forming intimate relationships with others. Consider someone who believes, perhaps due to experiences of dehumanization, loss, or abandonment, that the gap between themselves and other people is completely unbridgeable; social connection thus feels like a hopeless endeavour.
Loneliness in intimate relationships occurs when our relationships don’t fully satisfy our social needs to be understood and recognized. This happens due to failures in communication. Consider someone who feels really unseen or unheard in a close personal relationship. Perhaps their friend isn’t taking them seriously, or doesn’t have the lived experience or conceptual tools to properly understand an important aspect of who they are. This kind of loneliness emerges despite the presence of reciprocal interaction.
Both papers have a lot of interesting things to say about loneliness. But so did you. Here’s a taste:
What distinguishes loneliness from solitude is choice. Solitude is aloneness that is voluntarily chosen or at the very least affirmed by the person experiencing it.
Similarly, one of the features that distinguishes solitude from loneliness is the sense that I can terminate my aloneness at any time by reconnecting with other people. Loneliness, however, is defined by a sense that any such connection is unavailable or impossible.
Loneliness is precipitated by a kind of loss—the loss of social connection.
But if this is true, how do we explain feelings of loneliness caused by the absence of things we’ve never had?
Loneliness isn’t just a matter of having other people meet our needs; it also involves the need to be needed, to know that your efforts or your existence makes a difference.
We often feel lonely even when other people are around, because loneliness is a matter of being heard or seen, rather than mere physical presence. We want our words and actions to be taken seriously; we want to be able to relate to others and have others relate to us. Loneliness arises when our efforts at authentic communication or expression miss their mark—when they are met with blank stares or fly over heads like the comments featured in the subreddit r/woosh.
Loneliness is unpleasant enough; talking about how bad it is, and the social perception of it as a bad thing, can somehow make the experience even worse.
Perhaps the stigma of being lonely is part of what makes the experience so unpleasant.
Even “unfelt” loneliness, in Tietjen and Furtak’s sense, must manifest as a feeling from time to time. No matter how absorbed I may be in my work, my social role, or my personal projects, there will always be times when my individuality will resurface and loneliness will again rear its ugly head. I may not always be aware of, or consciously acknowledge, my loneliness, but on some level my loneliness must be felt.
Different parts of myself desire the company of different people; perhaps there is a part that wants to spend time with myself. Solitude becomes desirable when I’ve had too much of other people’s company; loneliness arises when I am tired of my own.
In the second half of our discussion, we shifted our focus from the nature and experience of loneliness to how we can or ought to respond to it, tackling questions that ranged from the personal to the political:
Is the antidote to loneliness simply more social interaction, or is it a particular kind of social interaction?
Is seeking other people’s company always the right response to loneliness? Consider bell hooks’s observation in All About Love: “We all long for loving community. It enhances life’s joy. But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone.” She draws on Henri Nouwen, who writes: “Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.”
Does the solution to loneliness sometimes lie within, in changes to our attitudes or beliefs about the social interactions or relationships we have? (Should we perhaps adopt less idealistic standards for social connection, or cultivate a greater willingness to be vulnerable?)
Are there any upsides to loneliness? Is loneliness always something we should get rid of? Can we ever get rid of loneliness entirely?
Insofar as you experience loneliness, what would need to change in your life to take away that loneliness? What changes are in your control? What changes rely on broader changes in the way our society functions?
Here’s what some of you had to say:
Loneliness is an opportunity for self-knowledge; it throws into relief the depths of my interpersonal attachments and the value I place on my relationships.
Loneliness is an inevitable feature of human life. Instead of running away from it, perhaps we can learn to embrace it. Doing so would help us become less dependent and more self-sufficient.
As with most things, loneliness in moderation isn’t a problem; most people will experience periods of loneliness throughout their lives, but this doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with them. Loneliness only becomes cause for concern when it is experienced in excess.
The antidote to loneliness is community, but a community is more than a collection of self-interested people. I can’t become a genuine member of a community if all I want is to heal my own wounds; I must also be motivated by a desire to give back, by a sincere concern for the wellbeing of others.
One of the contributing factors to loneliness is our widespread belief in the atomistic conception of the self, whereby society is composed of self-sufficient and self-interested individuals who are ultimately independent of one another. What this idea suggests is that relationships and dependencies are merely supplements to the core identity of each person—that they are, so to speak, nice little bonuses rather than essential aspects of who we are.
Loneliness arises from a perception of ourselves that unduly prioritizes the individualistic aspect of our nature. One potential response to loneliness, then, is to develop an appreciation of the countless ways in which we are not individualistic, in which we are and have always been dependent on other people. After all, no one is perfectly independent. I was raised by guardians and educated by teachers; I use devices I didn’t invent and travel on roads and sidewalks I didn’t build.
As unpleasant as the experience of loneliness may be, what is most concerning about loneliness are the things it may compel us to do. In our desperation to escape loneliness, we are liable to develop self-destructive habits or addictions, like drinking or scrolling through social media brain rot. We should, then, be mindful of where our loneliness is taking us and seek healthier interventions when we can—such as meditation.
Living in a capitalist system has introduced a transactional element into our personal relationships, in which we judge the value of our relationships by what we expect to receive from the other party. This transactional framing contributes to the loneliness problem by inhibiting the connections we form or are able to form. (One example of this may be the language of “high value individuals” that you often hear from online dating gurus).
Family structure also bears some responsibility for our loneliness. The dominance of the nuclear family as the ideal or default family structure has weakened connections between different generations, and between friends.
Loneliness is fed by certain social scripts that shape our perception of what it is normal or acceptable to externalize. Men, for example, tend to be socialized into believing that it is “unmanly” to express or talk about their feelings, leaving them with few outlets for their internal troubles. (Not to mention that their romantic partners, who are often the only people with whom they feel comfortable talking about their feelings, are unfairly burdened as a result.) These social scripts are deeply baked into our culture and systemically inculcated through countless channels (through societal expectations, cultural narratives, media representations, and so on), making them very hard to avoid or unlearn.
A big thank you to everyone who came out for our last Curiosity Café of the year: We hope the connections you’ve made in this community extend into the holiday season and beyond. We’ll be back in January—and we expect our absence to be felt. Yours will be, too.
Community Survey
For those who’ve attended our Curiosity Cafés, please consider taking our brief community survey. We are conducting this survey to gather feedback on our events, and it should only take a few minutes to complete. Your responses are completely anonymous and will be invaluable in helping us improve our offerings. Thank you in advance!
Lonely with You: Loneliness as a Result of Hermeneutical Injustice
By Sophia Whicher
If you’ve been coming to our cafés for a while, you might recall me bringing up “epistemic injustice” as an example of one of those fancy terms that we should define first before using it in a sentence. Well, I’m finally going to do that for you, and then I will attempt to demonstrate how a particular kind of epistemic injustice is connected to loneliness. Basically, I’m going to argue that loneliness due to failures of communication can result from our inability to make sense of our experiences to those we are close with, and in many cases, this is an instance of a particular kind of epistemic injustice.
Epistemic injustice is injustice that can be done to us as knowers—as beings who can generate, acquire, and disseminate knowledge. Hermeneutical injustice is a kind of epistemic injustice. It occurs when, due to an unjust exclusion from a knowledge community (like, say, academic scholarship, or mainstream media), someone is unable to render an experience intelligible, to themselves or to others (or both). It’s not that the sufferer of hermeneutical injustice has been excluded from participating in a knowledge community. It’s that others who share their experience have been historically (and perhaps also presently) excluded, so the concepts that exist to make sense of their experience aren’t part of accessible bodies of knowledge, or they haven’t been generated at all. So, for instance, let’s say I experience romantic attraction to multiple genders, but I’ve only been exposed to stories about romantic attraction between cis men and cis women because historically, queer experiences and identities have been excluded from mainstream bodies of knowledge. I have no concept of queerness in its many forms to draw from, and as a result of this, I can’t make sense of my own experience, or how that experience might fit into and together with my own identity. This is what I call self-directed hermeneutical injustice. Then there’s other-directed hermeneutical injustice. This occurs when we are able to render something intelligible to ourselves, but not to those around us. This can happen because the concept(s) we wish to draw on in communication are marginalized—they exist, and we’ve found them, but they exist in the margins, in the backends of tumblr and reddit, in non-mainstream media, in books that never made the syllabi of required courses. All in all, both kinds of hermeneutical injustice can leave us feeling a little crazy, for lack of a better term. Hermeneutical injustice can also, I think, leave us feeling lonely.
In our café last week, Adrian and I drew on Ruth Rebecca Tietjen and Rick Anthony Furtak’s paper, “Loneliness, Love, and the Limits of Language,” to aid our discussion of what loneliness is. This paper critiques simplistic conceptions of loneliness that, amongst other things, assume that the antidote to loneliness is simply more social interaction. Loneliness, Tietjen and Furtak argue, can occur even in our close relationships, due to failures in communication.
According to Tietjen and Furtak, our close relationships offer us “a chance to be understood [and supported] in who we are, what we care about, and what is distinctive about our point of view.” They also involve a desire for this kind of understanding and recognition—part of mutual love is the desire to be understood, affirmed, and supported in who we are. When we’re in a close relationship with someone and this desire is frustrated, we are left feeling lonely because “we do not appear as a self in the world.”
I don’t know about you, but this description of loneliness deeply resonates with me. There have been countless times I’ve felt lonely amongst friends who aren’t familiar with the concepts that are central to the way I make sense of my experiences in the world. “Femme”, “queer” in the bell-hooks-Tim-Dean sense, a definition of love expansive enough to include my experiences of it, “queer platonic intimacy”… I could go on. That these concepts aren’t floating around in our mainstream social imaginary for the people in my life to draw from makes it harder for me to feel seen and recognized in my close relationships. And notice how these concepts are all related to a part of my identity that’s marginalized—my queerness. Yeah. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. That these concepts aren’t present in the stories we’re told growing up, the textbooks we read, and the pop songs that play on the radio (etcetera) is a direct result of the marginalization and suppression of queer identities and experiences from our mainstream knowledge communities. Being unable to communicate certain facets of my queerness to my straight friends (to simplify this heavily) is an instance of hermeneutical injustice, and one of the harms of this hermeneutical injustice is that it leads me to feel lonely even when I’m with them, and lonely in a way that’s totally preventable.
Now, I’m queer, but I’m also a white, middle class, mostly able-bodied cis person, and to this extent, I experience a whole lot of privilege, including the privilege of being able to look to mainstream culture as a reference point for understanding my own experiences and communicating them to others. But I’ve watched as my friends whose intersecting identities are much more marginalized than mine experience profound loneliness in their social circles, because those around them lack a real understanding of some of the core parts of who they are. I bet that some of this is due to the limits of communication itself, which Tietjen and Furtak identify as another source of loneliness in our close relationships; there’s an extent to which experience transcends the bounds of communication, and perhaps this makes a certain kind of loneliness inevitable, maybe to a greater scale for people whose experiences are rarely shared by others in their spatio-temporal location. But it’s not all inevitable. We often hear talk of diversity-this and diversity-that, talk of the importance of “representation” in media and classrooms. Well, here’s one reason why representation is important: when we systemically exclude people with certain identity markers from our knowledge communities, when we censor talk of certain ways of existing in the world and being in relation to others, we contribute to profound feelings of loneliness on the part of those whose experiences we’re silencing.
Toronto Events
Chris’s Toronto Event Calendar
If you want more opportunities to connect, inquire and mingle with like-minded people, check out Chris’s calendar on Notion. Chris curates this calendar with events happening in Toronto. Events include thought-provoking lectures, group discussions, and workshops.
makeworld’s Calendar of Toronto Events
makeworld’s curated list of recurrent events in Toronto, which include tech meetups, lectures, unconventional comedy shows, and discussion-based events (like ours!).
Readings & Resources
Adrian’s Recommendations:
I have a few specific recommendations, followed by a very general one. I recommend both papers referenced in the recap (which were suggested to me by Sophia): “Loneliness and the Emotional Experience of Absence” by Tom Roberts and Joel Krueger, and “Loneliness, Love, and the Limits of Language” by Ruth Rebecca Tietjen and Rick Anthony Furtak. While preparing for this café, I also learned a great deal from Lars Svendsen’s study A Philosophy of Loneliness, which—uncharacteristically for a philosophy book—draws extensively from research in sociology, psychology, and neuroscience.
I’m also a big fan of the paintings of Edward Hopper, especially his evocative and melancholic portrayals of urban loneliness (I chose one of them, Room in New York, for the poster for this café).
Finally, when loneliness strikes, I often find solace in reading literature. Part of the value of reading great books comes from inhabiting worlds and perspectives very different from our own—but, also, from discovering how other people’s experiences are very much like our own. I think that to some degree, literature, and art more broadly, provides the rewards of interpersonal interaction while preserving the comforts and protections of solitude. As C.S. Lewis writes:
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
In other words—get started on that holiday reading list!
Sophia’s Recommendations:
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks. This book offers a powerful account of love and the importance of community. It tells us, over and over, that we need to love each other, in a real, hard, life-affirming way.
Life is Hard: How Philosophy can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya details various of life’s hardships, including loneliness, grief, injustice, and failure, and draws on philosophy as a way to help. The chapter in here on loneliness is part of what inspired our last café!
Featured Quote
Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.
- Samuel Beckett
Our mission is to present a diversity of perspectives and views. The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are solely those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Being and Becoming. Being and Becoming disclaims any responsibility for the content and opinions presented in the newsletter, as they are the exclusive responsibility of the respective authors. If you disagree with any of those presented herein, and you feel so inclined, we recommend reaching out to the original author and asking them how they came to hold that opinion. It’s a great conversation starter.