Going Solo

by Eric Klinenberg

  People who live in the world’s busiest and most modern societies can easily forget that it’s vital to learn how to be alone. But finding solitude is particularly important for those of us who spend ever more of our time online and in social media. Today “friends” are everywhere, distractions are ubiquitous, and all too often our minds are exactly where we are not. Whether online or offline, we are so immersed in social networks that, as Connected authors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler put it, we have begun “to form a human superorganism.” In this state, they claim, “we necessarily lose some of our individuality.”14 This is precisely the kind of loss that would have worried the philosophers Emerson and Thoreau, the sociologists Durkheim and Simmel, or the psychologist Anthony Storr, each of whom, in his own distinctive way, viewed individuality as sacred because it enhances collective life.

  Living alone is by no means the only way to reassert our individuality or to discover how and where and on what terms we want to engage the world. But an unprecedented number of people in our hypernetworked, ultra-active, 24/7 culture have discovered that, instead of leading to loneliness or isolation, having a place of one’s own gives us time and space for a productive retreat. Solitude, once we learn how to use it, does more than restore our personal energy; it also sparks new ideas about how we might better live together. No matter who we are or how we live at the moment, isn’t this our most pressing need?

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  APPENDIX

  METHODS OF RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS

  THE PRIMARY SOURCES of original research that I use in this book are ethnographic observations and long-form, semistructured interviews with more than three hundred people who live alone. In addition, I draw on interviews with people who assist, interact with, or design for those who live alone, including social workers, family caregivers, community organizers, political officials, urban planners, architects, and scientists working on artificial intelligence.

  All of the ethnographic observations and interviews took place in major metropolitan areas, and it should be clear that this book is primarily about living alone in cities. Those who are interested in learning more about the experience of living alone in rural areas or small towns will need to look elsewhere, for although I too am curious about these issues my work does not allow me to contribute much to our knowledge about them. The majority of the research presented here took place in four boroughs of New York City (Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens), whose diversity allowed for a heterogeneous sample within the parameters of a great city. The fieldwork also extended to other metropolitan regions, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, and Stockholm. And the research included extensive reviews of the secondary literature on living alone in many other parts of the world, such as England, France, Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, and Brazil.

  I used different methods to recruit subjects from each of the following four groups of people who live alone: young adult professionals (between the ages of twenty-eight and forty); middle-age middle-class adults (ages forty to sixty-five); poor men in SROs (ages thirty to sixty-five); and the old (age sixty-five and above). For the young adults we used a targeted snowball sample, seeking out people from a broad range of backgrounds, neighborhoods, and professional fields (i.e., not simply interviewing a convenience sample of any singletons willing to speak with us, but rather asking subjects to identify other people who lived alone and were different from themselves). We also made special efforts to recruit African American women because of their relatively high rates of living alone. For the middle-age, middle-class adults we used three techniques: poster advertisements, snowballing, and Web-based solicitations. Again, for this group we made special efforts to recruit a diverse sample, by occupation, ethnicity, sex, and location. For the poor men in SROs we worked through referrals from social workers at a supportive housing organization in New York City. For the older subjects, we used referrals from the staff at senior centers and from social workers, as well as direct invitations at senior centers that allowed us to visit and explain our project. None of the subjects were paid to participate. And all but those who are already public figures were guaranteed anonymity, which is a common way to protect human subjects in social science research.

  I designed the interview questionnaires for each group of subjects and conducted many of the interviews personally. I also hired and trained a team of graduate students to help with the interviews and the recruitment of subjects. We consulted regularly, especially at the early stages of the project, as we fine-tuned the interview questions to address unexpected topics. The graduate student researchers wrote extensive field notes on their observations and identified their most common observations as well as their most surprising discoveries. These notes, and those that I recorded personally, were crucial to the analytic and interpretive process.

  As a sociologist, my aim is not to report the most sensational stories that I learned from studying the world of singletons, but to uncover the shared experiences and orientations that tell us something about the fundamental features of solo life. To distinguish between common and uncommon experiences, idiosyncratic and widely held views, I entered transcripts for 273 of my interviews into ATLAS.ti, a computer program that facilitates the coding and analysis of large qualitative data sets. I selected the individuals and the stories that appear in this book based on how well they expressed the most interesting and important findings from this analysis. The cost of this approach is that some intriguing personalities, extreme perspectives, and entertaining anecdotes are excluded from your consideration. The benefit is that the themes highlighted herein are general social phenomena, ones we need to understand as we come to grips with a world in which so many of us live alone.

  NOTES

  Introduction: the singleton society

  1. Genesis 2:18.

  2. Aristotle, Politics, Trevor J. Saunders, trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 11.

  3. Carel van Schaik, Among Orangutans: Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

  4. This quote is in Craig Haney and Mona Lynch, “Regulating Prisons of the Future: The Psychological Consequences of Solitary and Supermax Confinement.” New York University Review of Law and Social Change 23 (1997): 477–570.

  5. Craig Haney, “Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and ‘Supermax’ Confinement.” Crime & Delinquency 49, 1 (2003): 124–56.

  6. See Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

  7. George Peter Murdock, Social Structure (Oxford: Macmillan, 1949), pp. 2–3.

  8. See Pew Social Trends, “The Decline of Marriage and the Rise of New Families,” Washington, D.C., November 18, 2010.

  9. The data on group quarters are from Robert Ellickson, The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 40.

  10. On the durability of one-person households, see Toni Richards, Michael White, and Amy Ong Tsui, “Changing Living Arrangements: A Hazard Model of Transitions Among Household Types,” Demography 24, no. 1 (1987): 77–97. On their prevalence, see Euromonitor International, “Single Living: How Atomisation—The Rise of Singles and One-Person Households—Is Affecting Consumer Purchasing Habits,” 2008.

  11. The statistics on living alone are from the 2006–2008 American Community Survey Three-Year Estimates, published by the U.S. Census Bureau.

  12. See Harold Bloom, Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Chelsea House, 1985); David Potter, “American Individualism in the Twentieth Century,” in Ronald Gross and Paul Osterman (eds.), Individualism: Man in Modern Society (New York: Dell, 1971). On Franklin as the “quintessential American,” see Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, H
abits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 [1981]).

  13. See Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

  14. See Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008).

  15. Potter, “American Individualism in the Twentieth Century.”

  16. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 367.

  17. The international statistics on living alone come from varied sources and are produced with different methods, and I treat them as good estimates rather than as absolute facts. Here I draw primarily on two sources: Euromonitor International, “Single Living”; and Maria Iacovou and Alexandra Skew, “Household Structure in the EU,” in Anthony B. Atkinson and Eric Marlier, Income and Living Conditions in Europe (Luxembourg: Eurostat Statistical Books, 2010), p. 84. I use different sources for a few additional cities and nations. For Paris, see Philip Ogden and François Schnoebelen, “The Rise of the Small Household: Demographic Change and Household Structure in Paris,” Population, Space, and Place 11 (2005): 251–68. For Japan, see Richard Ronald and Yosuke Hirayama, “Home Alone: The Individualization of Young, Urban Japanese Singles,” Environment and Planning A 41, no. 12 (2009): 2836–54. The European nations with the lowest rates of living alone are war-torn Kosovo, where in 2003 just 2 percent of all households had one resident, and impoverished Albania, where in 2001 only 5 percent of all households had a single dweller. This is consistent with the observations of Yale law professor Robert Ellickson, who writes, “As a nation becomes more prosperous, its households generally shrink in size.” See Ellickson, The Household, p. 35. For Kosovo and Albania, see Sasha Tsenkova, Housing Policy Reforms in Post-Socialist Europe: Lost in Transition (Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag, 2009), p. 115.

  18. See Euromonitor International, “Single Living.”

  19. See Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial, 1962 [1942]). p. 157.

  20. The survey figures are reported in Frank Furstenberg Jr., Sheela Kennedy, Vonnie McLoyd, Rubén Rumbaut, and Richard Settersten Jr., “Growing Up Is Harder to Do,” Contexts 3, no. 3 (2004): 36.

  21. Andrew Cherlin. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 31.

  22. The “community of limited liability” concept comes from Morris Janowitz, The Community Press in an Urban Setting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). I should note that in the 2000s Americans were moving less often than they had in previous decades. See Claude Fischer, Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  23. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2002), p. xxii.

  24. See Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko, “The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 12139, 2006.

  25. See Mitra Toossi, “A Century of Change: The U.S. Labor Force, 1950–2000,” Monthly Labor Review (May 2002): 15–28. Although women’s compensation continues to lag behind men’s, a growing number of women do well enough to become financially independent and, in turn, domestically independent, too. As the international trends suggest, when women can live alone without enduring poverty, a great many of them will.

  26. Women’s economic independence is not the only reason for the increase in divorce. Legal reforms, most notably the no-fault divorce laws that became common during the 1970s, have allowed a dissatisfied spouse to terminate a marriage without accusing the partner of any wrongdoings and likely have given divorce rates a gentle nudge upward. See Andrew Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, third edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

  27. See Michael Rosenfeld, The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing American Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

  28. Telephone use rates are from the U.S. Census and reported in Inventors and Inventions (Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 2008).

  29. Ethan Watters, Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003).

  30. See Claude Fischer and Michael Hout, Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).

  31. On England, see Steven Iliffe et al.,“Are Elderly People Living Alone an At-Risk Group?” British Medical Journal 305 (1992): 1001–4. On mental health in the United States, see Robert Michael, Victor Fuchs, and Sharon Scott, “Changes in the Propensity to Live Alone: 1950–1976,” Demography 17, 1 (1980): 39–56. For the survey, see Emily Grundy and Michael Murphy, “Marital Status and Family Support for the Oldest-Old in Great Britain,” in Jean-Marie Robin et al. (eds.), Human Longevity, Individual Life Duration, and the Growth of the Oldest-Old Population, Volume 4 (New York: Springer, 2006), pp. 415–36.

  32. See Dora Costa, The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History, 1880–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

  33. See Ellickson, The Household, p. 39.

  34. According to one rigorous sociological study: “In general, persons living alone are not fundamentally more socially isolated than others in comparable marital situations, and they are generally more likely to be socially integrated outside the household.” See Duane Alwin, Philip Converse, and Steven Martin, “Living Arrangements and Social Integration.”

  35. See Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), pp. 2, 135. The article on social isolation is Michael McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew Brashears, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 353–75. The response is Claude Fischer, “The 2004 Finding of Shrunken Social Networks: An Artifact?” American Sociological Review 74 (2009): 657–69.

  36. John Cacioppo has done the most cutting-edge research on loneliness. For a synthesis, see John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: Norton, 2008).

  37. Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher. The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

  38. See Debra Umberson, Kristi Williams, Daniel Powers, Hui Liu, and Belinda Needham, “You Make Me Sick: Marital Quality and Health over the Life Course,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 47 (March 2006): 1–16.

  39. One great exception is the writing of Vivian Gornick, and in particular her arresting book Approaching Eye Level (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

  40. Jenna Appelbaum, Jill Conte, Jane Jones, Sarah Kaufman, Isadora Levy, Allison McKim, Elena Portacolone, Nerea Puzole, Jason Stanley, and I conducted interviews with people who live alone, as well as with service providers and family members who care for them. Throughout this book, I use phrases such as “my interviews” and “tells me” rather than “our interviews” or “tells us.” The reason is primarily stylistic, but in the social sciences it is not unusual for the principal investigator of a large-scale interview project to use this language.

  Chapter 1: Going Solo

  1. See Jemele Hill, “Kickball Carnival in Las Vegas,” ESPN.com. October 16, 2009; and “Nobody Lost Their Virginity at Hipster Kickball Prom,” Gawker, September 22, 2008.

  2. Rosenfeld, The Age of Independence, p. 6.

  3. Younger adults, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, are also not much more likely to live with their parents than they were several de
cades ago. In 1960, for instance, 52 percent of young men and 35 percent of young women lived at home, compared with 53 percent of men and 46 percent of women in 2005. The data on young adults living with parents are from the U.S. Census Bureau and are publicly available at www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0193723.html.

  4. See Rosenfeld, The Age of Independence; and Sharon Jayson, “‘Boomerang’ Generation Mostly Hype,” USA Today, March 14, 2007.

  5. The historic data on living alone come from Wendy Wang and Rich Morin, “Home for the Holidays . . . And Every Other Day,” Washington, D.C., Pew Research Center, November 24, 2009. See also Elizabeth Fussell and Frank Furstenberg Jr., “The Transition to Adulthood During the Twentieth Century,” in Richard Settersten Jr. et al. (eds.). On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 29–75.

  6. Peter Brown, 1971. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 82–83. On China, see Aat Vervoorn, Men of the Cliffs and Caves: The Development of the Chinese Eremitic Tradition to the End of the Han Dynasty (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1990), p. 3.

  7. For a rich account of the monastic tradition in several world cultures, see Isabel Colegate, A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002). And see Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York: Free Press, 1988).

  8. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Donald Levine (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971 [1903]).