Three books about loneliness and isolation, ‘a modern epidemic’
- This One Wild and Precious Life, by Sarah Wilson, looks at ‘moral loneliness’, the severing of the ‘supply cord to connection, caring and doing the right thing by each other and the planet’
- A Biography of Loneliness, by Fay Bound Alberti, studies the ‘modern epidemic’ of searching for a soulmate while audiobook The Power of Ritual, by Casper ter Kuile, explains how the non-religious can create communities
This One Wild and Precious Life, by Sarah Wilson, Pan Macmillan Australia
The uplifting title of this volume borrows from American poet Mary Oliver’s The Summer Day, which asks: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” But it is the book’s working title, “Wake the F**k Up”, that relays more immediately Sarah Wilson’s aims and feelings about certain issues, climate change, mindless consumption and political polarisation among them. Loneliness is inextricably linked.
In a conversational style honed from years of blogging, the author introduces readers to new and old thinking on the subject and points to what sociologists and psychologists term “moral loneliness”.
Also known as ethical loneliness (variously defined by de Balzac, Nietzsche, Sartre), the emotion, Wilson says, can be compared to the severing of the “supply cord to connection, caring and doing the right thing by each other and the planet”.
The Lonely Century: tackling the modern-day scourge of isolation
Because of seemingly never-ending negative news, she argues, we have shut down, able only to watch as we “disconnect from our own value systems”.
