The twenty-first century ideal of a self-sufficient, John Wayne-style tough guy—the loner as hero—was expressed nicely in a 1961 song by Dion and the Belmonts called The Wanderer.
As an 18-year-old in the sixties, I related to the line hop right into that car of mine and ride round the world—that’s what I wanted to do. But the song also confused me. I could not understand how anyone could tolerate continually moving from one place to another every time he got an itch. And I could not fathom finding a relationship only to run away from it. Though the appeal of travel and discovery called to me, my real plan was to not get away. To me, relationships were more important than wandering.
Wanderlust is part of the development story of the USA, and the Industrial Revolution amplified that desire into a fantasy of confidence, strength, and, above all, independence.
Wanderlust and the automobile were a powerful combination. A book review by Adam Gopnik in an issue of The New Yorker offers some historical context for this idea. “Public transportation was the self-evident bedrock of working-class life. Yet it was also in the mid-fifties that the hipsters, beatniks, and rebels feverishly celebrated the car and the burst of autonomy, even anarchy, it offered to postwar life. In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the car was the vehicle of liberty for the bohemian kids of those working-class Brooklynites.”
It’s ironic though, because if you take a closer look, being a loner is not really a choice that is made by the individual alone: the ability to thrive “alone” in the USA is dependent upon the cultural and social environments we have been exposed to, including those created by the industrial and information revolutions. This is true both in terms of the material resources required to be “alone” within a society, and for the specific mindset that leads one to crave such a state of being.
Historian Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, has something to say about this, and it’s worth repeating two paragraphs.
“The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals.’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.”
“But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities.”
Harari is stating a de facto agreement with Gopnik, and here’s the fine print: we humans got carried away by our enthusiastic embrace of technology, and its assorted cultural outcomes, to the extent that some manufactured functions have now become a critical component of social engagement. We have learned to trade—confuse?—machine-enabled virtual contact with in-person relationships.
These virtual, at-a-distance and siloed interactions, however, are no substitute for a personal, comprehensive social bond, which makes them dissatisfying. The ideal of the lone wanderer becomes one who has learned to “balance” their virtual social life, and the resulting frustration and angst, by embracing the idea that it’s okay to be alone. We have adopted a social philosophy that makes a lone existence more palatable.
The philosophy goes something like this: being alone in the world is what we are anyway; in the end, you will die alone so get used to it. Life faced alone can be an adventure. And, when alone, we’re free; there is no one to be accountable to. Elements of this philosophy may be true—being alone can be rejuvenating, and attention to our individual needs is necessary—but feeling isolated, with loneliness as a steady companion, can be painful. This pain hurts the self, as well as the community it is a part of.