Seek You
A Journey through American Loneliness
by Kristen Radtke
Pantheon
Pantheon
2021
Seek You is graphic nonfiction about loneliness. Kristen Radtke says she was inspired by the widespread social isolation of the coronavirus pandemic. Isolation isn't quite the same as loneliness - it's possible to enjoy a certain amount of time alone, and possible to be in the presence of others and still experience loneliness due to a lack of connection. What Radtke has produced is partly a personal essay where she looks back on the times in her own life when she's felt loneliest, partly an intellectual history of the idea of loneliness, and partly a tour through a few ways people have responded to being alone.
Radtke's tour includes the invention of the laugh track, Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, the visual artist Yayoi Kusama, the rise of 'cuddle parties', and Casey Kasem's long distance dedications, among other topics. She talks about American gun culture, the way distrust of other people encourages gun ownership ... which then fuels more distrust, and the way mass shooters are invariably described as 'loners'. Cars are also isolating, especially compared to public transit, something Radtke feels viscerally when she moves from New York to Las Vegas.
At two different points in the book, Radtke talks about the research of psychologist Harry Harlowe, who is best known for his study showing that orphaned baby monkeys prefer a 'soft mother' made of cloth, who provides only comfort and nothing else, over a 'wire mother' made of metal but equipped with a milk bottle nipple. Many of Harlowe's experiments seem like animal torture, and he seems to me to have continued long past the point of learning anything new. These parts of the book were genuinely upsetting to read. Harlowe himself appears to have been a very lonely person. Radtke says that one benefit of Harlowe's research was to overturn the prevailing parenting advice at the time, which amounted to physical neglect in the name of preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
Two of the book's strongest sections are when Radtke talks about her father's teenage hobby as an amateur radio operator, and his late-night CQ searches for other operators, and later, when she talks about her own teen years on the early internet, maintaining a personal website and talking to strangers in chatrooms. Despite increasing concern about loneliness, it's not actually clear if more people are lonely now than in the past, or if it is simply more part of the public conversation. The similarity of Radtke's and her father's two activities serves as a kind of embedded metaphor for the universality of the human search for connection with others.
If Seek You has a throughline though, it's a growing pessimism about how people are harmed by loneliness and isolation, and how that harm becomes self-reinforcing as those people then find it harder to reconnect with others afterward. One of the findings of Harlowe's monkey research was that monkeys who had endured long isolation found it increasingly difficult to interact with others; they became stressed and overwhelmed by time spent with others, even to the point of self-harm. Beyond a certain length of isolation, they basically cannot rejoin the group; beyond another threshold, the other monkeys simply kill them.
Among humans, Radtke notes that lonely people often fear rejection more than they fear remaining isolated. This fear becomes self-fulfilling and self-defeating, as it taints every interaction with anxiety, making them awkward and uncomfortable, and can lead to people preemptively avoiding or rejecting others before they can be rejected. Loneliness is contagious with social networks - knowing a lonely person makes you feel lonelier yourself. And because lonely people withdraw from public and create solo spaces for themselves, they reduce the pool of potential people for others to meet or interact with and the shared space where such chance encounters might occur.
Seek You predates the much-discussed 'male loneliness crisis', and reading it, I thought about how people sometimes talk about men's very special and important pain as though women never feel lonely. The book also predates the rise of ChatGPT and Claude, although I suspect that Radtke must've felt more resigned than surprised when we started seeing news that lonely people were using chatbots as substitutes for human friends, that some people were even falling in love with chatbots, and that some people were developing 'AI psychosis' as their too-long chats overrode the sense of shared reality that comes from interacting with other people. It's easy to see links between Radtke's observations about the difficulty of connecting with others in "Seek You" with Alison Pugh's findings about the importance of it in The Last Human Job.
Radtke's tour includes the invention of the laugh track, Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, the visual artist Yayoi Kusama, the rise of 'cuddle parties', and Casey Kasem's long distance dedications, among other topics. She talks about American gun culture, the way distrust of other people encourages gun ownership ... which then fuels more distrust, and the way mass shooters are invariably described as 'loners'. Cars are also isolating, especially compared to public transit, something Radtke feels viscerally when she moves from New York to Las Vegas.
At two different points in the book, Radtke talks about the research of psychologist Harry Harlowe, who is best known for his study showing that orphaned baby monkeys prefer a 'soft mother' made of cloth, who provides only comfort and nothing else, over a 'wire mother' made of metal but equipped with a milk bottle nipple. Many of Harlowe's experiments seem like animal torture, and he seems to me to have continued long past the point of learning anything new. These parts of the book were genuinely upsetting to read. Harlowe himself appears to have been a very lonely person. Radtke says that one benefit of Harlowe's research was to overturn the prevailing parenting advice at the time, which amounted to physical neglect in the name of preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
Two of the book's strongest sections are when Radtke talks about her father's teenage hobby as an amateur radio operator, and his late-night CQ searches for other operators, and later, when she talks about her own teen years on the early internet, maintaining a personal website and talking to strangers in chatrooms. Despite increasing concern about loneliness, it's not actually clear if more people are lonely now than in the past, or if it is simply more part of the public conversation. The similarity of Radtke's and her father's two activities serves as a kind of embedded metaphor for the universality of the human search for connection with others.
If Seek You has a throughline though, it's a growing pessimism about how people are harmed by loneliness and isolation, and how that harm becomes self-reinforcing as those people then find it harder to reconnect with others afterward. One of the findings of Harlowe's monkey research was that monkeys who had endured long isolation found it increasingly difficult to interact with others; they became stressed and overwhelmed by time spent with others, even to the point of self-harm. Beyond a certain length of isolation, they basically cannot rejoin the group; beyond another threshold, the other monkeys simply kill them.
Among humans, Radtke notes that lonely people often fear rejection more than they fear remaining isolated. This fear becomes self-fulfilling and self-defeating, as it taints every interaction with anxiety, making them awkward and uncomfortable, and can lead to people preemptively avoiding or rejecting others before they can be rejected. Loneliness is contagious with social networks - knowing a lonely person makes you feel lonelier yourself. And because lonely people withdraw from public and create solo spaces for themselves, they reduce the pool of potential people for others to meet or interact with and the shared space where such chance encounters might occur.
Seek You predates the much-discussed 'male loneliness crisis', and reading it, I thought about how people sometimes talk about men's very special and important pain as though women never feel lonely. The book also predates the rise of ChatGPT and Claude, although I suspect that Radtke must've felt more resigned than surprised when we started seeing news that lonely people were using chatbots as substitutes for human friends, that some people were even falling in love with chatbots, and that some people were developing 'AI psychosis' as their too-long chats overrode the sense of shared reality that comes from interacting with other people. It's easy to see links between Radtke's observations about the difficulty of connecting with others in "Seek You" with Alison Pugh's findings about the importance of it in The Last Human Job.
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