Are the Poor Lonelier Than the Rich?

The images of the lonely rich man and the poor who at least have each other are horribly worn cultural cliché.

And besides being well-worn, probably false, more loneliness likely to be found among the poor than the rich.

"How can that be?" one may wonder.

The plain and simple truth is that society is attentive to the problems of the haves--and brushes off the problems of the have-nots. ("Be grateful for what you have!" is ever the answer to the latter as the former are coddled after their every temper tantrum.) And so the loneliness of the rich, just like all the other problems of the rich, get infinitely more press.

But alongside this there is what leaves people lonely. In David Foster Wallace's meandering (and wildly overrated) but not wholly valueless essay "E Pluribus Unum" there is an insight here and there, with one that caught my eye his remark that "[l]onely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans."

Those costs are not the same for everyone.

When you have money and status and are sought after, when people show you deference because they cannot afford to show you offense, you are in a very different position to the person who lacks those things, whose company is not sought after, who no one has to treat well with the result that no one does treat them well, and the "emotional costs" of being around others are that much higher accordingly. When you feel safe and protected by your standing in the world, you are in a very different position than the one who is unprotected--who gets brutalized, and as a result find themselves warier of others generally, and is much more likely to have to repress themselves rather than speak freely, with all the alienations that go with that (the "emotional" economy of which Freud wrote strongly paralleling the monetary one).

Indeed, when we look at such realities as social isolation we tend to find that it is not the children of wealth and privilege who turn hikikomori, but the children of much more socioeconomically marginal families that do so. When we look at social retreat in less extreme ways than that--those who eschew relationships, marriage, starting a family, with all these mean for the potential of being with others in a society which leaves few alternatives for robust personal connections--there is a robust statistical correlation between income and involvement, validating not such stupid presumptions as that "Family men work harder" (as if hard work had anything to do with income!), but the fact that people are less likely to have a chance, let alone act on it, in the absence of the conditions that make it possible. And so on and so forth.

But, as one is reminded by the covers of the magazines that most people actually seem to read, celebrities who have everything else will whine about having no one, and people who have nothing will think "Those rich folk sure have it tough."