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Lonely People
One cause of loneliness
Eleanor Rigby is a Beatles song that has the verses:
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?
It was written in 1966, and even then, there were lonely people. However, a case can be made that people are even more lonely now despite the advent of more ways for people to connect.
After all, back in the 1960s, many people didn’t even have access to telephones. Now, even in isolated parts of Africa or in poor villages in Asia, people have cell phones. We also have the internet with all of its varied communication tools.
Yet if you read fiction from the past — people were more integrated into their communities.
When I was a little girl in the 1970s, when my mother needed to go shopping, she could call a neighbor over to watch my baby brother. When I got home from school, I played with other children while she chatted with their mothers. They kept an eye on us. When she grew a bumper crop of tomatoes in her back yard, she gave some of them to neighbors.
I grew up in NYC, but my ex grew up in the suburbs in Iowa in the 1960s and he has also shared stories of childhood friends who lived close by and of…
