>> Amy Draves: Good afternoon. My name is Amy Draves and I'm here to introduce Eric Klinenberg
who is joining us as part of the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. Eric is here today to discuss
his book, Going Solo, the Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. In 1950 Americans
who lived alone made up only 9% of households. In 2011 this percentage has more than tripled.
Contrary to the common assumption that living alone is lonely, those who live alone are socially active
specifically engaged often more so than their married counterparts. Eric Klinenberg is a professor of
sociology at New York University. His research and stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, the New York
Times Magazine and on This American Life. He is also the author of Heatwave and Fighting for Air.
Today's cover article in Time Magazine listed Going Solo as the first of ten ideas that are changing your
life. Please join me in giving him a very warm welcome. [applause].
>> Eric Klinenberg: Thank you. Thank you for being here. It's really nice to be at Microsoft and I'm
looking forward to the conversation today. I want to talk for about 40 minutes or so about the book,
and I thought it would be nice to start by showing you the cover image. Obviously, I have a commercial,
self promotional motivation to do that at all times, but that is not the real reason I have the cover up on
the screen here. I want to call your attention to two things on the cover because it turns out it was a
hard thing to come up with. The first is the title for the book, Going Solo. It took a long time to figure
out that that was the right title for the book. When the project started the title for it was Alone in
America. And if you think about it that is a title that takes you emotionally to a very different place than
Going Solo. We can talk more about where it takes you, but Alone in America and Going Solo are two
really different ideas. And the next thing is I want to look at the birds and the birdhouses, because they
also take you to a place that is different than the icons and images that we had originally thought of
putting on the cover and I'm going to show you them in just a minute. Just for now, kind of take this in
and think about these concepts. What I want to do over 40 minutes today is persuade you of two
things. The first is this one. And I am not going to read those words you because I am trusting that this
is a literate crowd and my number one pet peeve of going to a talk is when someone reads the slides.
So this is the first idea that I want you to believe at the end of the 40 minutes that we spend together,
the biggest social change. And the next is this one. It doesn't mean what we think it does. Now if you
think about the kind of icons that are readily available to someone who is going to write a book called
alone in America, this is one of the obvious ones that comes to mind. The kind of Lone Ranger cowboy
figure and it would've been an appropriate reimaged 60 years ago, because it turns out that 1950 living
alone was most prevalent in the U.S. in the big open Western states, places like Alaska and Nevada and
Wyoming. People that lived alone were typically migrant workingmen. They were on the road to a job
and on the road to some other kind of life. They would ultimately settle down with someone, but this
kind of idea of the Lone Ranger is one that we hear a lot about and have seen often in American life. But
it is not the one that is appropriate for the story that I'm going to tell you today. Now I'm a city guy. I
live in Manhattan and I trust that most of you are city kinds of people too, and so you probably can
relate to this image even more than the first one. When you talk about being alone in America, it's hard
not to think about the Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks. This 1942 image has a lot of interesting
stuff going on in the image. I will point out just a few of them. We've got our guy here whose back is
towards us. He is obviously alone in this diner. We conventionally project the feeling of loneliness or
something melancholy onto him. It's interesting though. We don't see his face, so we don't really know
what he's up to or how he is feeling, and that is interesting, this active projection. And I want to suggest
something that we do a lot when this issue is the one that we are discussing. It's notable too that the
people across from him are together, connected with each other. It looks like they've gone out on a
date. They are dressed up a little bit. But if you share my reading of the painting, you might also think
that, they don't look like they're having the best evening. [laughter]. It's not clear that there's been a
love connection here. Something has gone wrong. They are little bit alone together, if you think about
it. And I think what really kind of seals the deal here is that the diner that they are in turns out to have
no door, no windows that can open. It is a suffocating environment. They look to be trapped and that
gives you this feeling of anxiety maybe looking at it, that this is really what it means to be alone in a city.
That's not the idea that I want to argue today either. It makes some sense, however, that people
thought about living alone that way 60 or 70 years ago, because if you look closely at how we lived in
the 1950, a couple of things pop out. The first is that almost every adult was married. Only 22% of
American adults were single in 1950, and the other is that living alone was quite a rare experience;
fewer than 9% of all American households were one-person households in 1950. So in a way it really
was strange and peculiar. And that's why in 1957, when a group of psychologists at the University of
Michigan surveyed a nationally representative sample of American adults about their attitudes towards
people who wanted to live alone, who wanted to be single, they found that 80% believed that single
people who wanted to stay that way were sick, neurotic, or my favorite, immoral. Those are pretty
strong views from a lot of people. Lest I stand before you as a sociologist, you know, representing a
purely enlightened position that's not so judgmental and it doesn't come to its work with some
predispositions and a history of how to frame these experiences, let me tell you that the best-selling
books in the history of American sociology are books that have titles like these. And maybe some of you
recognize these books from your college syllabi. The Lonely Crowd, The Fall of Public Man, the Pursuit
of Loneliness. These are books that sell hundreds of thousands and in some cases The Lonely Crowd, for
instance over a million copies and speak to some fundamental concern in American popular culture.
These are older, more classic books. But if you followed recent debates about the state of civic life in
the United States or in the case of the second book here Alone Together, our relationship to devices,
you will note a similar kind of theme, you probably remember the Bowling Alone idea and if you look at
the lonely roller on the cover of this book. This is Bob Putnam, the Harvard scientist book about the
collapse and then revival of American community. You see this man looking a bit like he's come from an
Edward Hopper painting into the bowling alley for a break. He's looking down at his ball. He looks a
little sad, and then there is Alone Together which is the recent book by the MIT psychologist Sherry
Terkel in which she makes the argument that our passionate romantic involvement with our iPhones
and androids and other device are supplanting our face-to-face relationships so that we are attached to
other things, to machines but not so much to ourselves. We expect less from ourselves is the idea. And
I want to suggest that the kind of root idea at the core of many of these books is an idea that goes
something like this, once upon a time we lived in a golden age, a golden age of strong communities, of
more coherent relationships. Our marriages were stronger. Our friendships were tighter. Our children
played in the streets; we all felt less lonely. Life was better. When we talk about our social lives we
often depict them as if we are all involved in a fall from that glorious golden age. Now it turns out an
interesting thing is that there is a kind of infinite regress here if you will really read the literature. We
almost always can find the golden age like 30 or 40 years before the moment we are writing. This is kind
of the theme in the Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris, if you have seen it. But it is very much true in
the way that we talked about American social life as well. We are prone to thinking that we have fallen
from something better. Sometimes even the best scientific data seems to bear this out. I want to call
your attention to a study that got an enormous amount of attention in 2006 when it came out. It was
published in the top sociology journal. And the story it told is that between 1985 and 2004 the number
of Americans who reported they had no confidant, no close friend, no one with whom they could discuss
confidential and important matters skyrocketed. It went from about 1 in 10 people to 1 in 4. One in 4
American adults we were told this study had no one with whom they could have those kinds of
conversations. And this is a terrifying finding. It is a very scary idea about what it means to be
American. Of course the big thing that comes into our world between 1985 and 2004, you know, is the
internet, and e-mail and social media and so that raised a lot of concerns that maybe, you know, the
stuff that you guys are up to here is destroying the fabric of American social life in this is how it was
reported out. Now I've got this graph here on the side, not because it's such a gorgeous piece of design,
but because it is from the USA Today. And I want to let you know that when the authors of this piece
published it, they were invited onto every talk show, you know, the networks. They were featured in
newspaper stories across the country. There was an enormous amount of interest in this report. In
some ways it tells us the story we are used to hearing. It confirms the impression that things are worse
than they used to be, that we are more disconnected than we used to be. Now let me fully
acknowledge that I too participated in the story at some level. My first book was a book about a heat
wave disaster in Chicago in 1995. It was a crisis that lasted just a couple of days but more than 700
people died in Chicago, and what was really disturbing about the book and the event for many people is
that huge numbers of people who died, died alone. The book was seen to be kind of an expression or
sign or a report on the way in which we had become disconnected and isolated. And I really focused in
on the most vulnerable people who were living alone in Chicago, people who are very old and very frail
who were living in impoverished and bombed out abandoned neighborhoods. It was a very sad and
tough story and when I finished the book a research foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,
which does a lot of terrific health work, came to me and said we would really like to follow-up with you
and have you do more work on this issue of social isolation, because we believe that it's a serious
problem and deserves more attention. Would you do it? And I said yes. I was interested in it. I knew
that there was something here, and I fully expected that in this project I would follow the footsteps of
those great social scientists before me and bring to you a report about the extent to which we have
grown disconnected, fallen apart in America today. The amount of living alone is something staggering;
I would get to this in a second, and I thought I would have a book like this to share. So one of the great
things about being a social scientist or a writer, in particular one with tenure, is you get to be wrong.
And you get to not lead with your conclusion, and if you lead with your conclusion because sometimes
we just do that, you have a chance to look at the facts and look at what you learned and move in a
different direction. It's hard to do that. It's hard to acknowledge that your predispositions took you to
the wrong place, that an argument that you made to get the grant doesn't hold up. But in this case, I
think, it was merited. And so what am I about to tell you is what I learned after deciding to write Alone
in America with an Ed Hopper painting on the cover. The first thing I did was to scale up and out of
Chicago which is my hometown, and to try to look at this rise of living alone in some different way. The
two things here, take in the top chart, but really I want to get your attention on the bottom for now,
because we will go back to the bottom in just a moment. I realized when I looked at who lives alone in
the United States that what I had seen in Chicago represented in some way the toe on the elephant. I
had started looking at the oldest and most vulnerable of people who lived alone, and I was ready to
generalize about them, but if you look closely at the numbers, you see something quite remarkable.
There are about 32.7 million Americans who live alone today. Of those, about 11 million are over the
age of 65. That's not at all kind of generalized from what I saw, and I hesitate to even call that 11 million
elderly, because the truth is a great proportion of them are between 65 and 75 or 80, and the point is
that they are much more healthy, more alive, more active and engaged than the people we used to call
elderly, and if they were in the room here they would object to me saying the name elderly, so aging has
changed. So a part of the story here is people are aging and aging alone but remaining healthier and
more active. But the really big thing that impressed me when I looked at that bar chart below, is that
contrary to what I thought going in, the majority of Americans who live alone are adults between the
ages of 35 and 65. They often have been married before; they have lived with someone before, and
now they are living alone for some considerable portion of their lives. You can see the gender skew and
I want to get back to that. There are more women living alone than men, about 18,000,000 plus
compared to 14,000,000 plus for men, but see how it skews so the women are living alone in their later
years, whereas men are more likely to live alone under the age of 50. That's the other thing that I want
to call your attention to. It turns out that in recent decades, the fastest growing group of people living
alone are young adults, under 35. Consider this, in 1950 about 1% of young adults were living alone.
Today, it's about 11%, 500,000 in 1950, more than 5 million today. Now obviously you are thinking
these last few years have been terrible for the economy. You know, we're reading all about the
boomerang generation, young people who can't launch themselves fully away from their parents. They
boomerang back and land right in the basement if not their old childhood room because the labor
market is so bad. That's true. It turns out there are more young people who are moving back with her
parents, but the dip in living alone has been incredibly small. Twelve % of young adults lived alone in
2007 compared to 11% today. What's staggering in a way is how little that has changed, and something
I think we should track and pay more attention to. Here's the other thing to add another set of bars to
the bar chart I showed you before. Remember how 22% of American adults were single in 1950? Today
it's about 49%, almost one in two American adults is unmarried and the proportion of one-person
households has gone from 9% nationally to 28% nationally in just 50 years. Now I know you want to see
this in different ways, so I will quickly go through here, the rise in population of Americans living alone
from five or six million in 1960, four million in 1950, to 33 million today roughly. Here it is a proportional
terms because you're not going to be persuaded just by the absolute numbers, right, you know there
are more people, so there should be more, but proportionally it is a big change too. I should note a very
steep increase between 2000 and 2012, and in fact considerable increase between 2008 and 2012, so
the recession did not slow down the proportion of Americans living alone either. I told you that in 1950
there was a more rural phenomenon about migrant workers. Today, of course, it is primarily an urban
one. What you're looking at here is a map of the proportion of households in different cities that are
one-person households. Here we are in Seattle where 42% of households have just one person. And
there are some cities here where you would expect to see big numbers, like Seattle, or Miami maybe,
your Boston, but look at Denver and Minneapolis and Atlanta and Cleveland and Chicago, a bunch of
cities where the proportion of one-person households is very high, over 40%, in all of those cities except
for Chicago. In Washington DC and in Manhattan where I live, it's almost one in two households are
one-person households. And of course there's a way in which that understates the concentration of
living alone, because solo livers are not equally distributed in all urban neighborhoods. There are
specific places where they come to live alone but be together, like Belltown in Seattle for instance. And
there are neighborhoods like that throughout the United States, and I am willing to bet you could name
them from your seats here. The bulk of my book is going beyond the numbers. I've shown you those
numbers there because they're impressive and I think they begin to tell us a story about a social change
that we hadn't recognized before, but we can get into trouble if we to quickly make interpretations
based on numbers without really knowing what's inside of them, and so the bulk of the research for this
book came from interviews. I assembled a research team and we scoured through different cities, the
East Coast and West Coast and Texas and Chicago, a little bit outside the United States as well, to look at
the lives of people who live alone and try to understand what they were doing. We separated them
roughly into three different groups; I have given them to you, above the age of 65, between 35 and 65,
and under 35. There are different kinds of experiences. We also talked to some very poor men who
were living alone in hotel residences in New York City, but it turns out there are not a lot of people who
are impoverished and live alone, for obvious reasons. It's expensive to live alone. So you find it in
affluent places and middle-class places, but far less in poor ones. For me the big breakthrough came in
learning to recognize that the social problems language that we typically used to describe what's
happened in our lives, the kind of golden age fallen story, is wholly inadequate for making sense of the
rise of living alone. There are social problems related to living alone. I know that from the book I wrote
about the heat wave, and I'll tell you about some of them today. In some cases living alone can lead to
loneliness and isolation and worse. But really, that doesn't capture the majority of the experience, and I
came to think that we are much better off understanding this. We have much better analytic capacity to
understand this if we think of it as a social experiment, not just a social problem. And there's a reason
for this. Until the 1950s, you could not find a single society in all of human history that sustained large
numbers of people living alone for long periods of time. Not a single one. In 1949, the great
anthropologist George Murdock wrote a book called Social Structure in which he surveyed everything
we knew about family formation and the life course in an enormous sample of cultures and his
conclusion which proved to be controversial, was that the nuclear family is a universal human social
grouping. Now the conclusion was controversial because some people said he had failed to recognize
alternative collectives, so there was a game in anthropology and history of trying to come up with these
societies where it wasn't just a conventional nuclear family, but there were more people living together
like the kibbutz, for instance. No one said you missed out on the fact that there are all these societies
organized around one person dwellings, because they didn't exist. What that tells me is that we have
about 200,000 years of history as a species learning how to live together in groups and about 50 or 60
years learning how to live alone. This is truly a novel way to organize our lives and our settlements. For
me it's like the equivalent of being anthropologist landing on an island that no one has discovered
before, except for that the thing was right in front of us all along. So naturally, you probably want to
know a little bit about how this happens and what it means. I'd like to talk about that a little bit with
you today too. If you speak with economists, they will tell you look, there are two simple reasons that
so many people are living alone in the world today and they boil down to one reason which is that
people can afford to do it. We live alone because we can. Two big reasons the economists say, the first
is in the second part of the 20th century market economies generated enough widespread affluence
that more people could afford to get places of their own just based on the wealth that they were
producing for themselves, and the second thing is the rise of welfare states; they provided people a
safety net, a kind of social security and human security that made it possible to feel okay while living
alone, to not necessarily need other people. That's a pretty powerful argument and gets at a lot of
what's going on, but I want to suggest that it's not wholly satisfying for a couple of reasons. First of all,
you can find societies where there is a lot of affluence but very little living alone. For instance, Saudi
Arabia, very wealthy, basically nobody lives alone there, and we'll get to the reason why; I'm guessing
you've already figured it out. But another reason is that there are lots of things that we can afford to do
and choose not to do. We don't choose to do all of the things that we have the resources to do, so I
found that it was productive to reframe the question this way. Of all the ways that we could use our
money and our security, why do it to get places of our own? Now let me acknowledge something here.
It's a little peculiar. If I were speaking to a group of sociologists at this point you might be ready to
throw stones and bottles at me, because I am invoking a concept which I haven't named yet, and the
concept is choice. Now we live in a world where there is an intellectual division of labor and most of the
time the economists get choice and the sociologists get constraint. They tell us what we opt into and we
tell them why you can't do what you want to do, which is, I think, one of the big reasons why I think
there are not so many people taking our courses anymore [laughter]. I think you can't understand the
rise of living alone outside the language of choice. Of the hundreds of people we interviewed, the truth
is the majority said that in the abstract they would like to be living with the right partner. People aren't
saying my aspiration is to have a place of my own. That's what I hope for myself forever. Some do, but
they are not the majority. But the thing that's interesting is today, we are unwilling to settle for the
wrong person. We won't live with the person we don't want to live with. Moreover, unlike 50 years ago
or 100 years ago, we are not interested in much less expensive options for how to live if we don't have a
romantic partner that we want to be with. For instance, we don't want to move in with our parents if
we can help it. If we are older, we don't want to move in with her children, if we can help it. We want
to move in with roommates when we leave school and move into a big city and we enjoy living with
roommates until we don't. [laughter]. And we often have that experience, so much so that we're not
interested in Craigslist, thank you very much, when we can afford it. So we are not just choosing to live
alone; we are paying a premium to do it, because it's more expensive and it's hard to discount that.
Why do we make this choice? Well, if you think about it, living alone comports with sacred modern
values. It gives us freedom, not simply freedom from, but freedom to, freedom to do what we want
when we want to do it without concern about someone's judging eyes looking over us. Living alone can
give us a degree of control over our personal lives that can be difficult to get otherwise. It can give us a
chance to have a kind of a self-realization. It gives us solitude, a break from the busy social lives we
have, from the constant attention that we spend and give to our media, our social media, our work life.
Paradoxically, I came to appreciate that living alone can give a chance to reconnect, not just with
ourselves but also with other people, and to reconnect in ways that are meaningful and relationships
that have some depth, and it is interesting. I should tell you in case it's not obvious; my book is not the
case for living alone. It's not the case against marriage. I'm not trying to persuade you to leave work
today and abandon your spouse. I'm not interested in that. I personally am married. I have two young
children. My wife likes to say sometimes that this is my fantasy book [laughter]. But you know, the
truth is I think, we all need a chance to have some of these things. We all value these things. In the
mornings I drop off my children at school and now that the parents at my kids’ schools know that I have
written this book, they all come to me with their secret confessions about how much they long for
solitude. Like there is nothing that makes you appreciate freedom and personal control and solitude
more than living in a small Manhattan apartment with your family. [laughter]. So we all need some of
these things. Living alone is one way to get it. But that's not the whole story. I want to say that there
are some other big drivers in the rise of living alone, and I want to run through them with you. Now the
first is this woman here, maybe you recognize her. My students don't. [laughter]. We’re getting older
folks. What can I say? It beats the alternative. Mary Tyler Moore, why is she there, because you cannot
understand the rise of living alone outside of the rising status of women in the world. When women
achieve economic independence, they develop the means to delay marriage and also to get out of a
marriage that doesn't work. Today, we get married later than ever in recorded history. The average age
of first marriage is 29 for men and about 27 for women in the United States, and in cities like Seattle's
it's over 30. And if you combine the kind of economic independence of women with their sexual
independence and the cultural independence that comes from changes that gave them the capacity to
control their bodies and their lives, this represents a real sea change in what it means to live. Just 60
years ago women who got divorced were doomed to a life of poverty and struggle or were sentenced to
move back in with their family members. We oftentimes forget this change. That of course is no longer
necessary today. It's not easy to make ends meet after divorce, we know, but women can do it, and
that's a new thing. Remember Saudi Arabia? That's why no one lives alone in Saudi Arabia. Women
don't have the economic independence to do it. They don't have the cultural independence to do it. I
would be remiss to be here in Redmond speaking to you at Microsoft without saying that the
communications revolution is an enormous driver in the rise of living alone. The thing is that the
communications revolution that really mattered, at least at first, was the introduction of the home
telephone and the television and to some extent the radio. Why? Because with these communication
technologies we gain the capacity to be home alone, but also connected to other people and to ideas
and to entertainment in ways that previously were impossible. That really establishes a change in what
it means to be home and alone. Now if you fast-forward to today, to a world in which we have social
media that are enabled by the internet, Skype, if you are a grandparent and you are living alone and
you've got children or grandchildren in another part of the country, or Facebook or Craigslist or Meetup
or instant messaging or e-mail or Netflix or massively multiplayer video games, you name it. People who
live alone today can experience a rich and profound social life when they are home. I think that we
often overestimate the ways in which social media are pulling us apart from each other and fail to
appreciate that social media are actually quite social. So for instance, the Alone Together thesis that we
rely more on our devices than we do on each other, I'm sympathetic to many of the concerns behind the
book. I get worried about children who spend too much time in front of screens and don't give their
neural pathways are chance to develop optimally. That's an issue that we should all be paying more
attention to. I get worried about the truck driver and particularly, my driver in the taxi who is texting
while he is racing up Fifth Avenue. It's not a situation you want to be in. I read the stories about kids
who are in their devices walking across the streets. There are lots of terrible and dangerous things here.
But to my knowledge and maybe you have better, the best research we have so far tells us that the
heaviest users of the internet and social media and cell phones, smart phones are more likely than
others to spend time with other people face-to-face. They are more likely than others to go out into
public places where they encounter strangers. This is the finding of the Pew Internet study done by
Keith Hampton when he was at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of
Pennsylvania and I haven't seen any better evidence showing me that this is wrong. Talk to older people
about the ways in which they are using social media, and you gain an appreciation for the way in which
it's transformed the experience of being home alone. So with communications today, it need not be
solitary or isolating. Very quickly now, there are a couple of other drivers that are worth paying
attention to. One is urbanization, and I've already showed you the map letting you see what a powerful
change this has been and told you that we can locate the neighborhoods where people live alone and
come to live alone alongside other people. The truth is that single people are more likely than people
who are married to be social. They are more likely to spend time with friends and with neighbors than
people who are married. They are more likely to go out at night in bars and restaurants and cafés and
spend money. They are more likely to come to public lectures and take art classes and do a number of
the things that we really value in cities, so there's this nice synergistic virtuous circle that you find, cities,
singles. There are subcultures of singles in cities everywhere today. This is a fundamentally new thing in
the world. And finally, I would be remiss to not say that you can't understand the rise of living alone
outside of the rise of aging alone, the longevity revolution has changed the experience of being alive. It
means that today because we live longer, but not always equally long to our partner, there are a
growing number of people who outlive their spouses by 5 or 10 or 20 or 30 years. Typically these
people are women and you saw the chart before. That's why women are so much more likely than men
to live alone. It's because they are more likely than men to age alone. Now here's the thing. Women
who live alone at all stages of the life course are more likely than men to stay connected to their friends
and their family members. Women do a better job of making and maintaining relationships than men
from the beginning of their adult years on until the end. So while women are more likely to age alone,
they are less likely to get isolated. Men when they live alone if they get divorced from their spouse, the
spouse on whom they likely relied on for a lot of care and social work, if they outlive their spouse, they
are at greater risk of getting isolated. That's a serious thing; something we could pay attention to. One
of the things that I am really interested in is the way in which new communications technologies are
giving men new skills for being connected, for making friendships, for maintaining relationships, for
getting themselves out into the world. I think we studied that enough, and there really is something to
do there. It might be possible that the rising generation of men are going to develop some skills for
being connected that the current generation of older men don't have, so that's an open question, and
maybe we could discuss. For these older men, and even for younger men who wind up living alone, the
Edward Hopper world of isolation, that melancholy place of being alone in the city becomes more
relevant and it's something that I'm concerned about. There are policy issues here that come up. There
are no quick and easy solutions for them, but when we slash our budgets for urban services for things
like Meals on Wheels or home care or specialized public transportation during a tough economic time,
those are the programs that get cut. Those are the people who suffer and they are not on a radar
screen in the way that they could be. But, we are seeing these interesting kinds of adaptations. In just
the last decade, the number of older people who have learned skills to use social media, who have
become more comfortable with interacting through screens is striking. And I think that there is a lot of
room to develop programs here as well, issues about access to the communications, issues about media
literacy, issues about how you would design the devices to make them more user-friendly to older
people are clearly important and I think there is a lot of exciting action in this area. I say this as
someone whose children spend a lot of time communicating with their grandparents on devices. So
although I'm concerned that some people do get isolated and find it difficult, the story in the end of the
book is that going solo turns out to be a much more social experience than we conventionally think it is,
a more connected experience than we think it is. Let's not be glib about it. People who live alone feel
lonely and complain that it can be difficult to be as connected as they want to be, but they say
something very interesting here, particularly the people who live alone after having been married or
lived with a partner for some time. In the hundreds of interviews I did, one recurrent theme that was
hard for me to dismiss was this one. People who have lived in relationships that don't work will tell you
that there is nothing more lonely than being next to a person and still feeling isolated. It's a very
powerful idea that recurred in our conversations, and they said moreover, when you're living alone and
you feel loneliness, that's a kind of physiological cue, an emotional cue that you should do something,
get out in the world, connect with other people, get active. It's pretty clear what that cue is. Some
people get locked in a kind of vicious circle and have trouble doing it. Loneliness leads to depression,
but they are a real minority, and they can get help. When you're married to someone and they are right
beside you and you feel that loneliness and isolation, it's a very profound and disturbing emotional
signal and it's not exactly clear what the cue for behavior is. So we shouldn't think that loneliness is
something that belongs to solos and not to the rest of us. It is a false comparison. The science on this is
oftentimes shoddy. When we talk about the health benefits of marriage, for instance, or the risks of
being alone. Remember that study I told you about, one in four Americans have no confidants, no close
friends; the one that was all over the news? So it turns out that when that study was published a
number of us who really know the literature on social networks said this just seems funny. It's so out of
sync with everything that we know about American social patterns. Are you sure that it's right? And
guess what? It wasn't. The data was flawed, deeply flawed and there were some signs that the authors
even knew this before publication. I wrote about it in the book, and The Chronicle of Higher Education
decided to do some follow-up. They called the person who is now a professor at Cornell. At the time he
was the grad student who did most of the number crunching and asked him about the data and he said
well, I certainly don't think it's reliable, and it isn't. Let me tell you something, that story did not make
The Today Show and the cover of USA Today and the New York Times and talk shows throughout the
country. When the story is we are just about as social as we always have been, we are just about as
lonely as we always have been, that's not a great news story [laughter]. But it's true. So let me end by
saying I think we need to hit the refresh button and find some new images to capture this experience of
what it means to go solo. We have the Hopper part of it down. We know the melancholy story. We've
heard that. There's another way to show it. Our lives, I've come to believe are more interesting than we
think. They're more interesting then we say. Our social lives are more interesting than we say. It's like
we live our lives and have a general, some level of satisfaction; we struggle with some things, but we're
doing okay, and then when it comes to talk about the way the world is, we suddenly get into this kind of
crisis mode like we're on Fox news and saying the world is ending. I don't know why we do that. I don't
know what that's about, but we need to appreciate the kind of productive side of our social lives as well
as the dangerous and disconnected one. Remember I told you that book concept originally alone in
America, I told you why the alone part is wrong, right? It turns out the America part is wrong too I
really thought that this was a story about our rugged individualism, our religion of self-reliance, the stuff
we've inherited from Emerson and Thoreau and the Lone Ranger and the whole tradition, but it turns
out there we are laggards when it comes to living alone, not leaders. The places on earth where living
alone is most common are the Scandinavian societies where they have invested collectively in programs
that support one another. They have subsidized housing. They have guaranteed access to healthcare
and to home care and transportation. They have gun control; they have safeguarded the street so that
you can live alone and be connected to a world of people who are there for you. Living alone is more
common in family centric Japan than it is in the United States. What I came to conclude is that our
independence is made possible by our interdependence. It's by collectively investing in each other,
finding ways to support and be with each other that we make it possible for people to live alone without
being disconnected, without being miserable, without being isolated in all the ways that we fear. How
could we not think of this as a social achievement of some kind? I hope that now you understand the
title a little bit better and appreciate the birds. You know, we had to jump a species to get the image
right this time around, but maybe, you know, not long from now, we'll have an image of an actual
human being alone and we won't think all of the things that we usually think about it. Thank you very
much. [applause]. Yes?
>>: I have sort of two questions; I'll start with the easier one first.
>> Eric Klinenberg: Thank you. [laughter].
>>: Can you talk a little bit about the transition period for folks that are going from, you say
predominantly your studies deal with people that weren't alone first and then they come into a life on
their own, the transition period for those folks? And you had a slide that talk about basically the five
higher values of self-actualization peace that comes from what people get from having that experience,
but how long it takes to embrace those things and become cool with them.
>> Eric Klinenberg: So it depends. One of the things I write about in the book is the history of the
private room for child, and the history of the crib. We all grow up in some collective environment; there
are not many people who just raise themselves in places of their own, so we don't have a real model
that we've lived inside her for how to go solo, and there's not really a roadmap for it. There's not really
a how-to guide that's out there. So there is a lot of learning that has to happen and the people I spoke
with talked about that learning process and some of the challenges that they had to overcome, how to
make sure that you're using your time home alone to have that productive solitude that gives you a
chance for self-realization and for reconnecting. If you live alone at home and you go home when you
pop open a bottle of whiskey and get on the couch and start watching, you know, bad sitcoms, there's
not going to be a healthy experience for you. So people struggle with that, how do you learn the skills to
cook for one? These things are not easy to do. People talk about getting a place of their own, being
really excited and then waiting for the phone to ring or someone to knock on the door like they did in
college and then realizing that doesn't happen. You have to be a self-starter. You have to project
yourself out into the world. Those are skills. But interestingly, when it comes to this kind of history
about the private room, in the last 50 or 60 years we've been involved in this other experiment, which is
that middle-class people in the United States and Europe and the kind of developed economies that are
on that list I gave you before, that bar chart on the end, have had the experience of growing up in rooms
of their own. They also had the experience of sleeping in a crib as infants, which we didn't do just 100
years ago, very unusual to sleep in a crib. People slept with their parents, their mothers, in particular, in
bed. So there's a way in which this individuation process happened at an earlier phase than before. In
1950 there were more people than bedrooms in the typical American home. Today there are slightly
more bedrooms than people in the typical American home and houses, housing units in Europe have the
same change. So what do you think it is that college students demand when they get to campus in their
freshman year and every year after? If you're in charge of the housing office, what would you hear
about? Yeah, people want a single. Everybody wants a single. And so there's a way in which we are
prepared for it. You could go different places with that. You could say well, it's all narcissism; we don't
know how to get along anymore, but you might also think that people are better, might be better
equipped for the experience of being alone that has become so common. The real difficulties come for
people who are, you know, 50, 60, 70 and have never lived alone, then suddenly find themselves
divorced or widowed or widower and now have to remake their lives and they've never had this
experience before. I think that future generations will be better at it. Now I know that was your easy
question.
>>: So can you actually go back a slide? You touched on this a little bit here in your explanation, so I
look at this and you talk about changing the images overall about what it means to be alone and I see
that we have a lot of other parts of the world that are further ahead of us and I wonder how much that
ties into the big polarization that goes into discussion nowadays between sort of liberalism and
conservatism, and there's this big push behind conservative values and preserving the nuclear family
and the family unit and a lot of the things that come into tearing that down are demonized, and then it
sort of tends to lean towards more of these negative pictures about what it means to have more of an
individual based society where people can live on their own. And I am wondering how we can tie that
back into the broader argument that's going into to supporting the notion that it's actually okay and
there's social progress. Obviously there's other countries here that I feel are more socially progressive
than us and they are doing well with this concept and they are further along.
>> Eric Klinenberg: The politics of this are tricky. I mean the libertarians and the conservatives who
don't like welfare states, they like freedom. And they like individualism, and so it's a paradox that it's by
collectively investing in each other that we give people the freedom to live the way they want to live.
Now the different strains of conservatism, of course, and there is a kind of branch of politics today that
is interested in a different kind of conservatism; they want to bring us back into an age when say women
didn't have the same level of control over their lives and bodies as they have today. You hear some of
the candidates, you know, talking about rolling back reproductive rights, for instance, and you think this
is like moving us back closer to the Saudi Arabia side then towards the Sweden side of the continuum,
and I find that somewhat worrisome. I think that one thing to note here is that living alone tends to go
up when people can afford it, when people have the human security to do it and they can afford it
because of the market or they can afford it because of the welfare state. So in recent years, the
countries that have had the fastest increases in living alone are China and India and Brazil, places where
there is a lot of market activity. But I wonder what will happen to living alone in Scandinavia if they
really roll back the welfare state programs, if they get rid of the subsidized housing. If in the United
States we roll back Social Security or privatize it and things fall apart, older people will not be able to live
alone, and it's interesting that we worry about older people living alone and worry about them getting
isolated and I think with good reason, but you talk to older people who live alone and they will tell you
that their dignity and sense of integrity rests on it, that if they get to the point in their lives that they can
no longer go solo, when they have to move in with their children or with friends or into some kind of
institutional facility, that will represent to them some terrible loss. It will represent to them the end of
something about their life. And so we in fact invest heavily as families to help our relatives live alone as
long as they possibly can. And I write a little bit about assisted living facilities, for instance, which can be
impossibly expensive, you know, for all but the most affluent people. So the book ends with a section
on redesigning solo life in which I tried to take up some of these questions. How could we design better
buildings, communication systems, artificial intelligence, neighborhoods to make living alone a more
connected experience? Yes?
>>: So the lady in the picture, I forget her name Mary Taylor or someone, look pretty, glad to be…
>> Eric Klinenberg: Mary Tyler more, yeah.
>>: Of all of the things you listed, the sacred modern virtues, going out to socialize, the [inaudible] club
with choice, the one that you didn't list was happiness and I was struck that your graph which showed
the study increase since 1950 of living alone was also the exact inverse of happiness since 1950 and am
wondering if…
>> Eric Klinenberg: Oh, I don't know that literature. If you look at happiness since 1950, we started off
really happy in 1950 and the studies using the same methodology and the same questions show a
steady decline in happiness, is that what you're saying?
>>: Yeah.
>> Eric Klinenberg: Oh, I don't know that. I've got to say I'm a little suspicious about it. I should see it.
The studies that I have seen on happiness tend to look something like this. People who are in happy
marriages are at the happy end of the distribution. Then there are people that are, by happy I just been
successful, because if you're in an unsuccessful, unhappy marriage, you have a pretty easy exit option
these days to get divorced. Then kind of right below them on the spectrum, just a little bit, but
noticeably below, are people who never married and then at the bottom part of the happiness spectrum
are people who are married and then divorced or married and then widowed. Some of the literature on
the happiness stuff actually throws out the people who are married and then divorced or married and
then widowed and they just study the entire universe of people who are successfully married and the
entire universe of people who are successfully, the entire universe of people who are single. And I've
always found this to be complicated for the methodological problem I just gave you, which is they throw
out the people for whom the drug didn't work. You know what I mean? If I give you the marriage drug
and it works for you then you stay in the study, but if I give you the marriage drug and you reject it or
you refuse to take it or you die, then you are out of the study, and so the comparisons are really, really
weird.
>>: So then you should be able to control for that and look at [inaudible] like cases of people who are
living with housemates versus living alone after you adjust for income levels. I wonder if you would
observe any difference…
>> Eric Klinenberg: Yeah, so I can't answer you with the best data on that, but I would love--I'll give you
my e-mail address. I would love to see the happiness study showing that steady decline from 1950
because that would be a useful thing to know. I find myself skeptical of it, and what I know for instance
about the loneliness, there are studies of loneliness levels, and we do not see by any means the spikes
of loneliness that work along with that spike in living alone. So living alone and being lonely seem to be
detached; they are different kinds of things and I, gosh, I really want to see the happiness stuff, so will
continue the conversation. Happiness is one of those things that is tough to measure. You really have
to know what you mean by it and, you know, well, another discussion. Yes?
>>: So you talk about how single people are more likely to go out and seek, you know, social
interactions, go to bars…
>> Eric Klinenberg: People who live alone.
>>: Yeah, people who live alone, okay, and I mean you sort of anecdotally, I'm sure everybody knows
the married couple, the couple who like gets together and then doesn't go out as much, and doesn't
hang out as much, would you have any like, studies or any information about like, married people or
people who are partnered up who do manage to go out and still be very sociable and like what that
takes for partners to be able to affect the same kind of reaching out socially?
>> Eric Klinenberg: Yeah. So what I was giving you were not anecdotes, just to be clear, the social
surveys that look at how we spend our time tell us that people in marriages are less likely than people
who live alone to spend time with friends and with neighbors and are less likely to volunteer in civic
organizations and they are less likely to go out to these public places and spend time and money. You
know, that probably comports with a lot of our personal observations and experiences. It turns out that
women who are married are the most affected by the marriage. There is a sociologist named Naomi
Gerstel, who writes about the greedy marriage. Marriages, especially when there are children, are very
demanding of women's time. You probably are not going to believe this but it turns out that women
tend to do the majority of the domestic work in American families [laughter], and I didn't write that, and
definitely not in my personal case. [laughter]. I want to be clear. I mean I make that argument almost
every night, but it turns out that that's a trend and so women find themselves without the time and the
energy that it takes to go be out in the world, whether it's volunteering or out with their friends and
doing other things, so that's a pretty robust finding. And that doesn't mean that married people can't
get out in the world and find ways to do it. I mean part of what I'm pushing for here, I hope you hear
this, is a more honest conversation about how we live and what we value and what we aspire to
because it seems to me that we have a story we tell ourselves about how we should be organizing our
lives which runs in real contrast to the kind of the way in which we actually do things. And the result of
it is we are always feeling bad about ourselves because it's like we're not living up to this ideal from
some other time when it probably wasn't as idealized as we think it is. So where I'm pushing us here is
to, you know, be more appreciative and realistic about our social lives and our ideals and our values so
that we can live more rich lives, so that we can say to our partner, you know, I love being married to you
and sharing a home with you and I think I might be a healthier person if I have some more opportunity
for solitude or for going out in the world. I miss these things that I used to have before. Maybe we can
figure out a way that we can have time with each other, but also give each other freedom to do this
other thing. I actually think that when you talk to people in successful relationships, they often have
stories about how they do that, precisely that. But that doesn't get reflected in these conversations
about the end of the family and the end of the marriage and this other stuff. So maybe if we had more
realistic expectations about what we should expect from relationships, we wouldn't find ourselves so
disappointed by what we get.
>> Amy Draves: Sounds like a good point to stop.
>> Eric Klinenberg: Okay, thank you very much. [applause].