In Space, No One Can Hear How Lonely You Are - Reactor

At some point, fairly early into Project Hail Mary—maybe it was while Ryan Gosling drank contraband vodka from a pouch—I thought to myself, Oh, fuck. We’re all just really crushingly lonely, aren’t we?

This is, in a way, a large leap. Gosling’s character has been unwillingly sent to space and is, at that point in time, unwillingly the only person alive for who knows how many miles. He could not possibly be more alone, on a technical level. And yet I spent a lot of the rest of the movie just thinking about loneliness, and modern life, and these stories that—whenever they may have been written—have cropped up in the last few years, full of people who are or have become alone, who may or may not be reckoning with their loneliness. 

Everyone in Severance is lonely, so far as I can tell; Helena may have money and power, but does she have friends? Mark Scott has candles that belonged to his dead wife, and Irving has his dog. When they go to work and stop being themselves, becoming their innies, they have each other. But not themselves.

In Pluribus, Carol is the only individual in thousands of miles who has not become part of a larger hivemind. I thought about Carol a lot while watching Ryland Grace try to save the world. I thought about Carol and her whiteboard, and Ryland Grace and his whiteboard. You work with what you’ve got. 

There are so many more books than movies in any given year that I generally find it harder to follow these thematic threads, but still: Maw in Claire North’s Slow Gods is largely isolated, if not exactly lonely, but most everyone he interacts with wants something from him. The characters in Pip Adam’s Audition are sometimes alone—a very specific kind of alone that’s imposed on them—sometimes with each other, but always cut off, sustained by too-small, too-rare moments of connection. The demon in Nghi Vo’s The City in Glass spends ages rebuilding her city, mostly alone, rebuffing the angel who wants to help. Is she lonely? She would never admit it. Morgan in E.K. Johnston’s Sky on Fire chooses her solitude, up to a point, when she realizes there are other options.

The young man at the heart of Rachel Hartman’s Among Ghosts has, for much of the book, ghosts and a murderer for company, but that book feels lonely. There’s barely a drop of loneliness in Martin MacInnes’s glorious In Ascension, but the narrator is almost always on her own. You can choose that, of course. I don’t want to say you can’t choose solitude. But so many stories I’ve read in the last few years have loneliness as a color in their palette. A note in their bouquet. It hovers. Sometimes it comes straight to the fore. 

We are not all unwilling astronauts. We are not all one of the lone individuals on the planet after the arrival of a hive mind. But Pluribus, especially, feels … accurate, in a way that is hard to describe. Carol is alone but not alone. There are people present, sort of, sometimes. Somewhere, far off, there are other people that might, potentially, be more like her. Or they might not. It kind of feels like being online. So many people! And yet so little to grab on to.

The internet, as you might gather from this comparison, or if it has happened to you too, has started making me more lonely.

People have been complaining about the state of the internet for a while now; I am far from the first. But it keeps coming up: the thing I used to do, the place I used to go when I was lonely and bored and angsty and uncertain—well, now it’s the place that makes me lonely and bored and angsty and uncertain. Once upon a time, I went to the internet to read about people’s lives, to read journals and blogs and talk to whoever was awake and on AOL Instant Messenger. (The thrill of the little green light!) Once upon a time, I read thousands of words that were just written because people had too many feelings and had found an unlikely place to put them. Once upon a time, we were strangers writing to each other, not brands, not self-marketers, not influencers. No one had yet figured out how to monetize people’s attention spans. I went online because I was bored at work, or depressed at work, or sad at home, or missed people, or wanted to be a different version of myself for a minute.

Now I go online because I have to, and yet I’m still looking for that old internet, expecting it to appear between the cracks, slipping through the paid posts and the fake videos and the engagement bait Instagram drops into your feed just to try to get you to go yell at someone on Threads.

It is a very weird thing when what was once the salve for loneliness is now the cause of it.

Maybe you don’t feel that way. I don’t always feel that way. I love the moments of surprise, the stories, the threads of unexpected and magical encounters, the photos of birds and rabbits and cats and dogs. I love the way you can gain a new appreciation for a person by seeing what catches their eye. What they notice. At its best, the internet is full of glorious noticing—sometimes a pithy one-liner, sometimes an essay. At its worst, well, I probably don’t need to tell you. It’s a luxury to be able to look away when the feed that perpetually alternates between art and horror switches over to horror. And yet I’m not sure how many minds are built to engage with the erasure of that divide. 

No one in these stories full of loneliness spends any time online. The answer isn’t in there. A lot of good things are: essays, stories, art, cat videos, fundraisers that I wish weren’t necessary, information that we need to know. Job offers, freelance work, news about books I want to read. But I keep thinking about the moment in Pluribus where Carol, abandoned by the hive-mind people who cannot deal with her messy emotions, paints a huge sign asking them to come back. I want to tell her no. I want to tell her she doesn’t need them. They want to change her; they want to make her one of them. But she is all alone in a big house with only the prowling coyotes for company, sending missives out into the world that may or may not ever arrive. What else is she going to do?