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By the 21st century loneliness has become ubiquitous.

Commentators call it ‘an epidemic’ – a condition akin to ‘leprosy’ and a ‘silent plague’ of civilisation.

In 2018 the United Kingdom went so far as to appoint a Minister for Loneliness.

Yet loneliness is not a universal condition; nor is it a purely visceral internal experience.

It is less a single emotion and more a complex cluster of feelings composed of anger – grief – fear – anxiety – sadness and shame.

It also has social and political dimensions – shifting through time according ideas about the self – God and the natural world.

Loneliness in other words has a history.

The term ‘loneliness’ first crops up in English around 1800.

Before then the closest word was ‘oneliness’ – simply the state of being alone.

As with solitude – from the Latin ‘solus’ which meant ‘alone’ – ‘oneliness’ was not coloured by any suggestion of emotional lack.

Solitude or oneliness was not unhealthy or undesirable but rather a necessary space for reflection with God or with one’s deepest thoughts.

Since God was always nearby a person was never truly alone.

Skip forward a century or two however and the use of ‘loneliness’ – burdened with associations of emptiness and the absence of social connection – has well and truly surpassed oneliness.

What happened?

The contemporary notion of loneliness stems from cultural and economic transformations that have taken place in the modern West.

Industrialisation – the growth of the consumer economy – the declining influence of religion and the popularity of evolutionary biology all served to emphasise that the individual was what mattered – not traditional paternalistic visions of a society in which everyone had a place.

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Source: Here’s How Industrialization and Individualism Led to a New Language of Loneliness | Alternet