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The First Separations
For most of human history, being alone was a logistical death sentence. Life depended on the group, on shared hunts, on hands taking turns to keep a fire alive. Loneliness meant hunger, illness, or death.
But over time, people began inventing tools that made it possible to do without others, if only for a moment. Technology eased the burden of collective effort while also dissolving part of the bond. The spear made solitary hunting possible. The domestication of other species meant that the strength of one animal could replace that of several men. The wooden plow, irrigation canals, ceramic or stone utensils, and water- or wind-powered mills made it possible to harness external forces and depend less on human ones. Each instrument expanded the body's freedom. Each tool reduced the need for company and loosened, a little, the need for others. Bonds persisted, yes, but they became increasingly optional.
Feudalism can be thought of as the last system in which dependence remained total. In twelfth-century European villages, life was still embedded in a web of obligations. No one could fend for themselves: the serf worked for their lord, the lord depended on the clergy, and the clergy on their God. Community was both suffocating and vital. At the margins of this web, something was beginning to break away.
In medieval Europe, the Cistercian monasteries of the late eleventh century stood out as centers of technological innovation and economic management. There, the monks rigorously adopted the Rule of Saint Benedict, under the principle of ora et labora (from the Latin “pray and work”), and emphasized manual labor, transforming the landscape around their settlements. They developed complex networks of canals and dams to drain wetlands, create self-sufficient farms, and power grain mills with exceptional efficiency. The constant operation of these mills, visible day and night, symbolized a power that could seem extraordinary to people at the time. Their effectiveness rested on two pillars: the technical mastery of energy and an exceptionally efficient organization of labor. In this way, production could be significantly detached from direct human physical effort and entrusted to machines powered by nature. Work could continue without the body.
This adaptation and refinement of watermill technology had profound socioeconomic consequences. It became one of the earliest and most successful examples of mechanized production in the Late Middle Ages, and made it possible to redistribute labor efficiently. While lay brothers could focus on specialized tasks (such as metalworking, brewing, or farm management), choir monks devoted themselves to the divine office and study. The system generated a substantial and predictable agricultural and industrial surplus, which formed the basis of its economic power. Productivity ceased to depend solely on the collective rhythm of the body and became linked to the efficiency of a technical and organizational system. Standardization, specialization, and the exploitation of resources on a large scale became an influential prototype for the premodern enterprise. Europe's later economic development began in this way.
The Birth of the Self
The Renaissance also brought a separation between body and thought. The expansion of trade, the increasing circulation of money, and the rise of cities transformed people into mobile units with individual interests and property. The printing press multiplied texts and, with them, the inner space of reading. Reading ceased to be a collective experience. As early as the fourth century, Saint Augustine had been astonished to see his teacher Ambrose moving his lips without making a sound. More than a thousand years later, that slow, silent gesture had become customary in medieval scriptoriums before the printing press made it widespread. Silent reading invented a place inside the mind where no one else could enter, one of the beginnings of modern intimacy.
Montaigne, shut away in his tower, embodied this revolution. He did not write to teach, but to observe himself. “What do I know?” he asked. There was something radically new in that phrase: the individual thinking of himself as a world apart. Introspection, which for centuries had been a form of religious penance, became an intellectual method. The self emerged as protagonist—and as boundary—at the same time that cities grew, money replaced tribute, and the countryside emptied out. Enclosures privatized common lands and drove out thousands of peasants. In England, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, millions of acres were enclosed, creating an inside and an outside, private and permanent property. The peasants, turned into day laborers, migrated to the cities. These bodies, stripped of their means of subsistence, became free workers, a doubly ironic category: free of everything except the need to sell themselves (“or die under a bridge in Paris,” as Anatole France would say).
In the mid-sixteenth century, European printers began publishing books in small formats, octavos, easy to carry and read in private. They were moral works, devotional books, or classical texts adapted to pocket size. This portable object condensed a new form of possession: knowledge that was not shared and could be accumulated in greater quantities by some than by others.
It is fair to think, then, that the self, that consciousness folding back in on itself, was not a spiritual discovery but an economic consequence. As communities broke apart, working on each person's individual identity became a way to compensate for uprootedness.
The Factory and the Crowd
With the Industrial Revolution, isolation became architecture. Factories brought workers together in the same space, but the juxtaposition of bodies did not imply a relationship, a bond, a community. They cooperated to work, yes, but it was choreography: bodies in rows, repeated gestures, fixed schedules. The clock replaced the sun, and the shift replaced the season. The sound of machines imposed its law over voices. In 1833, a British inspector wrote that what disturbed him most in textile workshops was not the exploitation, but the silence. Hundreds of children worked looms without uttering a word. “No army would obey like this,” he noted. Discipline at its most extreme: the most efficient form of productive solitude.
The industrial city repeated the same logic. Workers' houses were identical boxes; hallways, passageways. The crowd did not dissolve loneliness; it multiplied it. Urban life forced individuals to adopt a blasé attitude, a protective indifference in the face of excessive stimulation. It was a form of anesthesia, necessary to endure the density of contact without connection.
Isolation ceased to be an exception and became routine. Work separated bodies; the city crowded them together. Years before Marx conceptualized alienation, the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle described the essence of the change in 1829: “Men have become mechanical in the head and in the heart, as well as in the hand.” Inside human beings, the same cold, repetitive logic as the machines. In reorganizing space, the factory and the city gave rise to a new, systemic loneliness: not that of the shepherd on the moor, but that of workers so attuned to the machinery they operated that they lost the ability to tune in to the subjectivity of those around them. The structures of production required function, but not necessarily presence. The urban and industrial ballet took shape in this way: neat, orchestrated, and taciturn.
New Forms of Happiness
It is often said that machines isolate us, as if this were an accident of history or a new phenomenon, exclusive to the exponential age. But every technological advance springs from the same impulse: to reduce our dependence on others. Fire made it possible to cook without a tribe; the printing press, to think without a teacher; the screen, to work without colleagues. Every tool is an attempt at independence, and every independence makes distance possible.
In the twentieth century, this ambivalence became routine. Offices, household appliances, and private cars promised emancipation and produced enclosure. The architecture of well-being replicated the logic of the machine: enclosed spaces, precise functions, functional silence. The courtyard replaced the front porch, and the house stopped looking out onto the street; everyday interaction, gossip, watchfulness, and chance, trivial encounters dwindled.
In the late 1950s, American appliance ads showed smiling women in empty kitchens. “This is what freedom looks like,” said one from General Electric. In that immaculate setting, isolation was presented as the ultimate ideal of happiness.
An Epidemic of Loneliness
If the twentieth century encapsulated independence in objects and spaces, the twenty-first transformed that promise into the constant flow of platforms. It is no longer about owning the machine that sets us free, but about inhabiting the network that manages, connects, and optimizes every aspect of existence. This shift from tool to protocol brought the historical paradox to its sharpest point: every technical solution, designed to ease a burden, ended up creating its own form of deprivation. We turned the need for others into a product, regimented it in an interface, and thus made it both omnipresent and unreachable.
In this ecosystem, loneliness acquired a new economic value. It became the substrate on which the digital economy operates, an economy that thrives by isolating the individual as a coherent unit of digital traces and metrics. The paradox is absolute, even in the name: social networks. The promise of infinite connection consolidated new forms of absence: perpetually available, but never quite there.
Thus, the body once freed from physical servitude now wears itself out through digital exposure or, in an almost ironic twist, pays for the chance to artificially reproduce at a gym the very effort civilization sought to abolish. Productivity is measured in sustained attention and emotional performance. Machines, once extensions of the body, have become mirrors of the mind that, by reflecting it, atrophy the senses in an efficient sterility. This separation operates on two levels: between oneself and others, and, more intimately, between oneself and oneself.
The scale of the distress caused by disconnection between people has led the World Health Organization to declare loneliness a global public health threat, with a mortality risk comparable to that of smoking. Yet this declaration reveals a fundamental ambiguity in the Spanish-speaking world. In Spanish, a single word contains two radically different experiences. On the one hand, soledad-solitud (solitude in English): a chosen retreat, a fertile and creative intimacy. On the other, soledad-desolación (loneliness): the anguished experience of feeling isolated, disconnected, and invisible, even in the midst of others. One is a refuge, the other a deprivation. The fact that Spanish does not distinguish between them—perhaps because, in the cultural substratum inherited from Latin, the individual was never entirely severed from the collective—does not erase the real difference.
And whatever its nuances, it remains telling that the radical deprivation of contact is the ultimate punishment in very different systems of control. It is the harshest punishment in the modern prison system: solitary confinement, designed to break the psyche through absolute desocialization. The sentence imposed on heretical mystics: exile to a forced hermitage, a solitude without divinity. And the method used by many dictatorships, where the abducted spent their first days in incommunicado cells in order to sever their perceptual ties to the world, as a prelude to breaking their resistance. Even in myth, the gods reserved the worst torture for their rebels: not fire or ice, but eternal isolation. Prometheus, chained to a rock at the edge of the world, cried out in agony not only because a vulture devoured his liver, but also because there was no one at all to witness it in the abyss.
Even when this same unwanted loneliness is stripped of its exceptional character and spreads like a social climate, its significance is great enough that the World Health Organization has classified it as a global public health threat. This means it can no longer be considered a vague distress or merely an individual feeling, but an integral condition of the body and psyche, which interprets the chronic absence of an attentive other as a persistent threat. Far from being an anomaly, this epidemic of desolation seems its logical and foreseeable consequence. The pursuit of frictionless autonomy has left us suspended in an anxious ataraxia, for which the market promptly offers mindfulness subscriptions, humid forest essences, and cottagecore aesthetics as palliatives.
Desolation is not distributed evenly, but seeps through existing social fault lines. It appears in the adolescent inhabiting a dense digital universe devoid of physical contact; in the older adult disconnected from the communal rhythms that once structured their time; and, with particular severity, in women, whose social networks often shrink under the overwhelming weight of the unequal burden of care. In the most economically precarious strata, these forms of loneliness do not merely coexist; they merge and intensify, creating an experience in which isolation ceases to be a subjective circumstance and becomes another dimension of material vulnerability and psychological insecurity.
The experience of loneliness changes, but does not disappear, in contexts where denser community structures persist, as they do across large parts of Latin America compared with core countries. In our region, loneliness is often experienced as a tension between this collective inheritance and the economic and cultural pressures pushing toward individualization.
The Paradox
The history we have traced is therefore the history of this desolation, which takes the form of social life in every age. The instruments change—from the mill to the algorithm—but the dynamic remains. We invent tools to free ourselves from the need for others, and those same tools bring us face to face, again and again, with new variations on isolation.
The promise was always to lighten the burden of others. And today, the symptom of that liberation is a ubiquitous nostalgia for the imperfect, for the friction of real contact. We buy forest scents and the sound of rain to inject, in a controlled and safe way, the sensory disorder we have been fleeing.
This leads to a final hypothesis. I suspect the engine of innovation is not abstract curiosity, but suffering. Every technological leap responds to a concrete pain: hunger, cold, illness, exhausting labor. But its success does not bring us peace (or not peace alone); rather, it can displace pain into a more intimate and elusive territory: isolation and invisibility. By systematically eliminating delay, annoyance, and discomfort, we unwittingly erode the chance encounters that wove us together. The history of loneliness is the story of a species that cannot bear to depend on others, but loses its way when it succeeds in not doing so. Every time we think we have resolved this tension, it reappears disguised as the latest invention, leaving us with the same unsettling question. We wonder whether the gesture that redeems us may, at its core, be the very one that exiles us.
The chronicles, profiles, and essays that make up this book offer a way to approach the new forms of feeling alone in our own time. They are true stories (all names have been changed), told from different points of view. As we examine them one at a time, perhaps the overall picture they form will emerge, like a mosaic: the complete, if always incomplete, shape of unwanted loneliness in the twenty-first century.
