Vincent Cocquebert is a journalist and essayist. He has published
Millennial Burn-out
(Arkhê, 2019),
La Civilization du cocoon
(Arkhê, 2021) and
Uniques au monde (
Arkhê, 2023).
To discover
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LE FIGARO. - On the occasion of World Loneliness Day on January 23, the IFop published a study which shows in particular that more than four in ten French people regularly feel alone. And for a majority of French people (58%), solitude is a desired situation. How do you explain this phenomenon of withdrawal? Do the proliferation of home leisure offerings (Netflix, etc.) and insecurity accentuate this phenomenon?
Vincent COCQUEBERT. -
More and more people report feeling loneliness, without attaching a positive or negative dimension to it.
It is a phenomenon which became more widespread, at least in studies, at the end of the 1990s. At the same time, we have been witnessing a recession in friendship since this same period.
The social fabric of individuals has tended to shrink in recent years.
Thus, between 1990 and 2020, the percentage of individuals' friends was generally halved.
This applies to the United States and France.
Also read: The Tears of Narcissus, by Julie Girard: ultramodern solitude
This withdrawal into oneself is a movement that is at once domestic, social, psychological and spatial.
Today, we can domicile almost all of our lives, whether leisure (the consumption of which has exploded since the 1970s), work and now relationships, through the simulacrum of social networks.
We are then witnessing the creation of domestic-digital bubbles in which solitude is sought – even if some suffer from it.
Seeking solitude is a fantasy of the order of the monad.
We are self-sufficient.
Or at least, the small family nucleus is enough.
This can be compared to the somewhat desperate posture of the old bachelor who ends up being satisfied with his situation since it becomes more and more difficult to enter into contact with the other who seems distant, even, sometimes, hostile.
The brain then acts in a reassuring way, legitimizing a situation that would be sought after.
But it's a vicious circle.
After confinement, we observed that the more people locked themselves away, the less they wanted to go out.
They comforted themselves in their solitude.
At the same time, we have witnessed the explosion of psychological disorders.
Well experienced or not, loneliness affects the mental health of individuals. Among those who feel lonely, 82% have already experienced psychological disorders linked to loneliness during their lives, 63% having even experienced it during the last twelve months. Is isolation as a promise of individual emancipation an illusion?
Yes, because it is in reality a deviation from the promise of modernity of self-invention, according to which one could be master of one's existence and capable of self-determination, whether at the professional level , personal or emotional, but here pushed to its climax.
If individualism, in its movement of emancipation of the individual from institutions, is positive, today we are witnessing a desire for total self-determination of the individual.
This promise is fallacious and intoxicating.
Family, emotional or professional life being less and less conducive to narcissistic valorization, we withdraw into ourselves as if the quest for ourselves had become our last little utopia.
But there is something of the order of self-consumption.
This ideal of self-quest is insoluble and can lead nowhere.
For two reasons: our identity is constantly slipping away and it is through others that we (re)know ourselves.
This quest for oneself has something a little desperate, because imagining oneself independent of others and the world is obviously a way of fleeing it.
In the 1970s, we witnessed a transformation of the family;
we moved from the statutory family to the emotional family.
Vincent Cocquebert
In total, 9% of French people are in a situation of isolation. This “objective solitude” appears to be strongest in Île-de-France (14%), although it is more populated. How to explain it?
It’s a magnifying mirror phenomenon.
A poor individual in a rich country will feel this discrepancy, generating injustice and anger.
The feeling of loneliness, in a context of increasing social bubbles and excitement, is then necessarily amplified.
Then, if the French themselves can suffer from loneliness, we observe, paradoxically, that only 13% of the population believes that meeting people and enriching oneself in relationships with others is a criterion for a successful and fulfilling.
For 28% of those questioned, this will involve material or financial comfort.
So, if loneliness is a mass syndrome, to tackle it, we must first change the representations we have of the world and of others, seen more as an obstacle to our development than as a enrichment.
Asked about the way they socialize, the French mainly spend time with their family: 30% see them every day or almost. An entourage that is significantly more in demand than friends (7% every day or almost, 26% every week), colleagues, or other types of acquaintances. Should we see behind this tendency to turn towards the family an aversion to otherness, to the outside?
The family concentrates the softness of the cocoon and the quest for self-reflection.
In the 1970s, we witnessed a transformation of the family;
we moved from the statutory family to the emotional family.
From now on, parents are less attached to the worldly function of the family, which consists of preparing the child to enter into a dialectic with society.
Today, the child having become the basis of the family, he is both the object of a narcissistic and emotional charge.
If the emotional charge is rather positive, it can also be confining.
In fact, the family, as an institution, has the majority of the feeling that the values of society are no longer theirs.
A relationship of distrust is then created, observable in particular with the parents of students who have increasingly conflictual relationships with the teaching staff.
In detail, we observe a strong correlation between the choice to be able to isolate oneself and standard of living. Has isolating yourself become a luxury? In this sense, are we witnessing an anthropological shift?
Loneliness has more to do with people from rather lower socio-professional categories.
But this phenomenon of chosen solitude is the phenomenon of radicalization of a secession movement which takes place among the most privileged classes, frequenting neither the same geographical places, nor the same individuals, nor the same offers of services .
Sociability is then differentiated and pushed to its climax with this drive between oneself which becomes one between me.