David Riesman published The Lonely Crowd in 1950 and produced, without quite intending to, a description of the present. His subject was mid-century America—the shift he observed in how people oriented themselves toward the world, from an inner-directedness that took its bearings from internalised values to an other-directedness that took its bearings from the responses of those around them.
The inner-directed person carried, as Riesman put it, a kind of psychological gyroscope—a stable orientation installed in childhood that held its course through social turbulence. The other-directed person carried a radar, continuously scanning the environment for signals about how to behave, what to value, whether they were performing adequately.
Riesman thought he was describing a transition in American character. He was describing the infrastructure of a civilisation.
The other-directed person is not, in Riesman’s account, indifferent to others. They are hyperattentive to others—continuously calibrating their behaviour to the perceived expectations of the crowd, adjusting their presentation to match the signals being returned, seeking approval with a persistence that the inner-directed person would find exhausting and perhaps inexplicable. The paradox is that this hyperattentiveness does not produce connection. It produces performance. The other-directed person is present to others as an audience for their own behaviour rather than as people whose inner lives are genuinely encountered. The connection they seek is the connection of being approved, which is not the same as the connection of being known.
The crowd is full. The isolation is complete.
Gatsby is the literary version of this. He fills his house with people and stands apart from them. The parties are elaborate performances of a life he does not have, watched by people who do not know him and would not recognise him if they encountered him on the street the morning after. He is not lonely despite the crowd. He is lonely because of what the crowd requires of him—the continuous performance of a self that is shaped entirely around what the crowd is expected to want, which precludes the kind of sustained, unperformative presence in which genuine connection might occur. The crowd is the condition of his isolation. Without the crowd, he would not need the performance. Without the performance, he might be knowable.
Kafka arrived at the same observation from a different angle. His letters and diaries describe a person who experiences himself as fundamentally incompatible with the social world he inhabits—not because he lacks the capacity for connection but because the connection available seems to require a kind of performance of self that he experiences as falsification. The people around him are not people he cannot reach. They are people he can only reach by becoming someone he is not, which is not reaching them at all. The alienation is not the failure of connection. It is the product of the only connection on offer.
What Riesman identified as a mid-century shift in American character has not reversed. It has accelerated and been given infrastructure. The social media platform is the other-directed person’s natural environment—a space organised entirely around the production of behaviour for an audience’s approval, in which the measure of success is the signal returned from the crowd in the form of likes, shares, and the various metrics that translate social approval into a visible number. The platform did not create the other-directed person. It created the perfect conditions for the other-directed person to express their orientation at scale, continuously, without the interruptions that ordinary social life imposes on the performance.
The performance is the thing. The platform rewards performance. The reward produces more performance. The person becomes, over time, increasingly organised around the production of content that generates approval rather than the cultivation of the inner life that would have something genuine to express. The radar is on continuously. The gyroscope, if it was ever installed, spins without reference.
This is the extension Riesman’s work anticipates but does not quite reach: the person who has spent long enough performing for an audience that they have lost reliable access to the self that exists when no audience is present. Not lost in the dramatic sense of a crisis. Lost in the gradual sense of a capacity that was never developed or was allowed to atrophy—the capacity to be present to oneself in the absence of external signals, to know what one thinks and feels and values without checking the crowd first.
The loneliness that results from this is real and also peculiar in its structure. It is not the loneliness of isolation—the absence of people. It is the loneliness of presence—the experience of being surrounded by people and receiving nothing from them that reaches the part of oneself that needs to be reached. The modern psychology calls this perceived isolation, and the term is accurate in the specific sense that the isolation is not physical but experiential. The brain’s social monitoring system, which evolved to detect genuine social exclusion as a survival threat, registers the failure of genuine connection even in a crowd, because what it monitors is not the presence of people but the quality of response—whether one is seen, recognised, known.
The crowd fails this test consistently if the connections within it are organised around performance and conformity rather than genuine encounter. The person surrounded by people who know their performance but not themselves is isolated in the precise sense that their social monitoring system registers as dangerous. The crowd does not reduce this isolation. It may intensify it—by providing the continuous reminder of connection that is proximate and insufficient, by making visible the gap between the social contact that is present and the social encounter that is absent.
Virginia Woolf and Camus described this gap as existential loneliness—the specific experience of being emotionally disconnected and unseen in the presence of others. The description is literary but it is also precise. The unseen person in a crowd is not a person who has failed to attract attention. They are a person whose presence is registered as a performance but not encountered as a self. The difference between being seen and being watched is the difference between recognition and attention, and recognition is what the social monitoring system requires.
The loneliness epidemic, framed as a public health crisis requiring strategy and intervention, addresses a real condition through a frame that obscures its cause. The condition is real: significant numbers of people experience the felt absence of genuine connection despite being surrounded by people, despite having access to more communication technology than any previous generation, despite participating in social activities that register as contact in the measurement instruments used to survey the epidemic’s extent.
The frame that treats this as a medical condition caused by insufficient social contact does not engage with Riesman’s account of what kind of contact is missing or why. More contact of the kind currently available—more interactions organised around performance and approval, more exchanges mediated by platforms that reward the other-directed orientation—does not address the deficit. It may deepen it by providing more occasions for the performance that precludes the encounter.
Riesman’s diagnosis is structural rather than medical. The condition is not a deficit of contact. It is a deficit in the character of contact—a shift in how people orient themselves toward others that makes genuine encounter difficult because genuine encounter requires the inner life that other-directedness has allowed to thin. The person who takes all their bearings from the crowd’s response cannot easily bring to an encounter the kind of self whose presence makes genuine connection possible. They bring the performance instead. The other person receives the performance. The encounter does not occur.
The crisis framing is useful not because the condition is fabricated—the loneliness is real—but because the epidemic’s construction tends to obscure the distinction between the experience of isolation and its causes. The public health response to the epidemic addresses the symptoms—insufficient contact, reduced social infrastructure, barriers to participation—while leaving the character shift Riesman identified largely unexamined.
The character shift is harder to address than a community group referral. It does not respond to social prescribing. It is not amenable to the befriending service. It requires something the managed response cannot provide: the conditions for the development of an inner life that does not require continuous external validation, and the social environments in which that inner life can be brought into genuine contact with other inner lives.
These conditions were not manufactured by the epidemic’s industrialisation. They were present, imperfectly and unevenly, in the slow spaces and the local institutions and the neighbourhood encounters that produced the gradual familiarity from which genuine connection sometimes emerged. Their erosion is part of the same process that produced the other-directed person—the reorganisation of social life around performance, approval, and the continuous monitoring of the crowd’s response.
Riesman published his book in 1950. The radar has been on since then.
The crowd has never been larger.
The isolation has never been more precisely described or less adequately addressed.
The monitoring continues.
The gyroscope, for many people, has stopped.
The Vorpel Foundation