That is Roy Orbison, pictured, as he is using that exquisite voice of his to sing "Only The Lonely."
You can click right here for the lyrics. If you want to hear Orbison sing that song (or sing it again, I hope; I hope you have already heard him sing it - and I hope more than once) - here is the place you need to click to hear Roy Orbison sing.
This blog posting was stimulated by an article in the February 25, 2025, edition of The Atlantic. The article is titled, "The Anti-Social Century." Orbison is not mentioned, but loneliness sure is:
Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021. (He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.) ...
Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many observers have reduced this phenomenon to the topic of loneliness. In 2023, Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, published an 81-page warning about America’s “epidemic of loneliness,” claiming that its negative health effects were on par with those of tobacco use and obesity. A growing number of public-health officials seem to regard loneliness as the developed world’s next critical public-health issue. The United Kingdom now has a minister for loneliness. So does Japan.
One way to take a step against the growing epidemic of loneliness is to "find some friends," which I have been advocating in various blog postings over the past year or so. If you do embark on an effort to increase your friendship circle (in the "real" world, not "online") you will be taking a step towards the restoration of self-government, too - the kind of government that was the primary motivation for the American Revolution, and the alternative to which is oligarchy, autocracy, and totalitarianism.
Lonely people are powerless people. As Hannah Arendt tells us (and I have said this before, too):
Power comes into being only if and when [people] join themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when, for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another.
Those engaged in the adventure of self-government focus on taking action to change the world.
Surely you must agree that we do have to change the world. Actually, there isn't any viable alternative. So what are we going to do?
Check that Hannah Arendt quote again (with my emphasis added): "Power comes into being only if and when [people] join themselves together for the purpose of action.... It will disappear when, for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another."
So, if we believe Arendt, we need to "get together" to take action. But who really believes that will pay off, right? Orbison give us some guidance, right at the end of his song. He says we've gotta take the chance:
Maybe tomorrow
A new romance
No more sorrow
But that's the chance
You gotta take
Arendt puts it this way: Don't be a deserter!
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