Understanding Loneliness in Pre- and Post-Pandemic Times

Abstract

Loneliness was one the most important matters during The Covid Pandemic. This paper claims that this “lonely situation” was a previous cultural condition. Loneliness belongs to a certain style of life of the Western Culture as an effect of the cultural way of living during the last decades. For this purpose, we will show the way loneliness has been researched during the last 70 years, which is mostly from a psychological and emotional point of view. On the opposite, we will show 2 reasonings to declare the “emotional loneliness” not enough in order to understand this phenomenon. Finally, we will introduce structural cultural elements – taking Sweden as an example of a very modern western socialdemocracy – to show loneliness as way of life and not only a way of feeling. That conclusion allows us to re-ask the cultural control of an isolated individual in pre-Pandemic times.