I’m an anthropologist. I use social science to help me understand the world, but sometimes I need sci-fi. Here’s why.

Sci-Fi as Truth-Teller

Science fiction excels at showing us truths we need to see. It’s the genre of “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin, 1979) and “defamiliarization” (Jameson, 1982), which means (in a simplified nutshell) that it takes the world as it is and makes it strange enough to perceive what we can’t otherwise notice.

In Pluribus, Carol is literally the last individual on Earth since everyone else has been absorbed into a collective. She is, by definition, the loneliest person who has ever lived. In Murderbot, the protagonist’s deepest desire is to be left alone with its media feeds and opt out of connection. In Severance, the entire premise is that you’ve been severed from yourself, and isn’t the loneliest relationship possible the one between you and the person you were before clock-in?

Project Hail Mary puts a man alone on a spaceship with no memory of why he’s there. His only companion is an alien he can’t initially communicate with. It is, at its core, about two lonely beings learning to be less lonely together.

So yes, we are lonely. And beyond the lived experiences that Templeton describes so poignantly in the Reactor piece, we have evidence that loneliness isn’t just individual.

Society and Loneliness

The Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness made it official: loneliness is a societal problem. An epidemic. When Vivek Murthy issued that advisory in 2023, the signal it sent was: this is a crisis that threatens public health.

But the loneliness epidemic didn’t start with Twitter or Facebook, although social media has not helped anything.

Robert Putnam saw it coming in 2000. Bowling Alone, his landmark study of America’s collapsing social capital, documented the slow death of the institutions that used to hold people together. Community groups. Religious organizations. The PTA. The lodge. The bowling league. All of it, quietly, steadily dissolving. Putnam called it a fifty-year trend. We’re now twenty-five years past his book, and the trend hasn’t reversed.

Zygmunt Bauman, also in 2000, had a name for what came next: liquid modernity. In a liquid world, relationships are temporary, identities are unstable, and belonging is something you rent rather than own. You don’t join a community. You join a Discord server where you may only know a fraction of the people behind the usernames, if any. You don’t know your neighbors. The structures that used to provide stability have been replaced by systems that provide convenience, and all these little things compound to systemic loneliness.

What Sci-Fi Offers That Scholars Can’t

It’s hard to write about the collapse of social capital in a way that captures the imagination, but you can write about a woman who is the last individual on Earth, and suddenly the reader feels what it means to be disconnected from the collective.

Scholars write about anomie (Durkheim, 1897). They write about liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000). They write about collapsing social capital (Putnam, 2000). And yes, this work is invaluable. I’m not here to push back on the value of the social sciences.

But scholars don’t always offer hope.

Science fiction can.

In a sci-fi story, you’re not reading about loneliness because scholars tell you it exists. You’re experiencing it. You’re on a spaceship with someone who speaks another language. You’re watching a screen while everyone else lives it. You’re the alien who is the only one who understands the human heart. And in that experience, you’re not just observing loneliness. You’re feeling it. You’re feeling with the character.

And that’s where hope lives.

Because in the stories we love, even when it’s about isolation, we see the value of connection, and the lengths the protagonists go to to connect. These aren’t just stories about loneliness being terrible. They’re stories about how humans (and post-humans, and aliens, of course) figure out ways to connect anyway.

Scholars diagnose the disease. Science fiction shows us that we can survive it — and sometimes, even thrive.

What It Means

So when Molly Templeton writes about loneliness in sci-fi, she’s right. What the genre is doing right now is holding up a mirror and saying: this is what it feels like. And millions of readers (and viewers) are looking into it and recognizing themselves.

But here’s the difference: in the stories we read, people figure it out. They find ways to connect. They find ways to be less lonely. The question is what we’re going to do about it now that we can see it so clearly — and the stories tell us we can.

Finn Agler is the blogging pen name of R.G. Luchmun, a cultural anthropologist writing science fiction about first contact, time travel, and the places where cultures collide. Follow along for more intersections of anthropology and speculative fiction.

Bauman, Zygmunt (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity Press.

Durkheim, Émile (1897). Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Presses universitaires de France.

Murthy, Vivek H. (2023). “The Surgeon General’s Call to Action on Social Connection, Loneliness, and Isolation.” The U.S. Surgeon General.

Putnam, Robert D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster.

Suvin, Darko (1979). Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale University Press.