Daniel Herman, who lives in Orland Park, Illinois, and has been working a night-shift machining job since the late ’80s, told me he always wanted to be alone as a kid, though he didn’t understand why he felt that way. The people I spoke with told me they’d always resisted this forced socialization. From a young age, kids shuffle into schools, where they spend all day with their peers. Twenty-first-century American culture is now often associated with profound isolation.Īt the same time, much of modern life still entails being around other people whether you like it or not. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned of a dangerous “loneliness epidemic.” As he wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes it was loneliness.” In recent years, commentators have implicated loneliness in a wide swath of society’s ailments, including steep suicide rates and the opioid crisis. But, in his view, the late 1960s and early ’70s saw those bonds begin to break down, as urban sprawl and new technologies led people to spend more time alone, watching television or driving. In his book Bowling Alone, the political scientist Robert Putnam argued that this urban boom initially spurred a flourishing of connection. That growth exploded in the industrial revolution, as large numbers of people flooded into cities to work in factories, coming into closer contact than ever. Those communities, though, grew larger and more complex over time. When agricultural practices developed, larger populations began to settle down together-but interactions with strangers were still fairly limited. Until about 12,000 years ago, connections were mostly limited to relatively small extended-family groups for hunting and gathering. S ocial interaction looked very different among ancient humans than it does today. When does a desire for solitude cross into something unhealthy? If we take the nocturnals at their word-that they simply like living this way-they complicate one of our core assumptions about human psychology: that all people have the same fundamental needs. I could understand why people might wonder, though, whether a near-total retreat from daytime society would be motivated by more than just introversion. And many others I spoke with had similar reasoning. In fact, he told me, he’s an introvert and this is just how he likes things. Young has worked night shifts on and off since the late 1990s he prefers the peace of night, but that preference is sometimes mistaken for social anxiety or depression. (He didn’t feel comfortable talking on the phone.) “I don’t have any ill will towards people, it’s just exhausting to me.” John Young, a 41-year-old network engineer living in Hammonton, New Jersey, told me he’s “more than happy” living a fairly solitary life. “I’ve tried to hold down day jobs, but I couldn’t handle waking up early, rushing to work, and most of all just … being around people all the time,” Chris Hengen, a 26-year-old nighttime security guard living in Spokane Valley, Washington, told me via email. But the nocturnal people I spoke with feel they don’t need much interaction at all. Deprived of it, people’s physical and mental health tends to decline. I talked to people who painted me a magical picture of their nighttime world: of exquisite, profound solitude of relief of escape.Īccording to most psychologists, humans are inherently social creatures contact with others isn’t just a want-it’s a need. They do this because of the isolation, not in spite of it. But some of them want this very much-enough to seek out those night shifts, to train themselves to wake in the dark. Some of them have to they have sleep disorders, or night-shift jobs. As the sun rises, these nocturnal people settle down to sleep. In this parallel universe, there are rarely crowds, nor traffic, nor lines no awkward shuffling around other shoppers in the grocery aisle, no run-ins with neighbors or cacophony of email notifications. They go to work, drive around, run errands at 24-hour stores. It might even feel like the whole world is drifting off with you.īut out in that dark night, while most people are fast asleep, there’s a whole world of people who are wide awake. Maybe you hear cars honking in the street, or voices from the other side of your apartment wall, or your partner snoring beside you maybe it’s quiet. You slip under the covers and turn out the light.
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