Together We Live Alone (1/4)

Realizing the Paradoxical Individualization of Society

Coworking spaces, coliving spaces, instant messaging, Netflix… In more and more aspects of our lives, we do things together yet are alone.

Partly caused by political and social change, partly caused by technology, this evolution towards an extremely individualistic society has had great emancipation effects but also very negative consequences, with loneliness feelings exploding.

In this four-part story, I’ll try and explain where this phenomenon comes from, how people have reacted to it, and ponder whether this reaction might be effective. Can we escape becoming Wall-E humans?

The four articles will be:

1. Realizing the Paradoxical Individualization of Society
2. How Political and Social Change Induced Individualization (to be published)
3. How Technological Development Induced Individualization (to be published)
4. Will the Efforts to Counter Individualization Be Vain? (to be published)

Realizing the Paradoxical Individualization of Society

Dixon is a famous DJ and producer of house and techno music. A co-founder of the Innervisions label, he participated in popularizing a deep house genre made of ‘soaring strings, grand emotion, and cinematic flourishes’.

The Berlin-based DJ also created a clothing line called “Together We Dance Alone”. The name brilliantly captures the mood of electronic music events, where partygoers gather to dance alone in front of a DJ (with recreational drugs sometimes boosting their solitary daze). Here is the tagline:

‘Deconstructing clubwear to catch the madness and the sadness of dancing exhilarated but exhausted, together but alone’

A few months after I learned about Dixon’s fashion label, I realized that the ‘together yet alone’ narrative wasn’t only applicable to electronic music clubs.

Together We Work Alone

I was seated at the central large table of my coworking space in Paris, my mind drifting away. Looking at the people around me, it suddenly struck me: Dixon’s slogan applied perfectly to us. We were freelance workers, alone but together, together but alone. Not really dancing, but each one of us working on our own projects: ‘Together We Work Alone’.

I then looked for occurrences of these paradoxical ‘together yet alone’ situations in other territories of our 21st-century lives. And I found many of them: in the way we speak, we eat, we entertain ourselves… It’s not just coworking spaces:

• Together We Sleep Alone (flat-sharing and coliving spaces)
• Together We Talk Alone (instant messaging)
• Together We Eat Alone (home meal delivery)
• Together We Watch Alone (Netflix & online streaming services)
• Together We Orgasm Alone (online porn)
• … and there are many more

Not all of them are the same, but there is one common characteristic: people share an experience, without really living it together — without being fully aligned with one another, without sharing a purpose.

First I’ll go through these five examples, then I’ll sort out these different circumstances and lay out how they result from an evolution of our societies.

Together We Sleep Alone

@ WeLive

Did you ever hear about coliving? The concept is simple:

‘It involves renting private bedrooms in dorm-like buildings where living rooms, kitchens, and even bathrooms are shared. Utilities and WiFi are included, as are a number of amenities, such as house cleaning services and catered parties.’ (Vox)

So you share physical spaces and some moments with your roommates, then get back to your room to sleep alone. Unless you get lucky — I am ruling out couples, who appear to be a marginal demographic.

Coliving spaces are growing fastly around the world’s major cities, targeting a prefamily demographic of single young professionals. Global funding for coliving startups or behemoths (WeLive, Common, Quarters, Colonies…) has increased by 210% since 2015 and is expected to reach $3.2 bn in 2019 (JLL).

You might say that flat-sharing has been around for years. So how is coliving a new trend?

Coliving is the next evolution of flat-sharing. It aims at answering a growing problem better than traditional flat-sharing: that more and more young workers are looking to share their homes.

Flatsharing used to be a transitory phase between student and adult life: people chose to flatshare because they were single and didn’t want to live alone and because they couldn’t afford to pay full rent. Now late marriage, and the rent increase in major cities worldwide have caused this situation to extend until people’s late twenties and thirties.

‘Fifty years ago, 76 percent of 26-year-olds were married and cohabitating with spouses. Today, that share has plummeted to just 24 percent. (…) Meanwhile, living alone, living with roommates, and living with an unmarried partner have also become more common.’ (US Census Bureau, cited by Apartment List)

Thus, the amount of single young professionals is rising. But as their incomes rise, these people want to escape the loneliness induced by living alone while also avoiding the common downsides of flat-sharing. Coliving spaces have understood it and aim their services at this demographic.

Coliving is more fueled by social factors than economic ones. Coliving spaces are quite expensive compared to flat-sharing — and even sometimes compared to studios (economic factors push people to adopt more traditional strategies: moving away from urban centers to seek lower rents or turn to traditional flat-sharing).

‘A one-bedroom unit at WeLive’s Wall Street location costs $3,845 per month, while a studio costs $3,175 (both include private beds, bathrooms, and small living areas). (…) At Common’s Williamsburg Brooklyn location, a private bedroom in a suite with a shared bathroom and other roommates starts at $2,130. The median price for a full one-bedroom apartment elsewhere in Williamsburg is a bit more, at $2,840.’ (Vox)

Coliving spaces are targeted at young Millenials workers, often pursuing careers in tech and creative industries — and many of whom feel increasingly lonely according to an array of studies. (TIME Magazine, YouGov).

Coliving spaces are the realm of ‘Together We Sleep Alone’. When you’re coliving, you’re obviously sharing space and moments with your roommates. But in the end, you always go back to your room and sleep alone.

Of course, all the amenities of coliving spaces make it an attractive solution for professionals who as they age and as their income grows, don’t want to be alone and don’t want to flatshare anymore. It’s a solution that may look as a long-term one. But you’re not actually sharing any purpose with your roommates: you’re not living together, planning on building a future together. You’re together — but in the end, you’re alone.

Together We Talk Alone

Isn’t instant messaging a kind of ‘Together We Talk Alone’?

Thanks to smartphones, at every moment, we virtually carry with us every person we ever knew, and we can start a conversation with them just by putting our hands in our pockets. We talk and we come together.

Yet at the same time, we’re not physically with them, we’re alone behind our screens. We talk together — but we’re alone. (We’ll get in more details about instant messaging in the third chapter of this series: ‘How technological development induced Individualization’)

Together We Eat Alone

Will the explosion of food delivery kill the traditional togetherness of the restaurant experience?

If you step back and look at the ‘history’ of eating out, there seems to be a solid trend from sharing meals together in a dedicated place to sharing them in smaller groups at home.

Two clients ordering sushi from a Japanese restaurant on Deliveroo will share the experience of eating food from the same place: but they will experience it alone, each in their own homes. Food delivery apps break up the shared experience of the same restaurant.

Of course, you may not be alone when ordering food online: you may be with your loved one, your friends, etc. Nonetheless, there is a shift from an experience that was lived outside, collectively with strangers, to an experience lived within a smaller group, inside a person’s home.

And there is a competition between eating out and eating in: figures show that food delivery does cannibalize ‘dine-in meals’. A 2017 Morgan Stanley study on the US market found that ‘43% of consumers who ordered food for delivery say it replaced a meal at a restaurant, up from 38% in 2016’.

So are we going towards the slow disappearance of restaurants?

What is certain is that the current trend will strengthen. Online food delivery behemoths are working hard to lower costs for consumers, with the opening of ‘dark kitchens’. These are fully equipped kitchens in which chosen restaurants are invited to cook meals to be delivered under their names, exclusively on the app. There are no counters. Traditional restaurants, which have high fixed costs (rent, headcount…) and already see their profitability decrease as deliveries increase, are likely to experience a hard competition from these new ‘virtual restaurants’.

Deliveroo’s dark kitchens — Photo by Daniel Ziffer for ABC News

‘Deliveroo now plan to increase the supply of these virtual restaurants internationally, using ultra-low-cost prefabricated “Roo Boxes,” and by converting low-cost spaces into delivery hubs. According to one authoritative source, speaking off the record, a portable kitchen can be created for as little as $12,000. By comparison on costs, productivity, and scalability, these lean kitchen units are 10x more efficient, or more. A single operation can ship over 2,000 dishes per day; an exponential increase in throughput compared to a hybrid restaurant supplier. And this is just the start of it.

Huge savings on real estate and staffing can be passed on to consumers through this new micro-industrial kitchen model. Real estate costs alone can be reduced by 90% or more in London. Next generation automation technologies promise to extend their cost advantages even further — well beyond the reach of incumbents. Amazon have already done this with warehousing. Robots and drones will eventually deliver for both companies.’ (Forbes)

[Amazon lead a $575m investment round in Deliveroo in may 2019 — for now on hold due to a UK Competition and Markets Authority investigation]

Can you see the evolution? We may end up having large areas of our cities where the only way to ‘eat out’ is actually to ‘eat in’ at home via an app.

Both customers’ preferences and restaurants’ cost structure assist in this way. Many restaurants may be forced to close, unable to compete with dark kitchens and break even with their fixed costs. And customers increasingly prefer to eat at home rather than go out to restaurants, because it’s more convenient, or because they’re alone (it’s especially true for new generations, who prefer in-house activities to going out).

So I think we’re heading towards a world where more and more we’re going to eat together but alone.

Together We Watch Alone

Technology has enabled many performing and visual arts to be enjoyed not only in physical spaces where crowds gather together but in the aloneness of everyone’s home and room.

Movie theatres may have represented an intermediary space, where people gathered to watch a performing art transformed into a virtual format ready to be multiplied and projected in everyone’s home.

When television arrived, it allowed people to access shows from their own screen, and this individualization of entertainment accelerated with the multiplication of devices (multiple televisions in the same home, laptops, smartphones, tablets…), the Internet and online streaming services. On Netflix, we watch the same movies and series as other people, together but alone, alone but together.

This evolution also happened in sports: stadiums used to be the only place you could support your team, and television broke up the sport experience. We support our team together, but alone. In some countries as in Italy, the impact on stadium attendance has been very strong. (In many others, though, like Germany or England, sports broadcasting has caused the number of supporters to multiply without affecting game ticket sales.)

Together We Orgasm Alone

Photo by Cheryl Gerber for the New York Times

Internet pornography allows everybody to have an orgasm when they want, where they want, fantasizing every type of male/female they want, whatever sex act they enjoy, without any risk, without any judgment, without fear, without effort.

Of course, masturbation has always existed — and has always been accused of all sorts of wrongs. However, I believe Internet pornography is a game-changer. Easy access to infinite libraries of sex videos is changing how people masturbate. It used to depend on active thinking, and now simply depends on external stimulation. This easy access to climaxing induces addictive behaviors, which cause more and more people (especially young men) to experience a loss of libido and erectile dysfunctions. And less incitement to look for a partner than for a good video: more and more, together we orgasm alone.

Enjoying real-life sex less is perhaps the best-known consequence of porn over-consumption, and a well understood problem in the 21st century. In the 1980s, anti-porn protesters always argued it would turn men into monstrous pests. If anything, it seems to have done the opposite; it is not uncommon to hear of young men so accustomed to viewing porn of whatever variety, whenever they want it, that the labour of having actual sex is seen as unnecessary.

Then there’s a physiological impact. (…) Last year, for instance, NHS experts noted an increase in erectile dysfunction in otherwise healthy young men, and thought excessive porn use was the most likely factor at play. (The Telegraph)

→ Together We Live Alone (TWLA)

This trend that seems to be reaching every aspect of our lives is what I call ‘Together We Live Alone’, or ‘TWLA’.

Let’s try and put things in order

Now that I have round up a few examples, I would like to make some distinctions to better understand what has happened and what’s at stake.

Considering the above list (talk, watch…), I realized I had mixed up two different kinds of situations, which should now be distinguished. They both combine a form of socialization with a form of a solitary experience yet are different.

There are:

• ‘Together We Live Alone’ (TWLA) circumstances where people are physically together, yet live the experience alone, or aren’t sharing any common purpose. You may find in this category: electronic music clubs, coworking spaces, coliving spaces.

First case: Physically together yet living the experience alone

• TWLA circumstances where people do live an experience together yet are physically alone (as we said, not always alone — but there’s a shift from an experience that was lived outside, collectively with strangers, to an experience lived within a smaller group, inside a person’s home). Technology enables these situations, and you may find in this category: instant messaging group chats & social media, home meal delivery, television and online streaming services, porn websites…

Second case: Living the experience together yet physically alone (or in smaller groups than what used to be)

So there are two ways of being alone but together / together but alone:

1. Being physically together yet living the experience alone
2. Living the experience together yet being physically alone

Do these two have anything in common? Do they portray the same phenomenon?

What the second case portrays is a trend of rising individualization: activities that used to be enjoyed within a large group of people are now doable within a small group, or even alone. The only way to watch a show (a play, a musical, a movie…) used to be to go to a theatre, now you just need to connect to Netflix.

The first case looks like a reaction to this rising individualization. People who are living an experience physically detached from their fellow humans decide to regroup with others who are in the same situation. Freelance workers or remote workers who are sharing an experience with colleagues or clients from a distance, decide to regroup with other workers. And it’s the same for coliving spaces.

So I thought about it and drew this sketch explaining how our societies look to have evolved.

I’ll explore next why this individualization happened and is happening (from Step 1 to Step 2), and whether the reactions to this individualization (from Step 2 to Step 3) can counter its negative consequences — the main one being a loneliness epidemic.

The next two articles will focus on how this individualization of society was the outcome of two major trends (the last and fourth one being on Step 3):

• Political, economic and social movements in Western societies starting from the 18th century
• The technological progress of the second half of the 20th century

See you soon ✌️