Disconnection

Lost Connections

Johann Hari · 2018

Hari’s argument is that a good deal of what we treat as individual malfunction is actually disconnection: from meaningful work, from other people, from the natural world, from a future you can picture. He is a journalist rather than a clinician and the research has been argued over, so read it as a case being made rather than a settled account. What it does well, and what makes it worth the time, is take the feeling seriously instead of locating the whole problem inside your head.

Sorrow and Bliss

Meg Mason · 2020

Martha is forty, her marriage has just ended, and something has been wrong since she was seventeen that nobody has named. Mason is very funny, which is what makes the book bearable, and she is extraordinarily good on the specific loneliness of loving people properly and still being unable to let them near. If you have ever found yourself performing a version of yourself at your own dinner table, Martha will be uncomfortably familiar.

The Myth of Normal

Gabor Maté · 2022

Maté’s central claim is that many of us learnt early to put authenticity aside in order to keep our attachments, and then went on doing it long after it stopped being necessary. That is disconnection at its root: not from other people first, but from what you actually feel and want. It is a long book and he is not shy about his opinions, but the chapters on the cost of being agreeable are worth the whole thing.

Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf · 1925

One June day in London, a woman buys flowers and gives a party. Woolf keeps slipping inside people’s heads and out again, and what you notice is how much of each person never reaches anybody else: Clarissa surrounded by guests and thinking about a girl she kissed thirty years ago; Septimus, back from the war, unable to make anyone hear him. A hundred years old and still the sharpest thing written about being visible and unreached at the same time.

Together

Vivek H. Murthy · 2020

Written by a former US Surgeon General who kept meeting the same thing behind everything else he was asked to treat. The useful distinction he draws is between the different kinds of connection a person needs — the intimate, the relational, the collective — because you can have plenty of one and none of another and not understand why you still feel adrift. Practical, unhurried, and less depressing than the subject suggests.

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke · 2020

A man lives alone in an endless house of statues and tides, keeping careful notes, entirely at peace, and gradually the reader works out what he does not: that he has been cut off from his own history. It is short, strange and unexpectedly tender. Clarke wrote it during years of illness that kept her largely housebound, and it reads like a book by someone who has thought hard about what a self is when the usual connections are gone.

Digital Minimalism

Cal Newport · 2019

The practical one. Newport’s point is that the small constant contact our phones provide is not a weak version of real connection, it is a different thing altogether, and it quietly crowds out the sort that actually feeds you. He suggests a thirty-day clear-out and then a deliberate rebuild. Not everyone wants a programme, but if the distance you feel has a screen-shaped hole in the middle of it, this is the most useful book here.

Severance

Ling Ma · 2018

Candace keeps going into a Manhattan office long after a fever has emptied the city, because she cannot think what else to do. Ma’s joke is that the infected keep performing the routines of their old lives, and it is not always obvious who is infected. Bleakly funny, and very good on the way a life can look entirely functional from outside while nothing in it is actually landing.