1. I HAVE A LOT IN COMMON WITH THE PEOPLE AROUND ME
There are ways to see individual atoms and galaxies 13.5 billion light-years from Earth, but there is no microscope to see lonely people. Loneliness, distinct from isolation, has the same heightened mortality risks as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it a public health “epidemic” in 2017. The following year, the U.K. appointed a “minister for loneliness.”

That is why the scientists are here—to make quantifiable a subjective feeling.

The youngest member of the team is in her late twenties. She is given the task of greeting the participants who arrive at the loneliness clinic and walks them through the twenty-item questionnaire. They are to rate how frequently they feel each item. Every six months for the next fifteen years, they will submit their responses again so the outcomes can be tracked over time.

The other scientists call it the worst job, but she is happy to have it. Although the participants often come with their heads ducked in shame, she likes looking them in the eye.

2. I LACK COMPANIONSHIP
The highest loneliness score is 80. The score range for moderate loneliness is 28–43. The average elderly score is 61, the number trailing upward with age. For those who have lost spouses, it is even higher than the average.

A man loses his wife after fifty years of marriage. They had always assumed he would be the first to go, as was more statistically likely. On their long walks around the neighborhood after dinner, his wife would kid about moving into a commune with her book club when that happened. Privately, he was glad that she never talked about remarrying, not even as a joke. But he liked the idea of her living out her days surrounded by friends.

Neither could have predicted the malignancy growing in her lungs until she collapsed one day before they left the house for their evening walk.

His son returns and they both solemnly thank people for the endless flood of casseroles and condolences. The evening before his son leaves, the two are eating a lasagna left by the woman who ran the book club. They sit on opposite ends of the table. The son picks at his plate, rearranging the food into little piles.

“Are you dating anyone?” the man asks.

The son shakes his head. He’s too busy with work, and dating apps are exhausting.

“You should think about it.”

His son sets down his fork and rolls his eyes. “You’re starting to sound like mom.”

For a moment, they both contemplate the empty seat between them, the tense of the sentence. Present, even though she is no longer with them.

The man uses his napkin to dab at his eyes, “It’s good to have someone.”

3. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO REALLY UNDERSTAND ME
When the scientist isn’t doing the grunt work at the loneliness clinic, she fosters cats and goes to the movies every week with her friend who loves romantic comedies. The protagonists are always women who are isolated. They might be high-powered and famous or lost and aimless, but their shared condition is one she knows well. The movies always tout marriage or starting a family as a solution, though the scientist knows from her research that the reality is not so straightforward.

In addition to the questionnaires, she transcribes interviews with subjects. There are conversations with transracial adoptees who were raised in white suburbs and international students who spend their winter holidays on campus because flights home are too expensive. Some subjects feel like their partners are strangers. Others have grown children who refuse to talk to them.

When the scientist came out to her parents as bisexual in high school, her parents hadn’t outright rejected her but brushed it off as a phase. When she insisted it wasn’t, her dad blamed himself for letting her spend so much time online as a child. It no doubt had given her all kinds of ideas. She reassured him that Neopets was not the cause.

Even the scientist must admit that watching romantic comedies is comforting. For two hours, it’s nice to bask in the safety of a convenient narrative where the happy ending is guaranteed. Afterwards, she and her friend go to the twenty-four-hour diner across the street to discuss the movies, where the same friendly waitress brings them burger platters with extra fries. The friend usually laments her own perpetual state of singleness.

“Aren’t you worried you’ll end up a crazy cat lady?”

“I already am a crazy cat lady,” the scientist points out.

“Maybe I should be like you and just lean into it. I’ll name one of the cats Emily Dickinson.”

What the scientist doesn’t say is that loneliness is subjective. It lives in the gap between the relationships you want and the relationships you have.

She licks the salt from her fingers and smiles at her friend, “That’s not a bad idea. I’m actually thinking of adopting this black cat from the shelter . . .” 

4. I FEEL LEFT OUT
Every weeknight, the son orders dinner to the office where he works late. Around six o’clock, the bank’s lobby is flooded with delivery couriers bearing pad thai, sushi, and salads. This is convenient since very few of them are home long enough to buy or use groceries. The investment bankers consider this a “perk,” since the company’s dinner allowance can usually provide enough food for two meals.

The son’s food never lasts until the next day. He does not like eating in front of others, so he picks at his takeout in the conference room until people have finished their own meals. When he finally returns to his empty apartment close to midnight, he heats up the leftovers and eats quickly with the television on. Eating helps take his mind off demanding bosses and even more demanding clients. Eating brings him back to his college days, when he and his roommate made firecrackers and studied until the edibles kicked in. Eating reminds him of his mother, who he misses (though he hasn’t been able to stomach a lasagna since the day of the funeral). Eating is, above all, easy. He needs something easy in his life.

The moments of reprieve, however, are brief. Afterwards, he avoids his reflection in the mirror, ignoring the bloated feeling in his stomach.

The bankers like to go out together on the weekends—dinner followed by drinking—and the son politely declines the invitations. Everyone always ends up talking about their various attempts at “self-optimization.” They “swear by the keto diet” and brag about their fitness regimens. They get drunk on vodka sodas because they’re low-calorie, but start pounding shots until they need to soak up the alcohol with pizza. They then starve themselves and call it “fasting.”

The son has cycled on and off diets for most of his life.

One of the few times the son goes out with the bankers, a coworker mentions his own current weight.

“It’s the heaviest I’ve ever been,” he sighs. “Kill me.”

The son does the math in his head—that number is what his goal weight has been the last five years—and it makes him want to die a little bit too.

5. THERE IS NO ONE I CAN TURN TO
The man receives an invitation in the mail from someone named Romeo. He thinks it’s a joke until his son asks about it on one of their phone calls.

“Who is Romeo?” he asks.

“It’s a group,” his son explains. “ROMEO—Retired Old Men Eating Out. I was doing some research online and saw there’s a local chapter in your area.”

The man laughs. “I think I’m doing just fine on my own.”

He looks around his house, even though his son cannot see the state of it: an overgrown yard, furniture collecting dust, and stacks of magazines with his wife’s name on them. It’s been years since she passed, and he still hasn’t packed up any of her belongings. He’s rejected his son’s offers to pay for a house cleaner or come home to help him downsize.

It takes a while for his son to formulate a reply. The man braces to be berated, their dynamic now inverted as they age, but there’s only weariness in his son’s appeal. “Will you just try going once?”

The ROMEO Club meets at different restaurants on a weekly basis. When the man shows up at Red Lobster, the ROMEOs immediately wave him over. They’re wearing matching aqua blue polos, and he feels out of place in his own plain brown sweater. He tries sitting in a chair at the end, but the organizer insists he sit right in the middle.

The man picks at his Cheddar Bay Biscuit, bracing himself for a barrage of questions or a sales pitch. Instead, the table is lively with chatter. They ask each other about their health conditions, about their kids, about the college football game, about next week’s movie outing on Senior Discount day. It’s only after the main course has been taken away and they’re sipping on coffees that the organizer finally asks the man about himself.

The man explains he originally moved to Illinois for a manufacturing job and then transferred to the corporate side. He has a son who lives in New York. Most of his family still lives in Georgia. His wife passed away three years ago.

Many of the men nod. They are also widowers, or their children have similarly expressed worry about them.

The organizer wipes away a dab of cappuccino foam from his upper lip.

“I first joined because I realized that there’s no escaping it,” he says. “No matter how much family you have, there’s going to be some point in time when you’re all by yourself. Sure, you can run some errands in the day or go out for lunch. But it’s nighttime that gets you. You won’t know it until you’re there—that void. Something’s missing and you can’t place it.”

Another man shouts, “Amen!”

The organizer’s solemn expression is quickly replaced with a grin. “ROMEO just takes the edge off a bit. Doesn’t it?”

The table murmurs their agreement. It’s a flash of vulnerability, and then the group returns to their loud conversations and gentle ribbing.

Before they walk to their cars, the organizer gives the man a Red Lobster napkin with his number on it.

“Call whenever. I mean it.”

The man shoves the napkin in his coat and drives home. The dinner was pleasant, but had it really come to joining a group like this? He grips the steering wheel all the way home, as if to will the recognition he felt in the organizer’s words out of his body.

The house is quiet. The quiet is deafening. The man barely sleeps, and when he does, he dreams he is standing over a deep pit, looking down at another version of himself.

In the morning, he fishes the wrinkled napkin from his pocket and smooths it out on the table.

6. MY INTERESTS AND IDEAS ARE NOT SHARED BY THOSE AROUND ME
Harry Harlow was an American psychologist whose rhesus monkey studies were foundational to behavioral science around companionship and caregiving. The studies were controversial because of the brutal breeding methods and other unnecessarily cruel treatment of the animals. Some argued that the benefits of the research outweighed the costs.

In one experiment, baby monkeys were isolated after birth and reintroduced to their colony at different times. The more time they’d spent in total solitude, the more devastating the consequences. Those who’d been alone for fewer than six months went through an adjustment period. In their initial shock, they clutched themselves, rocking back and forth. Some starved themselves to death. Within a few weeks, most were able to socialize and join the colony. But for those who’d been alone for a full year, assimilation was almost impossible. They lacked the ability to communicate with other monkeys, who not only bullied and rejected them, but even wanted them dead.

When the scientist first learned about Harry Harlow’s work in college, the word that stuck with her was that the monkeys’ social abilities had been “obliterated.”

She immediately looked up his backstory. Who was this man whose scientific findings informed so much about emotional attachments and social and cognitive development, yet at such a damaging cost? She now pinpoints this discovery as the moment she became interested in studying loneliness.

The scientist found that Harlow was married three times, twice to the same woman. Clara Mears and Margaret Kuenne were accomplished academics in their own right, but both stopped working after they married him to raise their children. Harlow died an alcoholic, depressed, and estranged from his children.

Other people in her class did not care about Harlow as a person, only as a researcher. But the scientist could not help but imagine Harlow, passed out in his office so frequently his graduate students came to expect it, or brought so low by his second wife’s death that he checked himself into the Mayo Clinic for depression, as anything except “obliterated.” She could not divorce the man from his research.

Time and time again, his studies reflected the importance of love and care only by proving the undeniable truth that loneliness is violence.

7. I FEEL ISOLATED FROM OTHERS
The brain interprets the pain of social rejection almost the same as it does the pain of physical injury. The anterior cingulate cortex reacts to the distress triggered by pain, not necessarily the pain itself. As a result, the human body perceives social distress as dangerous. Once people have experienced enough social rejection, they can develop a paranoia of being dismissed and may start to perceive others preemptively as a threat.

A man pulls the trigger at a Walmart, in a park, near a concert, in an elementary school, in a nightclub, on a subway. Each headline is a Mad Libs of tragedy. The shooter is often described by the media as a “lone wolf.”

The man reads the news alert about the subway car shooting and immediately calls his son, whose office is near one of those stops. His heart is in his throat as the phone rings and goes to voicemail, rings and goes to voicemail. With shaking hands, he taps out a text message: Are you safe?

The son replies half an hour later, Was in a meeting. I’m safe.

In the following days, the media will find evidence of the shooter’s racist rants on various social media platforms and heavily trafficked message boards. They will also overwhelmingly identify the shooter as a “loner.”

8. PEOPLE ARE AROUND ME BUT NOT WITH ME
The son walks home from work on the day of the shooting. There are already people gathering for a vigil in Washington Square Park. At a crosswalk, he checks his phone and sees missed calls from his father. On social media, there is an outpouring of grief that he can only stand to scroll through until the light turns green.

When he arrives at work the next day, his boss brings him into his corner office.

“How are you feeling?”

His boss has never asked about anyone’s feelings before, so he’s never taken the lack of tact personally.

“Feelings about what, sir?” he asks.

His boss, a white man, shuffles his feet. He mentions the shooting but not the fact that the shooter, a white supremacist, had purposefully targeted the Black community in his rampage.

“The VP prepared a statement to send to all employees. We were wondering if you could sign off on it before it’s sent out,” his boss says. “And perhaps you’d like to lead a, uh, support space for the office.”

When he doesn’t immediately respond, his boss leans in conspiratorially. “Some of the younger analysts have been making a fuss about the lack of ‘listening sessions’ so this is what we’re going with.”

The man surveys the rest of the open floor plan through the glass windows. He did not have delusions about the environment he’d chosen, where he is one of five Black employees in the entire New York office and the only one in his division at his seniority. He bites back a question about human resources that would make his boss squirm.

He declines the invitation, invoking work, the common language they all understand. His boss sags with relief.

The man returns to his desk but is unable to focus. His father would say it’s better that the company is at least trying. But the son would’ve preferred his boss to have said nothing at all.

He checks social media on his phone when no one’s looking; all he sees are op-eds, links to GoFundMes for the victims’ families, and grainy cell phone footage of the aftermath. The repetition breaks him a bit more with each tragedy, but he feels like this is one of his perverted ways of bearing witness.

In the afternoon, his college roommate reaches out. Their friendship has always been one that requires little maintenance. Campus housing made them an unlikely match, and they liked the ease of this kind of peripheral friendship. They lived their parallel lives—the son deeply involved in the business fraternity and the roommate in Ultimate Frisbee—with the punctuation of occasional intense conversations. These were usually conducted late at night, facilitated by the roommate’s supply of weed.

You doing ok?

The roommate’s short text is an invitation to say as much or as little as he wants, but the son doesn’t want to be a burden and doesn’t even have anything coherent to say, so he simply sends back, Holding up, hope you’re doing ok too.

Let’s catch up soon? his friend asks.

For sure! he replies, because it feels like the easy thing to do.

9. THERE ARE PEOPLE I FEEL CLOSE TO
The scientist develops an intense crush on the waitress at the diner she and her friend frequent. The waitress is no-nonsense with every other customer, but always has a wide smile for her. She’s not a fan of romantic comedies but admires their dedication to the genre. From their moments of chitchat, she reveals she’s waitressing while trying to make it on Broadway as a dancer.

If this were a movie, the scientist would have the courage to write down her phone number on one of the receipts. Instead, she accepts the Coke from the waitress even when she orders a ginger ale to avoid caffeine. It doesn’t really matter. She always has a hard time falling asleep on those nights anyway, unable to stop imagining tracing the curve of the waitress’s cheek with her finger.

To her surprise a few months later, she gets a text from the waitress that says, your friend gave me your number, do you finally want to get an actual dinner?

Dinner turns into more dates, more activities, more time spent together. One lazy morning as pale sunshine streams in through the curtains, the scientist offhandedly tells the waitress, now her girlfriend, that she has never been to Coney Island. The girlfriend coaxes her from their warm bed, insisting that they should go. Right now.

The scientist, who normally likes plans and well-organized spreadsheets, feels giddy at this kind of surrender. They eat corn dogs with mustard, dip their toes in the ocean, ride the rickety rollercoasters, and lose all their tickets trying to win stuffed animals. The day is a movie montage that ends with them on a Ferris wheel. They kiss at the top and laugh at their own cheesiness. God, we’re disgusting.

The man operating the ride steps away for a smoke break so they’re left spinning. Each revolution, it feels like they can only go higher, higher, higher.

10. I FEEL IN TUNE WITH THE PEOPLE AROUND ME
The world is aging, aging faster than countries can prepare for. China builds apartment complexes that house the elderly alongside beaming couples and young families. Japan launches a “watchover service” for the elderly, partnering with Apple to provide free tablets to connect them to services, healthcare, and their loved ones. In this country, nursing homes fill up. Caregivers churn, flame out. A comedian talks for an hour about “the graying of America” on a Netflix special that only trends for three hours before disappearing from social media feeds.

When the father begins to confuse his words and forgets things between their calls, the son reaches out more frequently. Every week, the son asks about quiz nights, bingo, and the ROMEO Club. You have to stay active starts off as advice, but soon sounds like a threat. After ten minutes comes the same excuse: I’m still at work, I have to go. The phone calls are never long enough for the man to assure his son that forgetting a date here and there is just life, not cause for concern.

The man learns about a scientific study from the ROMEO Club organizer that seems interesting and gives him an excuse to see his son. He flies to New York City to enroll. His son takes a few days off but still steps away to take phone calls during dinner, at the museum.

You work too hard seems insufficient but the man says it anyway. The son’s back stiffens, then wilts. It’s nothing he doesn’t know, and nothing he’s going to change.

At the loneliness clinic, the man wipes eraser scum off a stack of forms. The scientist asks him about his interest in their study. He proudly tells her about the ROMEOs. Despite the crowded waiting room, her attention never wavers from him.

“How did you find out about the social club?” she asks.

He simply says, “My son.”

The scientist smiles and meets his gaze. “He must care about you very much.”

11. I AM UNHAPPY BEING SO WITHDRAWN
The girlfriend’s lease is up and it makes financial sense for her to move in with the scientist. In the first few months, they take joy in discovering each other’s likes (the scientist’s: a precise arrangement of the dishes in the drying rack) and dislikes (the girlfriend’s: leaving the microwave door open). They take a photo together with the scientist’s cat to send as a holiday card. They have friends over, and when the girlfriend sits in the scientist’s lap, the entire room coos with delight. The scientist marvels at the hairball their strands create on the shower wall—her straight black hair against the girlfriend’s wavy honey curls.

When the scientist tells her parents about her new relationship, the first question out of her mom’s mouth is, “But you’ll probably still marry a guy, right?”

The honeymoon period ends after two months. The girlfriend doesn’t receive many callbacks or book any auditions. She gets sick of her job at the diner and quits. Possession grips her, making her keep tabs on the scientist’s whereabouts and asking why she doesn’t text more during the day.

The scientist hesitates to reply, Because I’m at work, knowing it will make the girlfriend fume and feel guilty about her own situation. She tries to cheer the girlfriend up and reassure her of her love. It begins to feel like a losing battle. There is a tightening in her stomach every time she returns home, waiting on the threshold to step inside.

The weekly movie ritual between the scientist and the friend has long been abandoned. The friend is also seeing someone and seems happy. They run into each other at a party one night and embrace, shouting their entire conversation over the din of the music.

“How are things?” the friend yells, an expectant smile on her face.

Terrible! the scientist wants to scream.

But the room is pulsing and sweating with good music, the girlfriend is in a better mood at the moment, and the scientist doesn’t want to bring down the vibe with the truth.

Great! she wails in reply.

12. I CAN FIND COMPANIONSHIP WHEN I WANT IT
The son calls a phone sex line every Monday evening. It initially begins out of curiosity when a loud coworker mentions it after one too many drinks at a company dinner. He doesn’t know where to begin, so he turns to the internet. There are as many articles reviewing phone sex numbers as there are the latest tech gadgets.

After trying a few different numbers, he finds an operator he likes. Her voice isn’t too breathy and sultry, like the greeting that informs him of the instructions. She lets him vent and talk about his dad, how he misses his mom. He describes his body to her and she asks him, What would you do with me if you had me there with you?

She is one of the most consistent relationships in his life. If that counts.

13. THERE ARE PEOPLE I CAN TALK TO
The scientist monitors the loneliness clinic’s hotline twice a week. It’s a service for participants to anonymously dial in whenever they need help. The line is busiest at night and the early mornings.

It’s one of the scientist’s favorite parts of the job, even though the girlfriend finds it depressing. The night shift is a good excuse to not sleep at home, but it’s also when she feels like she’s helping people the most directly. A refugee confides in her about how hard the separation with their family has been. A man displaced by a wildfire talks about how he misses home. A new mother whispers her postpartum depression a few feet away from her newborn.

The man calls the phone line and begins telling the scientist about the potato salad he’s trying to make. It’s somehow not right. He was sure to use russet potatoes and incorporated hard boiled eggs, which is the way he’s always had it. They end up talking for thirty minutes before the man reveals that it’s his dead wife’s recipe. She’s passed away, and it’s the first time he’s trying to make her food. There’s a potluck he’s attending, and he thinks it would be meaningful to bring one of her dishes.

The scientist promises him that she’s happy to talk about potatoes, mustard, or celery. She is happy to talk about any number of things, because it’s all necessary for people to say how they really feel. She asks the man about his wife, and the brightness in his voice gets her through the rest of the shift.

She goes home in the morning, collapsing in bed while the girlfriend is just waking up.

14. I AM NO LONGER CLOSE TO ANYONE
Scientists confirm early on that the internet overwhelmingly harms participation in community life. The most digitally connected score higher compared to their peers. On r/loneliness, people laugh and commiserate about their scores of 69.

The man passes away seven years after joining the study. His son returns to clean out the house, taking one week of bereavement leave, even though the company gives two, because there’s an upcoming high-profile IPO date. No one else on his team knows except his boss. The son still spends half his time checking his phone.

He works through the house methodically, sorting piles into Sell, Donate, Trash, and Keep. The photos he’s saved for last. A part of him warms at the sight of his college roommate reclining on their ratty orange couch with the mysterious stain on the center cushion. When he thinks about the last time he talked to him, his head buzzes with emptiness.

He hasn’t shared the news of his father’s passing with anyone except his office because what was one supposed to do? Send a message out of the blue, fishing for condolences? Post a commemorative picture on social media he barely uses, slotting death in alongside Rihanna’s child’s shoe collection and videos of the latest dance trend? In the end, the Keep pile is the smallest.

“That was quite a long vacation you took, huh?” his colleague claps him on the shoulder.

He doesn’t correct him.

“It won’t happen again.”

15. I AM AN OUTGOING PERSON
The scientist gets appointed to senior researcher of the loneliness clinic, which requires her to move to a city further north to be closer to the university that funds it. The girlfriend wants to stay in New York and hates the idea of long distance. A part of the scientist is relieved that their relationship deflates in this way, and a smaller part feels guilty for her cowardice.

She and her friend say goodbye over dinner and promise to visit each other often. Her cat meows the entire train ride. As the landscape rushes by her, she feels a giddiness she thought she’d matured out of.

The scientist scours Meetup and Eventbrite. She grabs coffee with old friends who live in the area, but they already have their own circles of friends and aren’t willing to absorb a new member. There are yoga studios, running clubs, and pottery classes that result in too many misshapen cups. She downloads a dating app that can also be used to find friends. When she tells her coworkers this, they regard her with pity, as if it’s more embarrassing to use the friendship-seeking feature over the hookup-seeking side.

There are a handful of matches, and only one or two in-person “dates” that are somehow the worst dates she’s ever been on. One woman admits she and her husband are just looking for someone to take part in a threesome. Most people eventually ghost her.

When the excitement of a new city wears off, all that’s left is a bone-deep exhaustion. She goes to work and returns home. Her parents tell her she needs to eat more. She falls asleep with the television on just to have sound in her apartment. Her friend’s weekly calls go to voicemail because she doesn’t want to hear about her friend moving in with their boyfriend while her own cat has started to knock over the pottery pieces rapidly filling up her surfaces.

She is of the mind that it’s better to be on one’s own than in a bad relationship, but she finds that notion tested. The scientist begins to miss the girlfriend, not her specifically, but the presence of a warm body, someone to talk to at the end of the day.

It’s only when her friend surprises her by showing up at her door one weekend that she finally breaks down and admits how hard it’s been. Who knew that trying to make friends as an adult could be so hard?

While leaning into each other on the couch, her friend assesses her profile and tells her she should probably remove “loneliness researcher” from her app bio.

16. NO ONE REALLY KNOWS ME WELL
In the months after his father passes away, grief intensifies the son’s eating habits. The once familiar coping mechanisms start to feel out of his control, so he begins looking for a therapist. The intake sessions are worse than dates, and far more expensive. After his hand cramps from filling out twenty pages of paperwork asking about his symptoms, medication history, and counseling goals, he then repeats the same thing to a therapist. Many of the providers are pleasant, but he doesn’t feel anything strongly towards them. He finds himself using most of the sessions to explain, point out things that are just parts of his upbringing and family dynamics. Their responses make him wonder whether therapists truly understand cultural competence.

It takes three months and eight intakes before the son finds a therapist who seems like a good fit. She is out of network, but he can afford the weekly session fee. She recommends that in addition to their individual sessions, he also join a group. The therapist insists that the group approach is often the most effective for treating addiction.

Each week, the son attends the group meetings, only listening and observing. In his sessions with the therapist, he describes his life and she offers her perspective. After one particularly bleak recounting of how he didn’t tell anyone at work about his father’s passing, he tries to laugh it off.

“It’s just the way things are, I guess. It’s not that kind of workplace.”

The therapist leans forward in her chair and holds his gaze, not letting him shy away from the reality he laid out. In a kind voice, she observes, “You sound very lonely.”

The son, who has previously remained reserved, bursts into tears because the truth is so obvious and never has anyone—including himself—said it out loud.

17. I FEEL PART OF A GROUP OF FRIENDS
A global pandemic brings more people to the loneliness clinic than ever before. The scientist finds herself unable to sleep, turning over the harrowing experiences people have shared with her that day.

The scientist’s friend recommends a new video game where players control an avatar of themselves. The goal is to develop a deserted island they purchased as a vacation package from a raccoon in a sweater. The scientist is instantly hooked, accomplishing the assigned tasks and customizing her home. The game rewards players for interacting with their neighbors and building out the community of anthropomorphic animals.

The scientist and the friend take turns visiting each other’s islands. They pick fruit together, make their avatars say outrageous things in speech bubbles, and argue about whether the raccoon is benevolent or evil.

“He forces you into a loan and makes you pay it off by working for him!”

“It’s an interest-free loan with no deadline to pay it back!” the scientist insists.

18. MY SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS ARE SUPERFICIAL
Stay-at-home orders means that the son barely leaves his apartment. Two weeks go by before he has a physical conversation with another human being—a delivery person. His job goes remote. He works more hours than he ever has before. The son backslides into old behaviors. He mentions it to the therapist, but her video lags, and he can’t bring himself to repeat it.

The company sends an email at 9:00 am one Wednesday notifying them that 11 percent of the company is being laid off. “Affected parties should expect to receive another email in the next fifteen minutes.”

The son refreshes his inbox repeatedly. Nothing after seven, eleven, thirteen minutes. The knot in his chest begins to relax. An email arrives at 9:17. All of his work accounts are deactivated by the top of the hour. CNN reports on the layoffs in the evening news. 

The next day, the son receives a message from his college roommate.

Saw the news of the layoffs, hope you and your team are alright

The son is touched and writes back, spilling the whole saga over text.

Probably would be easier to explain on the phone, he adds self-consciously, a bit embarrassed at how easily the floodgates opened.

The roommate calls him. After nonstop video calls for work, gazing at his own tired expression, the son finds the phone calmer, more intimate.

They reminisce about their younger days and talk about the roommate’s family. They gossip about old classmates and discuss the latest episode of an HBO show. After losing track of time, they finally acknowledge the late hour.

“This was great,” the roommate says. “We should make this like a regular thing.”

19. I DO NOT FEEL ALONE
The scientist’s parents are so concerned about her single status that her mom asks, “Won’t you settle down with a nice man? Or a woman?”

The scientist stops engaging with her parents on the topic, turning instead to the clinic’s expansion, how fulfilling it is speaking to the press about their research. She signs up to volunteer at an animal shelter near the clinic. Many of the cats and dogs eye her with wariness, but she is patient, earning their trust with gentle pets and treats.

After two years apart, she visits the friend, who has now bought a house for her growing family. The scientist likes being called “aunt” and offers to help babysit so the friend and her husband can go out one night.

It feels good to feel useful.

20. THERE ARE PEOPLE I CAN TURN TO
The son is in a taxi on his way back from a night out with the college roommate. The driver has the radio cranked high, and the car is filled with energetic advertisements for cars and cell phone plans. The DJ introduces the next song, a throwback requested by someone in a long-distance relationship.

“This is for all you lonely hearts out there tonight,” the DJ says.

It takes the son a moment to place it, and when he does, he texts the friend he just left, wow guess what song just came on in the car. He tucks his phone into his pocket, leans his head against the car window, and waits for the reply. ■

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