Urban lone­li­ness is the idea that peo­ple in densely–populated urban areas are lone­lier than peo­ple in dis­perse areas such as the countryside. However, a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle in New York Mag­a­zine looks at the ‘sci­ence of lone­li­ness’ and sug­gests that urban lone­li­ness is a myth.

I found this com­ment, on an evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy the­ory of lone­li­ness, intruiging:

Cacioppo, co-author of W.W. Norton’s recently pub­lished Lone­li­ness, is part of the school of evo­lu­tion­ary psychologists—and cer­tain biol­o­gists too—that believes our species wouldn’t have sur­vived with­out a coop­er­a­tive social instinct. In their book, Cacioppo and his co-author, the sci­ence writer William Patrick, argue that lone­li­ness, like hunger, is an alarm sig­nal that evolved in hominids hun­dreds of thou­sands of years ago, when group cohe­sion was essen­tial to fight off abrupt attacks from stam­ped­ing wilde­beests. It’s nature’s way of telling us to rejoin the group or pay the price. “Nature,” they sim­ply write at one point, “is connection.”

via Mind Hacks

Edit: Ben Cas­nocha has a nice overview of the arti­cle.