Kristen Radtke takes a broad look at the subject of loneliness and also specifically how it relates to America in Seek You, in an effort to understand why there’s an epidemic of loneliness today, how we got here, and what can be done about it. Or are humans just naturally lonely creatures…?
It’s an interesting subject to make a comic about - in theory anyway, because in practice, or at least in Radtke’s hands, it’s not very compelling to read about.
There’s a lot of unengaging repetition here. Her dad was into ham radio when he was a kid, she was into chat rooms when she was a kid, and there are pages and pages of talking heads telling you their stories of loneliness, all of which just tell you that these people were lonely. It doesn’t really add anything except emphasise the same point over and over.
Some sections are equally dull like the invention of canned laughter and how it came to be used in sitcoms. Radtke’s point? Canned laughter can make you less lonely. How banal. Ditto the pages telling you that loneliness is bad for your health. Unless you’ve read absolutely nothing on the subject, this information isn’t going to knock your socks off (and is kind of obvious even if you didn’t know it before).
And then she makes a lot of presumptions. Like how the myth of the American cowboy and modern TV characters, all of whom promote self-sufficient “real men” who get on with things without needing anyone else, as examples of why men are so isolated in America today. Uh… maybe? Or perhaps some men simply are that way rather than because they want to be Don Draper et al.
She makes more tenuous points by then going on to say that loneliness can cause us to lose sense of what’s real and that’s why we have today’s climate of distrust and fear. It might be a contributing factor but I think the actual answer is more complex than this.
Other things she presents leave the reader confused as to what we’re meant to take away from it. Mass shooters tend to be paranoid, as a result of loneliness, she says - except for the Vegas shooter, who wasn’t. Social media is making us more alone - except for the people who feel it makes their lives more real. Not that I expected her to “solve” the issue of prevalent loneliness in society, but her suggestion of doing an equivalent of Casey Kasem’s long distance dedications would seem to hinge on social media’s involvement as I don’t know anyone who listens to radio anymore. Unless humans are generally lonely creatures and nothing can change this.
So is loneliness the reason for mass shootings or not? Does social media make us more lonely or not? Should we be using social media to alleviate loneliness or abandon it? Is there no cure for something possibly rooted within our DNA? Radtke’s presentation of these things left me unsure as to what point exactly she was trying to make (if any).
The section on Harry Harlow, a scientist studying love and isolation starting in the 1950s, was fascinating in a morbid way. The rhesus monkey experiments were both monstrous and enlightening, and Harlow himself was an intriguing, if loathsome, figure.
For the most part though, I was generally unimpressed and often bored with Kristen Radtke’s Seek You. I felt like, when she wasn’t relating bland autobiographical anecdotes or dreary pieces of history, she was either just throwing out facts on the subject without connection or else contradicting them, or drawing unconvincing conclusions. The effect is very muddled and this book made me none the wiser on the subject of loneliness - a superficial and underwhelming book.
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