There is a certain quality of light that falls across the western plains in late autumn, a light my father used to call "the bachelor's hour" because it found you alone whether you wanted to be or not. I think about that light when I read, in a Manhattan Institute commentary by Carolyn D. Gorman, that loneliness has become "an online lifestyle brand." The Institute publishes a great deal of careful, statistic-laden research. This piece is a quieter thing. It points to something almost too obvious to study.

We have, in a generation, taken one of the oldest and most painful conditions of human life — being unchosen, being unaccompanied, being apart — and we have sold it back to people as content. The young, in particular, now consume loneliness the way an earlier generation consumed romance novels: as a curated, aesthetic, slightly self-flattering version of a feeling they otherwise have no instructions for. There are TikTok subgenres dedicated to the "lonely girl autumn" and the "quiet boy winter". There are Spotify playlists, Pinterest boards, Substack newsletters. There is, in other words, an industry.

Gorman's argument, briefly, is that the branding of loneliness has decoupled the feeling from its remedy. To be lonely was once a signal to act — to walk to a neighbour's house, to attend a service, to write a letter, to marry. To be lonely now is to belong to a content cohort. The signal has been jammed. The feeling persists; the response has been replaced by aesthetics.

I am a painter. I spend a great deal of my working life alone, looking at country that does not look back, listening to wind that does not answer. I know something about the texture of solitude, and I will say this for it: it has a use. Real solitude — the kind that the bush teaches and the desert insists upon — strips a man back to whatever is actually inside him. If what is inside is small, solitude makes it smaller. If it is large, solitude makes it larger. There is no third option, and there is no audience.

The loneliness that has become a brand has an audience. That is what makes it different. It is performed solitude. It is the form of being alone without the function. It does not strip you back to anything because it is, fundamentally, a costume. You wear it. You photograph it. You post it. You are not, in any meaningful sense, alone — you are addressing the camera, and the camera is your company.

What worries me about Gorman's piece is what it implies about the landscape of the soul of these young people. A generation raised to brand its loneliness is a generation that will not know what to do with the real thing when it arrives. And it will arrive. It always does. A parent dies, a marriage ends, a body fails, a friend moves to another city and the texts thin out. The bachelor's hour comes for everyone, and when it comes, you cannot Pinterest your way through it.

The Manhattan Institute is right to flag this. It is the sort of cultural drift that does not produce headlines but produces, over decades, a different kind of person. A person who has the vocabulary of solitude but not the practice of it. A person who knows how loneliness looks and has never asked what it is for.

What it is for, I think, is the slow making of a self that can stand by itself in front of a paddock at dusk and not need anything. That self has to be built. It cannot be styled.