Losing Joyce
On Loneliness and Connection in Desperate Times
Hello! November’s newsletter has a subscriber-only essay and updates on projects, events, and other happenings in the world of Solid Ground. Your support makes my work possible, thank you!
Essay
Losing Joyce: On Loneliness and Connection in Desperate Times
Joyce Carol Vincent was a functional, seemingly ordinary 38-year-old woman when no one noticed that she disappeared in 2003. She had sisters and coworkers and neighbors just like the rest of us. She had a life. That she should suddenly disappear from that life should have been a mystery. But in 2006, people still hadn’t noticed she was missing. Her death itself was no mystery; she had suffered a health crisis while at home alone and died before she was able to summon help. Sad, but not mysterious. The real mystery was how everyone could have gone so long without missing her.
I wrote about Joyce Carol Vincent for the first time in 2013, the year smart phones sales first overtook sales of traditional cell phones, the year we all become more connected than we ever imagined. Only, we didn’t.
In our embrace of digital connection, we gained a broader, more detailed view into more distant and diverse corners of the world. But in doing so, we forfeited the intimacy of close communion, the visceral compassion that stems from in-person discourse, and the community we find and foster in third places, the bookstores, cafes, and other public spaces that used to fill the time that scrolling now consumes. We elevated information delivered at speed and volume and sacrificed a primal kind of connection to other people and the dynamic physical world that nurtures and sustains us in ways that we find difficult to articulate or quantify.
But we can, and have, quantified and articulated our loneliness.