https://www.wired.com/story/pandemic-loneliness/

For millennia upon millennia, we humans were a cooperative species, (literally) thin-skinned mammals that had to hunt and forage together to survive in an unforgiving world. Then came capitalism and its relentless veneration of the individual: Work hard enough and out-compete your fellow humans, and you too could die rich and entirely alone.

Around 1800, with the Industrial Revolution in full steam, an interesting transition appeared in Western literature, according to historian Fay Bound Alberti of the University of York, author of A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion. People had once described solitude as a cathartic, temporary escape from your fellow humans—think of a nice hike to take in the majesty of the natural world, for instance. After industrialization, they began to describe it more as loneliness, an involuntary and crippling isolation.