The story of the whale that sings songs at a frequency of 52 hertz mirrors the growing epidemic of loneliness in our modern lives, social isolation and structural silence
Loneliness comes in waves in our lives. It percolates and floats on the surface and, at times, sinks within, but it is seldom fleeting. We are all lonely, but we are human. We pick up flowers from the street, smile at the tiny kindnesses we encounter, and walk, flailing our hands, as we fall mysteriously in love with the wind.
We do things and speak words that are meant to echo a response. Loneliness is the absence of that very response. It folds in when you see the world with a detailed intimacy, but the world often fails to see you, housing a limbo where one feels suspended in the vast space, or in the case of ‘the loneliest whale in the world’, in the vast sea.
The loneliest whale in the world sings songs at a frequency of 52 hertz, far above the usual range for most whales (10-30 hertz). In the late 1980s, the US Navy detected an unusual whale sound on a hydrophone and tracked its migration pattern, suspecting it to be a whale of an unspecified species. It remains unseen and, to its own kind, unheard, rendering it the loneliest whale in the world.
Being human, and lonely
The concept of whale watching is like bird-spotting, but for whales. Imagine being the largest animal on Earth, and yet remain unseen, unheard. What, then, can relieve your loneliness if there persists an ache to be visible? Ultimately, you want people to see you in your unscripted existence.
Also read: Guru Dutt at 100: How the auteur of Hindi cinema made melancholia his signature
Despite calling out through its songs — surely louder than anyone else — this whale still swims solitary through the ocean. The case hasn’t been so different above the ocean lately, with the growing epidemic of loneliness in our personal and social lives. Loneliness has proven itself to be remarkably persistent over time.
The World Health Organisation has underlined that social isolation and loneliness are global health concerns affecting people of all ages, now more than ever. Loneliness creates dissonance in the self, to the point that it can affect mortality. Stress, anxiety, sleeplessness, and major mental health issues are often orchestrated by the feeling of being lonely.
It weaves its own narrative into an individual’s life. Young people excluded from groups due to socioeconomic biases, members of marginalised communities, and those coping with grief at their own pace — all carry a whiff of loneliness circling them.
During COVID, loneliness intensified its grip as people became increasingly detached from the world. Some made sense of it, but it became a big contributor to today’s growing epidemic. Still, in the aftermath of the pandemic, we slowly re-learned how to be with one another because, at our core, we are best at learning how to be human, every single day.
Trauma and the yearning to belong
The anatomy of loneliness is flaccid; its limbs filled with cloying and obscure qualities. American writer Nicole Krauss in her 2005 novel The History of Love wrote: “Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.” And so, it becomes an organ of its own, one that weighs like a boulder, too attached to carry or cast away. It grows deeper when the yearning for acceptance and desire is met with rejection on a structural scale, when the desolation is no longer individual, but collective or societal. The kind that comes with exile and exclusion.
The loneliest whale in the world sings songs at a frequency of 52 hertz, far above the usual range for most whales (10-30 hertz).
French writer Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory,” captures the loneliness of a woman’s relationship with her own body in her autobiographical work Happening (2000).
The book recounts the pregnancy and illegal abortion Ernaux underwent in France, when abortion was still criminalised. The shame and alienation of undergoing such an experience in an institutionalised system is starkly visible in the text. The kind of loneliness that settles deep within when no one else shares the trauma carried by your own body.
Gendered oppression continues to shape a particular experience of loneliness in our generation. Queer loneliness, in turn, stems from the act of reclaiming identity and resisting a system that often vilifies their rights. It’s an ongoing process of confronting and collecting their corporeality and fragilities as they carve a space to belong in the society, away from isolation. The kind of loneliness that begins to fade only when one feels truly seen.
Shaking up the collected self
Zaam Arif, a Houston-based Pakistani artist, sprays a strong scent of isolation in his paintings. His paintings relay a dissonance of the self from the external space, where the subjects are in a pensive state and the setting seeks an excursion for introspection.
His painting, Exile, 2023, shows a woman perched on a bed in a room next to the viewers. The distance itself suggests a stark sense of isolation. Books lie abandoned on the ground like a failed prayer, and the room holds a sparse, desolate emptiness.
The quiet, solitary malaise of the woman is loud enough in the painting, amplified by the eerie yet intimate choice of palette. The intricacies of loneliness that words so often fail to express, Arif knows how to embody in pigments and hues.
A person in a crowd can be lonelier than someone who lives alone, in solitude. By that logic, is the loneliest whale merely solitary? Sherry Turkle, American author and clinical psychologist, once said that loneliness is “failed solitude” — the ache of feeling lonely despite choosing to be alone.
But the 52-hertz whale never had a choice to begin with. Despite being creatures of choice, we too are overwhelmed with so much noise around and fall prey to the chaos that shakes up our most collected self.
How not to suffer in solitude
We are susceptible to anything when there is an excess supply of mechanisms that promise an escape from it. Our surroundings are an avalanche of noise on social media, overconsumption and overstimulation.
At the centre of this noise, social media promises an illusion of proximity, only a semblance of a safe space to reach out, furthering the alienation that it brings through our screens. We think we are close, but there can be only so much of intimate connection through a screen.
Also read: How to enjoy Australia’s wondrous Great Barrier Reef as a non-swimmer
Then, there is the myth of individualism — the belief that people can conquer being human on their own, propped up by the hubris of achieving everything. In the tug-of-war between being an individual and a social animal, we get caught up with loneliness.
The mind rests on small intimacies: a friend, a sibling, a colleague, a doctor, an acquaintance, someone in the grocery shop, a kind barista. Absolute individualism is impossible because we are anchored by community.
Sure, it is lonely at the top, but we don’t have to succumb to the loneliness we never chose. What we can choose is time spent with ourselves, and when we do, it becomes solitude, not suffering.
May the mystery find its miracle
A friend of mine — someone I’d never actually met — put up a post on social media, inviting strangers to a co-working session: a group of people meeting at a café to work side by side. I showed up. And in that moment, I realised that even in our gloomiest states, we gently pull ourselves out of loneliness — of any kind.
Book clubs, running groups, curated walks, exhibitions — we survive on community and communication. Somehow, we keep finding quotidian ways to cavort through our days. I walked home alone afterward, but it didn’t feel lonely to observe the trees, or to hold hands with the wind. As American poet, novelist and essayist Ocean Vuong reminds us: loneliness is still time spent with the world.
The 52-hertz whale first reached out to me through a song: Whalien 52 by BTS. Its lyrics used the whale as a metaphor for those who feel unheard, misunderstood, despite their efforts to reach out. It compelled me to search for this whale.
And year after year, I find myself returning to it, lingering in its silence, reaching out in my own way, hoping that this mystery finds its miracle. That the whale somehow knows that beyond oblivion, someone listens and echoes back to the songs it perpetually sings.
