In Spring 2020, the world as we knew it ground to a halt at the start of the COVID pandemic—streets emptied, shelves were bare, and the world quieted to a hum. The first two weeks at home seemed like a gift to writer Athena Dixon, a respite from a busy life. But as weeks turned into months and then into years, Dixon, along with the rest of the world, learned that humans are lonely. Disconnected. Isolated. Dixon found herself confronted by a lifetime of loneliness, a history of distancing herself from a family legacy of alcoholism, living alone as a middle-aged woman without children or pets, working forty hours a week from home, more than three hundred and fifty miles from her family and friends. How had her past decisions led her to an apartment alone, craving human connection while the world sat idle? How did she come to feel this way? How had her connections eroded away?
Dixon began watching mystery videos on YouTube, listening to true crime podcasts, and playing video game walk-throughs to have another human voice in her home. She discovered the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who died alone, her body remaining in front of a glowing television set for three years before the world finally noticed. In The Loneliness Files, Dixon explores disconnect and loneliness in a hyperconnected world, pondering if we are destined to be a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of the world, forgotten by the rest of the living.