Everyone is dead. You are born completely alone.
Would you feel lonely?
At first, the answer seems obvious. Probably not. Loneliness usually feels like being cut off from other people, and if you have never known other people, then what exactly would you be missing? You would have nothing to compare your life to. No memory of friendship, no memory of family, and no memory of conversation. In that sense, it seems strange to say you would feel lonely in the ordinary way. But that does not mean you would be fine.
What makes this scenario so interesting is that it forces apart two things that normally travel together: the feeling of loneliness and the condition of social deprivation. In everyday life, the two overlap. People feel lonely because they lack meaningful connection, and that lack of meaningful connection often has real effects on their health and well-being. However, in a wasteland where no one else exists, those two ideas come apart. You may not feel lonely in the usual sense, yet you may still be deprived of something essential. That distinction matters.
Loneliness is subjective. It is a feeling. A person knows they are lonely because they experience loneliness. In psychology, it is often defined as perceived social isolation – not simply being alone, but feeling that one’s social needs are not met. Deprivation is different. Deprivation is not mainly a feeling, but a condition. It means the body or mind is missing something needed for normal development or functioning, whether or not the person is fully aware of it. The World Health Organization’s ICF framework is useful here as it treats functioning in concrete terms such as body functions, activities, participation, and environmental context, rather than as some vague ideal of being ‘healthy.’
This means a person could, at least in principle, be socially deprived without consciously experiencing that deprivation as loneliness.
Indeed, the wasteland is a useful example precisely because it highlights that possibility. If you were born alone, you might never think, “I miss other people.” You would not even know what other people are, but the absence of that thought would not prove that nothing important was missing. It might only show that some forms of harm run deeper than conscious recognition.
Research on severe early deprivation points in exactly that direction. Even when basic physical survival is maintained, the absence of normal social interaction, especially early in life, can lead to measurable problems in development. Studies of children raised in such conditions have found persistent deficits in social, cognitive, and emotional development, along with evidence of disruptions in brain development. There are also reports of weaker executive functioning, including problems with working memory, inhibitory control, and planning. The point, then, is not merely that isolated people ‘feel bad.’ It is that profound deprivation is systemically associated with worse developmental outcomes across established measures of human functioning.
Feeling lonely also has concrete effects, but these are not identical to the effects of objective deprivation. Loneliness has been associated with depressed mood, heightened vigilance for social threat, disrupted sleep, and broader health risks. Reviews in this area also argue that perceived social isolation can be a more important predictor of certain harmful outcomes than objective isolation itself. In other words, the feeling of loneliness is not simply poetic sadness. It has its own psychological and physiological profile.
So, it has been established that there is an important difference between feeling lonely and being socially deprived. The former is a conscious experience of social absence, while the latter is an objective lack of the social conditions under which human beings normally develop, and the wasteland experiment suggests that these conditions can come apart. A person born alone may not feel lonely, because loneliness usually involves some awareness of what one lacks. But they may still be deprived, because human beings do not seem to develop normally in total social isolation.
This raises an even stranger question: what if the brain could be fooled?
Suppose that from birth you are connected to a perfect simulation. Every social interaction is artificial, but as far as you know, it is real. You are effectively raised in the Matrix. Would that count as deprivation?
Here, the question becomes less empirical and more philosophical. If the simulation reproduced every developmentally and psychologically relevant feature of human interaction (conversation, attachment, reciprocity, emotional co-regulation, even touch) then it becomes hard to say what exactly would be missing. If all the functions of real human connection were present, then calling the person deprived would start to sound less like a scientific claim and more like a metaphysical preference for ‘the real thing.’ At that point, the burden shifts. The question is no longer whether simulated social life feels real. It is whether there is some deeper feature of real human connection that no simulation could ever reproduce. That is a much stronger claim, and it is much harder to defend.
At the moment, there is no clear empirical way to settle that question. We do not have experiments in which human beings are raised from birth in perfect, undetectable simulations. What we do have is strong evidence that real social deprivation in childhood is associated with serious developmental costs, and strong evidence that loneliness, as a subjective state, carries its own distinct harms. Nevertheless, the perfect Matrix case remains speculative. It is a philosophical question built on top of empirical ones.
That brings us back to the wasteland. The most plausible conclusion is not that the isolated person would feel lonely in the way most of us understand loneliness. It is that loneliness and deprivation are not the same thing. You may not miss what you have never known, but that does not mean you do not need it.The tragedy of the wasteland, then, is not necessarily that the last person would sit there consciously aching for companionship. It may be something worse. They could be shaped by a deep absence they are unable to name.
