The Loneliest City in Canada

An exploration of Vancouver as the loneliest city in Canada

Sitting alone for a meal, a string of empty conversations, a quiet yearning. These are some of the ways you might stumble upon loneliness. It doesn’t have an address, or an area code, but many have found that it lives in Vancouver. A study by the Vancouver Foundation from 2012 found that one third of those they surveyed said it was difficult for them to make friends in this city. A fourth of the participants admitted that they find themselves alone more often than they’d like to be. The study found that “while most of us know the names of at least two of our neighbours, the connections typically stop there.” Few people had actually visited a neighbour’s home, or been invited over.

I moved to Vancouver from the US in 2017 to attend the University of British Columbia. I had very little trouble making friends, though most were people I met through international student orientation. All of us were in Canada for the first time, giddy and nervous and wondering what university would be like.

I moved into a new apartment in May 2021. In December, I met some of my neighbours for the first time. Apartment 7 had a holiday social with mulled wine and sweets that I had considered not attending. While my roommate hung back, I decided I would stop by. We had a nice evening together. We even talked about how the culture in the apartment building was very reserved, how we barely saw or spoke to one another.

Since then, I haven’t seen much of those neighbours. I noticed one of the nieghbours I had met that night had mounted a bird feeder on the outside of their window. On a sunny day, I sat outside the building and watched the local birds come and go from the feeder for at least thirty minutes. I remember thinking to myself I should write them a note to let them know how much I enjoyed watching the birds outside their window. Unsure of how this would be received, I never did.

When I found out that Vancouver had been ranked the loneliest city in Canada, I started to wonder how we know that people are lonely, how loneliness can be quantified. Is it a lack of meaningful moments? What makes a moment meaningful? I understand that aspects of a city can shape the experience of those living in it. But how can a city as big as Vancouver, with just under 700,000 people, be any particular way at all? Is it lonely? Or is existing anywhere difficult and lonely?

A City that is Nice but Not Kind

I’ve heard this idea thrown around that the East Coast is kind but not nice, and the West Coast is nice but not kind. But what does this really mean? And is one really better than the other? A city that is nice but not kind is a city with people who are polite. The kind of politeness you might use when meeting a friend’s parents for the first time. A shallow politeness.

I’ve heard Toronto to be deemed as the epitome of a Canadian city that is kind but not nice. There’s a hard exterior to people, but once you break through you find that people are more loving, more loyal, and more consistent friends.

I suppose if I had to choose between the two, I’d rather have a city like Toronto, that is kind but not nice. If I’m going to put effort into building a connection, I’d rather have those connections lead to kindness rather than cordialship. But, I can’t help but wonder why we can’t have both at once? Why be hard on the surface to protect a connection that could be meaningful? Why present a friendly exterior with no intention to show authentic interest or depth?

I turn to Reddit to find anecdotes on Vancouverites’ experiences with loneliness. One user discusses their distrust in friendly people in Vancouver. They say, “if a stranger strikes up a conversation with me, I’m just counting down the seconds until they ask for something/try to sell me something/etc.” I suppose this rings true to my experience. But how often are people in other cities actually making lifelong friends with someone they’ve just met on the street? As a woman, this seems like a distant idea to me.

Another user suggests that the passerby on the street is not the one to blame for their lack of kindness, but rather the people you actually know, through work or other connections. They suggest that these people won’t really make an effort to try to be friendly. I’ve seen this first hand. Plans with potential friends typically end up dissolving into “what-ifs.” People are flaky here. It seems to be part of the culture, a culture that doesn’t seem to benefit anyone.

Daniel moved to Vancouver from Calgary and has struggled to find connection in the city. This is not without trying. I sat down with him at a coffee shop on Granville and West Hastings. He was recommended to me as a good subject for this piece by a friend of a friend who works with him.

He tells me that he has been stood-up a number of times by people in the city. The day we met for an interview he told me he was surprised I actually showed up. He perceives people in Vancouver as having a facade which masks their self-centered flakiness. He fears he sometimes comes off as desperate when trying to make a connection, and that desperation comes off as unattractive to potential friends or romantic partners.

I asked Juliette about this, one of the few native Vancouverites I consider a friend. She has lived here for her entire life, twenty two years to be exact, with the exception of her semester abroad in Singapore. She tells me she thinks it’s a lack of warmth in people. She admits that there have been times she has felt a pressure to say yes to plans in the moment, knowing she will cancel once there's a follow up.

It’s an attitude she believes her community has modeled for her. She describes it as a “stay in your lane” culture, where people don’t want to overextend themselves and risk offending someone, but this often translates to disinterest. Many of the friend groups she knows in Vancouver have been friends for over ten years. They seem comfortable and uninterested in branching out. When she lived in Singapore, she felt welcomed as an exchange student, and later realized she has rarely made the same effort for exchange students coming to UBC.

Geographical Spread of the City

In my small hometown outside of Philadelphia, I didn’t grow up taking public transit. I think I had seen a bus in my town all of two times in the eighteen years I lived there. To survive in the United States, you need a car. That’s why I was so thrilled to move to a city which seemed to have such an effective way of getting around without a car. Hop on the bus and you could get just about anywhere you needed to go. I thought my time spent commuting was meditative, somehow special, interesting even. I was so fascinated by the bus that I did a whole art project on it for a Visual Arts class. Relative to many other public transit systems, the buses here are safe, clean, and, for the most part, timely.

It hadn’t occurred to me that an hour-long bus ride from one part of the city to the next isn’t typical of a city the size of Vancouver. The city stretched out in many directions, with clear divides between neighborhoods, but unclear boundaries of where exactly Vancouver, the city, starts and ends. I realized that the flakiness may not have been due to lack of interest or kindness, but perhaps because it’s just taxing to get places.

I know everyone isn’t as fond of the bus as I am. And honestly, I’ve come to understand it better. When I was living on campus in my first and second year, even a bus ride to my friend’s place on Dunbar and 41st felt like an adventure. From the time I left my building to when I would buzz her apartment, I would have spent 30 minutes getting there. If I wanted to go thrifting on Main Street, that time would go up to 50 minutes. If I wanted to go to my favorite Ethiopian restaurant on Commercial Drive, it was an hour.

If you want to cut down on that commute time, your only option is to drive. But if you’re going out with co-workers for some drinks, you can’t have more than maybe 1-2 beers which for a lot of people makes the whole thing not worth it. And if you do choose to use public transit to allow yourself a rowdier evening, you’re locked down to the skytrain or bus schedule, which stops running incredibly early. Most of the streets of Vancouver feel like a ghost town after 11PM.

Juliette, like myself, is a fan of the bus system here. Still, she finds that she makes plans but on the day of, she sometimes thinks “I don’t want to go all the way there”. The city is “hyper-segmented”, which comes along with an attitude of people not wanting to make an effort to go across town to attend an event or see a friend if they aren’t sure it will be a great time. Juliette points out that in other cities, such as Los Angeles, part of the culture is knowing and accepting that it may take you a long time to get from Point A to Point B. She believes Vancouver hasn’t adapted that same culture.

Can We Even Afford to Have Friends?

If you had to choose between a great social life and rent, which would you choose? To afford to live in Vancouver, you might have to work long hours which cuts into free time that you could spend developing relationships. 

If you live in a tiny micro studio apartment, you may pay less in rent, but you can’t host your friends, even if you’re lucky enough to have any. Getting a group together outside kind of relies on good weather, which only happens for a few months out of the year. And going out for food or drinks costs money. What do you do when you live in a city where you don’t have enough money to have friends?

Daniel tells me, “If I had money to blow, I wouldn’t be alone for one second.” He works in nightlife at a bar in Kitsilano. He works anywhere from six to seven nights a week as a bar back, where he sees groups of friends spend money on their night out while he works. He tells me it’s a reminder of what he hasn’t found yet in the city, of what he doesn’t have.

Daniel has started going to the movie theatre by himself. Sure, it costs money, but he knows he won’t let himself down. He will always show up.

Maybe You Just Aren’t Trying

One skeptic on Reddit suggested that it isn’t Vancouver’s fault at all, that everyone on the Reddit thread were just being huge cry babies about the whole thing. According to this user, what you have to do is simple: be brave. They say that the barrier people find in making friendships is merely themselves. “Meaningful friendships don’t just fall out of the sky into your lap, they take work… It’s easier to just blame this city than to admit you’re not doing enough to achieve your goal.”

Daniel tells me what loneliness in Vancouver has looked like for him. On a night off, he’ll usually go to the bar he works at, where the only people he knows there are his co-workers. Then, he’ll go home, watch TV, and spend time in his room. He tells me time alone in his room used to make him very uncomfortable, but that he has learned to adapt.

He tells me about a night when he went to The Roxy Cabaret, a club in downtown Vancouver. He had gone to the club alone that night. On his walk home, he found himself praying to God about how lonely he was. I asked him what that looked like. He told me it took the form of a song. He was singing and asking God for peace and acceptance of the lonely state he was in. 

I begin to think of all of the lonely people in the same city, floating around and passing by one another. So close to making the right connection, finding a spark, but just nearly missing it.

More Lonely or More Honest?

Maybe Vancouver isn’t to blame for the loneliness. Maybe, instead, it’s to be praised for a community with the ability to talk about its loneliness. Perhaps in other cities conversations about being lonely aren’t welcomed. There’s a front or a guard you have to put up that you’re having a great time with your awesome, authentic friends out having awesome, authentic experiences.

Juliette suggests to me that moving to any new place will be challenging and more than likely lonely. She thinks that when people find out that Vancouver has a reputation as a lonely city, it works as confirmation bias for their own experience.

Maybe It’s My Fault

I will admit, sometimes I feel like I know enough people in this city, like I’ve met all the people who matter. Do I perpetuate the culture of empty politeness that plagues this city? Maybe it isn’t fair to all the people trying to escape this plague of loneliness, but maybe this is how we all act once we’ve found somewhere we belong. Maybe the minute someone emerges from loneliness to find themselves draped in a warm blanket of belonging, they forget how easy it used to be to let others in. Juliette says something which resonates with me: “I like to be the one that’s included, but I don’t always feel like I need to do the same for others.”

Feelings of loneliness long term can have real consequences. People experiencing loneliness have reported “poorer health, lower trust, and a hardening of attitudes towards other community members”. Maybe we’ve all hardened. I like to believe I’m soft and warm and welcoming. Maybe I’ve hardened.

Sources

Vancouver Foundation. (2012). Connections and Engagement. www.vancouverfoundation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/VanFdn-SurveyResults-Report.pdf 

@m_kamalo. “Is Vancouver really The Lonely City?” Reddit, 2022, www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/xuzdrg/is_vancouver_really_the_lonely_city/?rdt=44112