Scholars from the Renaissance to the current era have pictured the individual in Western culture as torn between imperatives to participate in the collective and go it alone as an individual. On the one hand, the culture values membership in the group and the community; separation from the collective is understood to create the painful experience of loneliness, among other ills. On the other hand, there is an expectation in Western culture that impels each person to differentiate him- or herself; at the same time that people are given messages that they should be connected to others, they are also given messages that they should “break away from the pack” and become their own person.

At no point in the life span may the tension between these competing imperatives – to social connection and individuation – be greater than in adolescence. Expectations that a person conform to the peer group, have close and intimate friends, and become romantically involved reach a peak at this age period. Yet, independence is identified as a central developmental task: Becoming an individual is almost synonymous with coming of age. These disparate tasks would appear to pull adolescents in conflicting directions and set them up for the experience of social isolation. In this chapter, I investigate whether these seemingly opposing expectations create loneliness that puts adolescents' well-being at risk.

The orientation of my research is toward reconfiguring questions such as these in terms of the hour-to-hour “experiential ecology” of people's lives.