Consider what happens to the last speaker of a language. There have been several documented in recent decades — an Alaskan woman who died in 2008 as the final fluent speaker of hers, an Andamanese woman a couple of years later — and what the reports of their lives keep returning to is not the loss to linguistics, which is real, but something more ordinary and much sadder: that there was nobody left to talk to. Not nobody to communicate with; they had families, they had a second language, they were not silent. Nobody to talk to in the way they thought in. A person in that position can describe her situation to you fluently and still be alone in it, because the describing has to be done in translation.
That is a better model for the psychology of the genuinely unique individual than any amount of alien-orphan symbolism. He is not lonely because nobody likes him; he may be adored. He is lonely because every conversation he has about the central facts of his existence is a conversation in which he is the only expert, doing simultaneous interpretation from a language nobody else speaks, and in which the other party's sympathy — however sincere — cannot be informed by experience. There is no one to say yes, that happened to me too, which is the sentence that does most of the work in human consolation.
It also produces a specific and unattractive symptom, which is that such people become bad at receiving help. If nobody can understand the problem, then advice is noise, and after enough noise you stop asking, and after you stop asking you become the sort of person other people describe as private. The description is accurate and the diagnosis it implies is usually wrong.
from How to Think Seriously About Superheroes (2026)
