Dumb History of Loneliness

Capitalism and Individualism got married 200 years ago and had a child. They named him loneliness.

It is no surprise that that the word loneliness was  coined just about the same time the term ‘Individualism’ was created. Before that, Robinson Crusoe was alone, not lonely.

“No man is an island”

It wasn’t that people weren’t lonely back then. They probably were for brief bits here and there. But loneliness almost always and almost immediately was followed by death. Man had to be a social animal. Women too. Being alone and being alive was asking too much. It is like having a cake and eating it too.

If you are in a forest, alone, by yourself, you just hope there is someone slower than you with you. There is no way that you are going to fight a grizzly bear all by yourself and make it in one piece. Ask Dicaprio, he’ll tell you. It’s not fun. Those wild animals don’t follow any rules. They’ll be all over you like animals. When lost in wild, it takes surprisingly few mistakes for one to be lost forever. Every breath needs to be carefully drawn. So, it was better to stay in packs. “Finding your tribe” was not optional, but a necessity. It became a choice only recently. Very recently.

Once people started setting down, some people, especially at the top, had some opportunity to stay lonely. That’s the reason it was “lonely at the top”; given one has the resources. Either that, or do something terrible and be an outcast. Either that, or you give up all hopes of social life and live like a hermit. So you have to exceptional or an exception to be lonely and be alive. Even then, God was always nearby, so a person was never truly alone.

Few lonely people popped up here and there, but it is nowhere near as common as it is now. So what happened? Industrial revolution happened, and then cities happened. People were plucked out of their social circles and stashed into tiny apartments barely big enough for one.

Suddenly, we find stories, poems, and elegies on the sorrows of loneliness. 200 years later, loneliness is an epidemic. Here are some facts to make you feel miserable. One out four Americans lives alone. One-third of the people in the world feel lonely. Britain and Japan appointed loneliness ministries. But people only got lonelier. Rising incomes and ambitions made loneliness more affordable than ever.

Loneliness is like a notification that you receive on your apple watch. It prompts you to stand up, go out, and talk to someone. To that extent, loneliness is useful. However, it also sends out a second notification to be fearful and vigilant. This second notification was setup 10,000 years ago when people used to hunt alone in forests. They had to be reminded to be anxious and scared because you don’t know what will come from where when you are in a forest. 

We still receive this second notification even though we moved from forests to cities. Our evolutionary skills haven’t caught up the economic changes. Our thoughts go into overdrive when we are alone. Loneliness is not a state of feeling nothing. It is a state of feeling a lot of things: anger, grief, fear, anxiety, sadness and shame. 

So what do we do? Everything around us seems determined to make us lonely. Facebook prefers that you spend time on their app than in real life. Hinge prefers you to be engaged with the app rather than in real life. Every idle minute spent on the phone leaves one with no time for anyone else.

So what should we do?

1. I’m lonely, let me fix that. *Gets married. Now we are lonely together, me and my wife.
2. Adopt a dog and go to work to be able to afford dog food. And now the dog feels lonely. So get the dog a dog. Now both the of them are lonely together. Sounds a lot like marriage. To put things in more perspective, these dogs were on street, homeless. You put them in home, and loneliness struck, they’d rather be on the beach.
3. Who can live with me but cannot be sad? plants. Or, so we thought. Two weeks in, they begin shedding leaves. We shed some tears as if that’ll help, we pour more water as if that’ll help. Maybe, they don’t like it here. They’d rather be with their friends in the forest.

All of the above are hit and miss. There is only one time-tested way to cure loneliness. Turn off the lights and turn on a horror movie. You won’t feel lonely anymore. You can feel that there is someone in the kitchen. Try it tonight on a TV near you.

Today, One does not have to be alone to be lonely. We made it possible to be lonely despite being among people. 

“I’m bored in the house. I’m in the house bored”

One cannot talk about loneliness without talking about “Home Alone”. We are all Kevin. We crave freedom and economic independence when we were with our families. Yet once we have it, we are not sure what to do with it beyond the initial excitement.

I hope that nobody feels alone. It should not have been this difficult. There are so many of us everywhere. It’s not as if we ran out of people. We shouldn’t be running out of people to speak to. But the fact is, many people only talk to one person each day, and that's usually the chatty cashier at Trader Joe's.

“Don't appear lonely - Starter Pack”

Here are three tips from highly successful people who were successful at not looking lonely when they were eating alone in a cafe:

1. Hold a book in hand and keep flipping pages every now and then. You don’t even have to read it. Just make people think that you are better than them.
2. Open a laptop and start typing something. Anything.
3. Wear a trench coat and sunglasses. Whisper dramatically into your Bluetooth every few minutes. Let them think you are on a secret mission.

Forget all this, talk to the stranger next to you. Its OKAY!

If you like this post, please consider subscribing to this blog. It costs nothing. If you super duper like it, consider sharing it with your friends.