Are You Lonely?
Loneliness Kills
Social isolation is more lethal than obesity or smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to research published by Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University. Since obesity is associated in the United States with 300,000 to 600,000 deaths a year, the implication is that loneliness is a huge, if silent, killer.
Loneliness increases inflammation, heart disease, dementia and death rates, researchers say — but it also simply makes us heartsick and leaves us inhabiting an Edvard Munch canvas. Public health experts in many countries are debating how to address a “loneliness epidemic” that corrodes modern life, but Britain has taken the lead: Last year it appointed a minister for loneliness.
We live in age where just about everyone has a smartphone with all sorts of social media But it seems that while we have the technology to connect, we just aren’t relating to one another at a fundamental personal and emotional level. Emoticons are not feelings. “Chat” is not empathy. And your facebook friends are mostly not your friends at all.
Why?
My friend in New Zealand, with whom I wrote my first book of the Ageing Young Series, Dwight Whitney, writes and gives talks about “belonging” among other things. Dwight has a knack for identifying core issues. So he got me thinking about “belonging” or rather our lack of it, not to mention our our misunderstanding of what it means, and how it works in daily life. .
When you don’t feel you belong, you are lonely and isolated.
What do you do?
Do you do as Socrates did, when Athens gave him a choice between leaving the city and everyone he knew or drinking hemlock? Socrates, intelligent, as he was could not bear to be alone. He killed himself.
That is what a lot of people today are doing.
50?
Women are taught from an early age, playing Mommy and Daddy with their dolls and little houses, that their purpose in life is Family and Kids.
What do they do when they get to 50 and go through menopause and can no longer have children? What do they do when their kids move away for education or jobs or to start a family? What did they do when their husband looks more and more like a worn-out pair of slippers and just as sexless? What do they do when they stand naked in front of the woman and see wrinkles, belly fat, and their ass and breasts hanging. Friends move away. Parents die. Suddenly, they no longer “belong”. They have passed expiry date: they are in the back on an upper shelf with a bunch of other canned foods that nobody wants to eat for fear of salmonella.
Men at 50 are putting on weight. Years trying to make a living are taking their toll.: their prostates have tripled in size; their sex lives died years ago: they are under pressure at work from younger men, with newly printed degrees. Life sucks: in a few more years they will have to retire — even if they can keep their jobs that long: the economy is getting worse and worse; the routine is soul-destroying 9 to 5, 40 hours a week of which about 10 are productive, your world no wider than your desk at work. Men too suffer when their friends move away or are transferred and the kids look at them as “old” and parents die. Their wives are no longer interested in them sexually, not that really care anymore. They too are facing an expiry date. Rotting away.
They sum it all up saying that they no longer really “belong”.
Lonely….Mr. Lonely. If only Bobby Vinton knew.
Men fight back by going on Facebook and sharing photos of breakfast or their hatred of Donald Trump.
Solutions?
Leonard Cohen, sometimes called the “poet of loneliness” writes:
When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.
If you feel lonely and don’t belong, you have indeed “sinned” — in existential a spiritual sense. By “spiritual” I am not talking about religion, but something more basic that is rooted in our being and nature. You are doing something against both nature in general and human nature. That makes it also an existential sin.
Loneliness and the sense of not belonging are rooted in the Ego, the “I am”, which by its very nature is exclusionary and individual. The western world took a wrong turn with Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”. Cogito ergo sum which made “thinking”, verbal formulations all important, defining ‘identity” in social terms. Tinker, Tailor, Spy. But we are not just not one thing and certainly not our social roles either.
Freud, for all his faults, was right in seeing the Ego as a extension of the Super Ego, social conditioning, individuated by instinct, the demands of our animal nature. Identity and cognitive dissonance go hand in hand.
Male, female, trans. Gay, Straight, Bi. Child. Teen. Young Adult. Middle Aged. Retired. Old. All these social designations of identity, alienate us from one another and from of our fundamental being. They also generate sexism, racism, ageism and the like, as much as they are results of those things. It is no coincidence that loneliness has reached pandemic proportions in this new Age of Identity.
“But this who I am”, you say.
Maybe this IS “who” you are. But it is not “what’ you are. Your being is greater than your self of singular self, if only because the “self” is not singular at all, but plural. “What” is a priori to “who”.
Cogito ergo sum, assumes one unitary self. But you have many selves, many identities.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.― Alfred Tennyson
It is not just that each different social role and interaction requires a different “you”, it goes deeper: you are all that you have ever known. You include in your “self” therefore all the people that you have known and every interaction. A “singular” Self is useful as social interface since it is unitary but it is one-dimensional.
What you call your self’ is just a kind of psychological GUI and you can change the theme automatically depending on the context.Inside you is Mommy and Daddy and your siblings and friends, your first love, your last love, pets and everyone with whom you shared intimacy. Your self is composite, multi-dimensional. Your “Being” as the philosopher Heidegger called it” is much, much bigger than your social self.
We evolved this way, as the most social of the ape family, with a unique capacity for empathy and altruism that allows us to bond to each other in the same way children do to others , Mommy, Daddy, siblings, friends, Teddy and the dog. Other animals grow up, breed and die. We are little different because we maintain juvenile attitudes life long. We are all Peter Pan, or in the case of women, Petra Pan.
30,000 years ago we reached the apex of evolution, living in small egalitarian groups of hunter gatherers that had no leaders or chiefs and depended on consensus and collaboration.
What we call “ego” today — the ‘I am”, difference, was respected but not allowed to dominate. We learned to use song, dance, humor and play and sex to mitigate selfishness. We evolved a spiritual sense, which is simply the ability of the brain to transcend the “singular” I am, to bond with others and include them in the heart and to see oneself as part of something bigger than our “self” alone.
Nobody ever talked about loneliness or not belonging because we were always part of something greater. We belonged to our proto-tribe and to nature or we did not exist. We were not separated by age, sex, race, even species.
We did not discriminate according to sex — male, female, or trans — race or age. Difference was respected so long as it did not disadvantage others. If you saw visions, that was just cool.
But there was no tolerance for sociopaths.
Although the Iroquois Indians were not small-group, immediate return hunter-gathers, they were similar in many respects. White women captured by the Iroquois were never raped and they rarely wanted to return to settlement life where they were chattel. As Iroquois women, they were more than equal to men. Gay people from the European settlements could in find refuge with the Iroquois, who simply didn’t care.
Can we go back to this lifestyle? Not as it was. But we can learn from it. For this our nature.
Being Human
Before you can be a good human, you must first be a good animal. No one grows “up”: they grow forward.
Our civilizations will fail as all others have with enormous loss of life, perhaps billions. Humanity, if it survives, will do so in a world of small communities linked collectively through digital technologies, robotics and AI — globally but also locally — recalling Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic “Global Village”.
Once again, we will have to care for our neighbors.
Once again, we will have to encourage difference, diversity and equality at the same time.
Is it possible? Keep in mind that to make a singles 5 n chip for a next generation smartphone requires multiple technologies, produced mostly by small companies around the world — the infamous “supply chain”.
Few human hands are actually needed.
Advanced technologies have to be produced robotically with AI, with the AI also dependent on small, specialized companies and the creativity of small groups of researchers, often in teams no bigger than Robin Dunbar’s “core” group number — 5. Rarely bigger than Dunbar’s maximum of 150.
Big multinationals coordinate and brand and market and make their owners rich but they contribute nothing much to the development of technology to the extent that their primary goal is not progress but the profit of a few already rich people who don’t need more money.
The basic processes of technological creativity are collaborative and cooperative and involve much smaller enterprises: they are not driven by the profit motive or by competition but by the desire of creative people to make something original, something that did not exist before, and will benefit others. Empathy and altruism rules. There are no sociopaths in these techno-bands, whose momentum mimics that of hunter-gatherer peoples.
If neoliberal predatory and monopoly capitalism collapses, as it is sure to, along with the nation state was we know it today, many of the smaller enterprises and research groups that are the core of technological progress will survive — because they have to. With 3D and now 4D printing and robotics, systems can be networked with the nodes, to supply surviving communities with what they need and maintain a techno-matrix. With as many as 6 billion people dying, the remaining population will be smarter, more resilient and cooperative. This will not be a Mad Max world because that is a world in which ALL die.
We evolved to leverage empathy, altruism, communication, equality and cooperation to survive the challenges of nature. With a much smaller global population of, say, 1.5 billion, the pressure will lift on resources and the environment.
Once again, we will all belong. And few will be lonely. The Lonely will be dead.
