Is there a vaccine for loneliness?

"All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Well, maybe "all" is an exaggeration.  But, most people do seem to be unable to sit quietly in a room with other people or by themselves.

Covid is testing our abilities to sit quietly in a room alone.  Like the recent case of a woman who was placed in a 14-day mandatory hotel quarantine upon returning from abroad.  The woman couldn't stand her loneliness, I suppose; the hotel security caught her and a man working in the hotel in an inappropriate encounter.  He was fired. 

That quote about man's inability to sit quietly is from 1654.  All I am saying is that this is not a new problem.

There is a difference between loneliness and solitude.  A huge difference.

One can be in the middle of the noisiest and tightest crowds like in the congested Ranganathan Street and yet feel lonely.  Loneliness is a state of mind where the person is craving for company because the person does not like being alone. Perhaps even hates being alone.

Solitude is different.

Solitude is not boredom either.  Boredom begins when people do not know what to with their "free" time. Solitude is intentional.  It is activity even when being inactive, or inactive even when being active.  It is that wonderful combination of actively doing nothing while being all by oneself.

We do not often seek loneliness, but there are times that we seek solitude.

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely.

"If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely."

Loneliness is a serious health issue.

The health implications of loneliness have become clearer over time. According to the research of Julianne Holt-Lunstad, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, and colleagues, the heightened risk of mortality from loneliness equals that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic, and exceeds the health risks associated with obesity. Researchers are now actively studying the mechanisms by which loneliness affects health, including its relationship with inflammation and harmful changes in DNA expression.

Now, add the effect of COVID-19--the social distancing and shelter-in-place and more.

“A major adverse consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to be increased social isolation and loneliness,” argued several professors in The Lancet Psychiatry in April. “Tracking loneliness and intervening early are important priorities.”

We have to wait for the world to be vaccinated for us to end this new wave of loneliness.  It will be quite a wait though :(

Can't work with them. Can't work without them.

Writing is a solitary activity, even for wannabe writers like me, and more often than not it is done when working from home.  Well, yes, there are stories of how writers would check into hotels and furiously pound on the typewriter keys.  Right, Jack?

Working from home has never been the norm for most, but WFH has become the default for most white-collar occupations.  With a coronavirus vaccine months away, companies like Google are making it clear to their employees that it might be summer 2021 before they can regroup in office buildings, and play ping pong like in the good old days.

Does WFH help with productivity?

Measuring productivity in the service sector has always been problematic.  What exactly are the outputs that we can measure and compare when the output is not always tangible, unlike in manufacturing or agriculture?

Yet, "they" said that WFH since the Covid-19 lockdown had increased productivity.  But then the reality is slowly sinking in that WFH is creating more problems for productivity.  The US, which unlike the European countries, is strangled by its irresponsible leader in the White House and several gubernatorial offices, is doomed to experience a productivity drop with continued WFH.

And then there is the employee morale itself.  For people whose living spaces are not really work environments, work-life divide has become hopelessly blurred.

“I used to think of a desk as like a kind of prison cell, where I was chained for eight hours a day,” she tells me over the phone. “It was always like serving time. But, at this point, my desk would be my saviour.”

As long as there was a work to go to, people complained about it while counting down the days towards their next vacation.  It was also a place to go to in order to get away for a few hours from the nagging spouse and whiny children.

Now, there is nowhere to go even if one takes off from work--you are stuck at home, which is where you also work.  Meanwhile, the nagging spouse and the demanding kids are always around all the time.

Those without spouses and children are trapped in loneliness.

More than half a million people have tuned into The Sound of Colleagues, a web page and Spotify playlist of workplace sounds, including keyboards, printers, chatter and coffee machines. Red Pipe, a Swedish music and sound studio, created it in April as a joke, but its data suggests that people keep it on in the background.

The whole thing is becoming a Kafkaesque nightmare for many!

Here's to hoping that the nightmare will end soon.  Make that nightmares--after all, they are linked!

Isolation. Quarantine. Loneliness.

There are some who are social butterflies because they simply cannot handle being by themselves.  And then there are some who prefer being alone because to them, well, L'enfer, c'est les autres.

I have never been in either camps.  I could even come across as being one camp or another.  But, neither a social butterfly nor an anti-social being am I.

I think and read a lot about solitude, loneliness, and empathy.  As I have often noted here with thoughts borrowed from experts, there is a world of a difference between solitude and loneliness.

Take this post, for instance.  "loneliness is widespread in America, with nearly 50 percent of respondents reporting that they feel alone or left out always or sometimes."  These are people who don't want to feel like they are alone in this vast universe.  Ironically, most of them have plenty of "friends"--but they are in the social media.  Loneliness and social media are highly correlated!  Even worse, “It’s only a matter of time before loneliness turns into depression. And that’s where it gets dangerous.”

Solitude is different.

Solitude is intentional.  It is activity even when being inactive, or inactive even when being active.  It is that wonderful combination of actively doing nothing while being all by oneself.

It is important to cultivate within us a positive taste for solitude.

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely.

Tragically, we are all going to be subjects in an extensive study on how we deal with loneliness and solitude.  The novel coronavirus, Covid-19, is requiring us all to learn about social distancing.  And to quarantine oneself if the situation arises.  Bill McKibben writes that "social distancing, quarantine, and isolation go hard against the gregarious instinct that makes us who we are" during a collective crisis.  I hope we will learn from this forced isolation and social distancing, and truly understand that we are in this together.

As McKibben writes:

We should use the quiet of these suddenly uncrowded days to think a little about how much we’ve allowed social isolation to grow in our society, even without illness as an excuse. ...
If we pay attention, we may value more fully the moment we’re released from our detention, and we may even make some changes in our lives as a result. It will be a relief, above all, when we’re allowed to get back to caring for one another, which is what socially evolved primates do best.

Stay healthy--physically and mentally.

Social connection and community in these "modern" times

Early in my life in Bakersfield, when I was impressed with the public-minded work a much older couple was doing, I decided to invite them for dinner at a local restaurant that served fantastic food.

The restaurant, incidentally, was a lucky outcome for us locals--it was a failed business that brought the man and his family to what Johnny Carson called the "armpit of California."  And boy did they know how to make tasty food in an awesome ambiance!

We did dine with this older couple.  And that is when I noticed something for the first time ever in my life.

The couple often looked around the room to see if they knew people there, and they did.  After having been public figures for a while in town, of course they knew people and people knew them.  I felt letdown though that they were not focused on the people with them.

In all fairness, I should also note that despite me initiating the dinner meeting, the older couple insisted on paying for the dinner, which they did.

The more I became a real adult, the less I became keen on meeting with people at restaurants.  For that roving-eyes-reason and more.  It is difficult to have meaningful conversations with all the noise in the background. And then the constant interruptions by the waitstaff.  And, finally, the reality that we cannot linger on, even if the conversation gets to be mighty interesting--the restaurant tables are very short-term rental units.

Most restaurants are open only from early evening through the night.  They have plenty of unused space for a good chunk of the day, even when the prep work happens in the back, right?

Which is why we apparently have a new format:

Restaurants are taking this to the next level as tech apps like Spacious, Reset and WorkChew turn their dining rooms into co-working offices during off-hours. Most participating restaurants only serve dinner, so they function as workspaces from 8 or 9 a.m. until 5 p.m., at which point workers must leave.
N.Y.C. Czech restaurant Bohemian Spirit has been using Spacious for about three months. It didn't take much work on their end — Spacious brought in high-powered WiFi, copious extension cords, and manages the crowds.

If you are like me, you are wondering who might ever want to use that kind of non-office as office.

About 41 million Americans (approximately 13% of the population) work as freelancers, consultants and contractors, which equals more people seeking temporary workspaces.

Why don't they simply work from their homes then?  For "the sense of community established while working alongside others."

We live in strange times.  People looking at their electronic screens sitting next to others looking at their electronic screens, and this provides them with a "sense of community."

"This points to our social nature and the fact that many feel isolated and just want to be around others," he explains. "The alternative would be working alone at home. So the mismatch idea — that our modern environment is very different than that which we evolved in — has led to people feeling isolated and desperate for 'social connection,' even if it's merely sitting around others."

Surely there are other more productive, constructive, and fun-filled ways to feel less isolated and more connected.  Even this hermit knows of a few.  Like hosting a few people for dinner that was cooked at home. Lively conversations. Laughs. Good times.

All alone in this vast universe that I cannot comprehend

My grandfather left his village (which my mother claims has always been a small town and never a village!) deep in the southern part of India to go study in Varanasi.

This was back in the early 1930s, in an India where most people hadn't even seen a light bulb and where outdoor dry toilets and manual scavenging were the norm.

After days of train journey, grandfather would reach his student quarters.  If he didn't send a telegram informing his parents about reaching Varanasi, he wrote a letter that would take days to reach his parents.  This was the practice through all the years of his undergraduate studies in metallurgy.

Two decades later, my father, an engineering graduate in a newly independent India,  decided that exciting industrial projects were beginning in places far, far away from his village (which was and is a village, he agrees) and went to join the dam construction projects, modeled after the US' TVA.

Typically, it was four to five days of travel time from the village till father reached his bachelor quarters.  Upon reaching, he penned a letter that typically took a week to reach grandma.

My father and grandfather did not even pause to think that these were nightmarish conditions.  After all, had they thought that way, they would not have ventured out at all to places far, far away from their homes.  Often alone by themselves, and in places where the language, foods, and almost every aspect of culture was different from what they were used to.

Yet, they did.

Now, we live in a world that is hyperconnected.  We Facebook where we are, what we eat, what we do, where we travel. We tweet where we are, what we eat, what we do, and where we travel. We Instagram where we are, what ... well, you get my point.

Loneliness is no longer a part of life anymore, it seems.  

Loneliness makes us think about life and our own place in this universe.  In the old country, those bent on this inquiry went into the forests so that they could be alone to contemplate about existence.  Of course, such meditation was in the contexts of god and prayers, but there was a conviction that loneliness helps.

If we are hyper-connected, then when do we have the time to think about our own existence?  After all, even when we are "alone", we are no longer alone, it seems.

There is something seriously wrong, don't you think, when all these decades of "progress" has only led us to how we are afraid to be alone because, if alone we might have to think about important questions like who we are and why we exist?

My grandfather and father used their alone time to reflect on life.  They read, listened to music, and communed with their gods.  This atheist believes that was a far better existence than the current way of being afraid of inquiring about the human condition itself.

Whether or not one believes in any god, surely there is more to life than posting a Facebook status update, right?!

Source: seriously, you can't recognize this as from the New Yorker? ;)

Only the lonely!

The more the virtual connections, and the more time that one spends in the virtual world, there is less time for the real world.  And, it is in the real world that we people live.  So, if we have very little time for the real world ... then ...

loneliness is widespread in America, with nearly 50 percent of respondents reporting that they feel alone or left out always or sometimes.

Now, pause for a minute and think about it.  Who spends less time in the virtual world?  Older folks, right?  And who is online and connected 24x7?  The digital native young people.  So, it should be no surprise that:

"Too often people think that this [problem] is specific to older adults," says Holt-Lunstad. "This report helps with the recognition that this can affect those at younger ages."
In fact, some research published in 2017 by psychologist Jean Twenge at San Diego State University suggests that more screen time and social media may have caused a rise in depression and suicide among American adolescents. The study also found that people who spend less time looking at screens and more time having face-to-face social interactions are less likely to be depressive or suicidal.

More often that not common sense can easily tell us what we otherwise try to measure through expensive research.  Loneliness and technology is one of those easy to call issues.

The only interesting twist for me was this on the correlation between social media use and feelings of loneliness:

"If you're passively using it, if you're just scrolling feeds, that's associated with more negative effects," she says. "But if you're using it to reach out and connect to people to facilitate other kinds of [in-person] interactions, it's associated with more positive effects."

But then, it makes sense--it all depends on how we use any technological tool.

On this issue, the UK is ahead of the US--a few months ago, the UK's Prime Minister appointed a minister for loneliness:

“For far too many people, loneliness is the sad reality of modern life,” Mrs. May said in a statement.
“I want to confront this challenge for our society and for all of us to take action to address the loneliness endured by the elderly, by carers, by those who have lost loved ones — people who have no one to talk to or share their thoughts and experiences with.”

Modern life is a killer!

“There are so many university students who just lock themselves in their rooms for days because they feel rejected or that they don’t fit in,” Ms. Jenkins said. “It’s only a matter of time before loneliness turns into depression. And that’s where it gets dangerous.”

I am outta here!

Only the lonely!

A few weeks ago, a student came to get my advice.  I know what you are thinking; what's wrong with the student to ask me, right?

I never really tell students what they ought to do.  Instead, I often ask them whether they had seriously considered options other than the one for which they want my feedback.  I even tell them that my job is to make sure they have looked at their options from multiple perspectives, so that they can then decide for themselves.

Years ago, one student said that she wished for a Hogwart School kind of a situation.  If you recall, (btw, Harry Potter is now 20 years old!) students are assigned to the houses based on what the magic hat senses.  This student said it will be awesome if such a hat existed that will then tell her what she should do.  "What about free will?" I asked her with a smile.

So, when the student asked me for advice, I engaged with her quite a bit.  And one of the questions that I asked her was about how she spends time outside of classes, and about friends.  "Most people value the time they spent in college for the experiences they had," I told her.  "It is not classes and teachers that people cherish later on.  It is all about experiences with people, especially the healthy experiences."

I am not sure what kind of an impact my words had on that student.  I have done my part.

Students have gazillion "friends" in their social media lives, but, are they meaningfully engaging with their peers in the real  world?  I hope they are; else, it is recipe for loneliness, which is one of the increasing health problems.  Which is why the UK has even appointed a minister for  loneliness!

As this essay puts it:

Loneliness is the leprosy of the 21st century, eating away at its victims and repelling those who encounter it.

Ouch!

It may be that affluence is making things worse. We prize space, privacy and independence, and the richer we get the more of these we can afford, yet their corollary is being alone. Our economy works better if people move around to find work, yet mobility stretches and breaks the bonds of family and community. Phillips told me that “capitalism and a mobile labour market make connections between people very precarious and difficult. In so far as people feel that what they’ve got to do is get on, they are, as it were, encouraged to sacrifice relationship and intimacy.” 
But if money can’t shield you from loneliness, poverty can exacerbate it.

I am with this opinion author who cautions against overblowing the loneliness situation.  And I am also in agreement with the author's concluding lines:

In places like the United States and Britain, it’s the poor, unemployed, displaced and migrant populations that stand to suffer most from loneliness and isolation. Their lives are unstable, and so are their relationships. When they get lonely, they are the least able to get adequate social or medical support.
I don’t believe we have a loneliness epidemic. But millions of people are suffering from social disconnection. Whether or not they have a minister for loneliness, they deserve more attention and help than we’re offering today.

I hope the young, including that student, are making healthy choices.

Solitude in the technologically connected world

I think that I have qualities that will piss people off day in and day out.  But, maybe there are at least a couple of things about me that appeal to somebody.  And maybe a couple of different things about me appeal to somebody else.  But, here is the problem: Anybody who wants to be friends with me has to work with the entire me, right?  After all, they can't merely get those one or two things and then vanish.

If you agree with me, then you are my kind of a person.  But then that is also why you are here, reading the crap that I post every day.

But, if you think about seriously enough, you will immediately see that you can get those one or two things from me and then vanish.  Are you thinking how?

For instance, the moment I start talking slowly about something that absolutely fascinates me but is boring to you, maybe you start doing a quick check on the emails.  Or the Facebook feed.  Or you are sending a text message to your colleague at work about the meeting tomorrow. Or, you ... now you can begin to see how you can choose to get what you want from me, right?

Of course, this is not anything new.  In the old days, people simply zoned out.  Students' minds drifted off into worlds far away from away from our galaxy.  But, what is new is, well, let me give you an example.  Recently, I texted an older friend about swinging by their place to say hi and chat for a while.  A couple of minutes later, the text reply that I read shocked me.  The message said that they were at a funeral service for a friend.  Before the days of the smartphone, when we attended a funeral service, we had no choice but to be physically and mentally be at the funeral service.  Not anymore.  Whether it is a funeral, or a wedding, or my classes, or a board meeting, or whatever, we have started being here and in a gazillion other places all at once at the same time.

Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble -- trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection. We're getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere -- connected to all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives. They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that matters most to them is control over where they put their attention. 

I like how Sherry Turkle puts it: We want to customize our lives.  Which is what I see even in students in my classes.  You warming up now?

Across the generations, I see that people can't get enough of each other, if and only if they can have each other at a distance, in amounts they can control. I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right.

With the technology for which the smartphone is merely a forerunner of even smarter stuff coming our way, we are almost instantaneously editing our lives and our interactions with others.  But, this is far from the approach to understanding who we are--as individuals and as humans.

 Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring. 

Are you with me now?

We expect more from technology and less from each other. And I ask myself, "Why have things come to this?"

Exactly.  Why have things come to this?  What is the inner force propelling us faster and faster along this route?

technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable. And we are vulnerable. We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control. But we're not so comfortable. We are not so much in control.

We are making life unnecessarily complicated for ourselves.  Instead of admitting to the awful burden that loneliness and working towards eliminating that problem, we seek the illusion of companionship that technology provides us.

 if we don't have connection, we don't feel like ourselves. We almost don't feel ourselves. So what do we do? We connect more and more. But in the process, we set ourselves up to be isolated.
How do you get from connection to isolation? You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely.

So ... any suggestions?

Really, you need suggestions after all the posts on such topics?  Tell you what ... nothing will be new in the following:

Start thinking of solitude as a good thing. Make room for it. Find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children. Create sacred spaces at home -- the kitchen, the dining room -- and reclaim them for conversation. Do the same thing at work. ... Most important, we all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits. Because it's when we stumble or hesitate or lose our words that we reveal ourselves to each other.

Listen.
Even to the boring bits.

We will put that to a test here.
Let me tell you about my ... hey, listen to me.
Stop.
DO NOT run away from me ...

Just say hello

"I feel isolated" said my father in one of our recent conversations.

His feeling of isolation might seem to be an exaggerated statement when viewed via a framework that is not his.  Father's world was, and is, defined by the old traditions in the old country.  The traditions where even the second and third cousins were as close relatives as siblings were.  A tradition in which the extended family was one hyperextended set of networks.  Interestingly, one of his cousin brothers, who is  a decade and a half younger than him, apparently expressed a similar sentiment as well.  My mother joked that the two (cousin) brothers were consoling each other!

Emotions and feelings cannot be countered with objective measures.  Emotions are emotions.  Thus, there was no use, I figured, in pointing out the reality that his everyday reports to me include the conversations and visits he had with different people.  And here he was expressing that feeling of isolation when we were Skyping!  A technological miracle that allows us to remain connected from our locations on opposite sides of the planet.

Back when I was new to this country, telephone calls to India were mighty expensive, even during the off-peak times, and especially on a graduate student budget.  Now, a telephone call is inexpensive.  But, father is no longer interested in the telephone--he has recently gotten used to Skype.  And that has its own problems--when the video doesn't work, because of network speeds in India, and all we have is an audio call, he loses the interest to chat. (It was when the video worked, a couple of days ago, that he made that remark.)

Of course, father's comment was not merely about his interactions with this son.  It was about the first cousins who have drifted away.  The second cousins who might not even know that he still exists.  The children of those cousins who perhaps do not even know of such a person.  In other words, a current world that is vastly different from his own old world in the old world.

The old traditions held that nephews take after their uncles.  While I don't know how much that is true, it certainly is the case with father.  Like his uncle, father, too, recited from Bhaja Govindam to underscore his feelings.  There is something powerful in the argument when one recites from memory the most appropriate verse, more so when it is in Sanskrit:

यावद्वित्तोपार्जन सक्तः
स्तावन्निज परिवारो रक्तः |
पश्चाज्जीवति जर्जर देहे 
वार्तां कोऽपि न पृच्छति गेहे
yávad-vittopárjana-saktas-
távan-nija-pariváro raktaç
paùcáj-jivati jarjara-dehe
vártam kopi na pøcchati gehe 

And then came the translation:

So long as a man is fit and able to support his family,
see what affection all those around him show |
But no one at home cares to even have a word with him
when his body totters due to old age.

Thanks to having lived this long, I knew better than to intellectualize his comments right then and there.  My first thought was that if that was expressed by Sankara a long time ago, even then he was aware that old people were sidelined?

More than that, I did not want to make a point that economic development comes with many variations of a Faustian bargain, and a complete redefinition of relationships is one of the ways in which we have paid the price.  Of course, it is also thanks to economic development that we now have plenty of people his age, and older--and on Skype--when a mere two centuries ago the average life expectancy for humans was less than forty years!

While father might express his isolation in one kind of an old-world framework, isolation and loneliness are increasingly characteristics of our existential angst. Not only among the elderly.  This is one of the issues that Oprah appears to have taken on, in which Sanjay Gupta writes:

According to estimates by University of Chicago psychology professor John T. Cacioppo, PhD, coauthor of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, at any given time at least one in five people, or roughly 60 million Americans, suffers from loneliness. By this I mean both the acute bouts of melancholy we all feel from time to time, as well as a chronic lack of intimacy—a yearning for someone to truly know you, get you, see you—that can leave people feeling seriously unmoored

So, what is a simple thing that you can do?
Just Say Hello!
Especially to your aging parents.