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 :(

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.

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 ...