Loneliness
Actually I'm not about to rant about how lonely I am. I actually stumbled across this website in an effort to better understand all the loneliness and seemingly counterproductive behaviors I've often watched, tried, and had tried on me in an attempt to ease this pain.
So essentially the idea of this is that as a species we're used to living in small towns and not being so mobile. Given this loneliness was usually about being rejected from a small community with little hopes of living it down. In the last hundred years we've had a lot more mobility, larger communities, and most importantly anonymity.
Loneliness not just caused by being isolated, as the small community scenario would suggest, but by not being known. This is precisely why anonymity can cause loneliness. I remember, while I was trying to make friends in the city, that meeting people just by chance and really having lots of avenues to get to meet people was really limited. This seems counterintuitive for a city that has night clubs, pubs, coffee shops, bars etc on every block and every street, but the abundance of entertainment avenues actually made it harder to develop lasting relationships with people.
To break it down, let's look at the atomic level of this. Say you're new to the city and you go to a concert or a club or a coffee shop, however it is that you prefer to meet people. Then you meet someone, exchange contact info, have a nice chat. There is no guarantee you'll ever see this person again. You can go to the same coffee shop you met them every day (which is kind of creepy) and never see them. You can call them, but in general it's a lot easier to just do your thing than to schedule hang out times. So should you just do you're routine, this instance will happen over and over again resulting in meeting a lot of people who you'll likely never see again. This does little to quell lonely feelings, since even though you're not isolated you're not known either.
The reason this is such a problem is that this feeling and connotation of loneliness still has the same associations with large scale rejection that it always did. It's something that people are afraid even to admit let alone do something about; because in the past being lonely was more permanent.
So given these feelings that are so easy to instill and so hard to even manage, it's no wonder that there are lots of maladaptive ways of dealing with them. Throw the general shame into the mix and you basically have a situation where lots of people have a mutual problem and the only way to solve it is to think of an effective method yourself, which is like reinventing the fucking wheel.
Should you be someone who doesn't want to work so goddamn hard for something so basic, you're essentially screwed in this set up. Either you have a stroke of genius, or you stoically deal with the loneliness. The latter usually gets back to you, as you start looking at relationships as a means to satisfy your need for closeness, rather than a mutual appreciation for the other person as a human being.
So what happens? Stalkers happen, as an obvious primitive attempt to solve being lonely. But it can be subtler. Support group junkies are a great example. I say support group because of fight club, but this happens in special interest groups too. You go in, you talk about whatever the topic of the club is, then leave and make a b-line to the next group. During this usually the conversations are retreading of already established common ground and end up being unsatisfactory because nobody learned anything about anyone else. It's not completely ineffective-if you go to a sci fi club, you know that the people there know you like science fiction. The thing is that's all they know, and the next group only knows that you're interested in their topic, and it's full of different people. In addition this fills up your schedule fast, leaving you without much time for people who'd really like to know you outside of the groups you attend.
Then there are defense mechanisms to these methods, for example lots of people are stingy about contact info because stalkers are so common. Lots of people are quiet in groups because they don't want to be pestered by people who use the group to ease their loneliness. A lot of these defense mechanisms actually exascerbate the problem for the already lonely, and instill loneliness in new people, since it's a natural reaction to believe that someone who doesn't want to give you their contact info doesn't like you or want to see you. Worst of all, it even makes the person on defense more lonely because they preemptively cut off a decent friendship in the name of an increasingly more justified paranoia.
I think talking about these feelings more openly and frankly would do a lot for a lot of people. There are obvious benefits, like learning newer better ways to deal with loneliness. There are also less obvious benefits, like putting people in more common ground-therefore strengthening the idea of community and branching out. People can share war stories, and communicate on a much more personal level about a struggle that's really affecting everyone. Then we won't need to beat up Iraqis or hang Osama to feel like we have a common goal.
In the end I think loneliness is an elephant sybling of hate and fear. It's a painful feeling that can drive some truly horrific behavior I'm sure we'd all agree humanity would be better off about. And talking about it is the only true way to manage it.
So essentially the idea of this is that as a species we're used to living in small towns and not being so mobile. Given this loneliness was usually about being rejected from a small community with little hopes of living it down. In the last hundred years we've had a lot more mobility, larger communities, and most importantly anonymity.
Loneliness not just caused by being isolated, as the small community scenario would suggest, but by not being known. This is precisely why anonymity can cause loneliness. I remember, while I was trying to make friends in the city, that meeting people just by chance and really having lots of avenues to get to meet people was really limited. This seems counterintuitive for a city that has night clubs, pubs, coffee shops, bars etc on every block and every street, but the abundance of entertainment avenues actually made it harder to develop lasting relationships with people.
To break it down, let's look at the atomic level of this. Say you're new to the city and you go to a concert or a club or a coffee shop, however it is that you prefer to meet people. Then you meet someone, exchange contact info, have a nice chat. There is no guarantee you'll ever see this person again. You can go to the same coffee shop you met them every day (which is kind of creepy) and never see them. You can call them, but in general it's a lot easier to just do your thing than to schedule hang out times. So should you just do you're routine, this instance will happen over and over again resulting in meeting a lot of people who you'll likely never see again. This does little to quell lonely feelings, since even though you're not isolated you're not known either.
The reason this is such a problem is that this feeling and connotation of loneliness still has the same associations with large scale rejection that it always did. It's something that people are afraid even to admit let alone do something about; because in the past being lonely was more permanent.
So given these feelings that are so easy to instill and so hard to even manage, it's no wonder that there are lots of maladaptive ways of dealing with them. Throw the general shame into the mix and you basically have a situation where lots of people have a mutual problem and the only way to solve it is to think of an effective method yourself, which is like reinventing the fucking wheel.
Should you be someone who doesn't want to work so goddamn hard for something so basic, you're essentially screwed in this set up. Either you have a stroke of genius, or you stoically deal with the loneliness. The latter usually gets back to you, as you start looking at relationships as a means to satisfy your need for closeness, rather than a mutual appreciation for the other person as a human being.
So what happens? Stalkers happen, as an obvious primitive attempt to solve being lonely. But it can be subtler. Support group junkies are a great example. I say support group because of fight club, but this happens in special interest groups too. You go in, you talk about whatever the topic of the club is, then leave and make a b-line to the next group. During this usually the conversations are retreading of already established common ground and end up being unsatisfactory because nobody learned anything about anyone else. It's not completely ineffective-if you go to a sci fi club, you know that the people there know you like science fiction. The thing is that's all they know, and the next group only knows that you're interested in their topic, and it's full of different people. In addition this fills up your schedule fast, leaving you without much time for people who'd really like to know you outside of the groups you attend.
Then there are defense mechanisms to these methods, for example lots of people are stingy about contact info because stalkers are so common. Lots of people are quiet in groups because they don't want to be pestered by people who use the group to ease their loneliness. A lot of these defense mechanisms actually exascerbate the problem for the already lonely, and instill loneliness in new people, since it's a natural reaction to believe that someone who doesn't want to give you their contact info doesn't like you or want to see you. Worst of all, it even makes the person on defense more lonely because they preemptively cut off a decent friendship in the name of an increasingly more justified paranoia.
I think talking about these feelings more openly and frankly would do a lot for a lot of people. There are obvious benefits, like learning newer better ways to deal with loneliness. There are also less obvious benefits, like putting people in more common ground-therefore strengthening the idea of community and branching out. People can share war stories, and communicate on a much more personal level about a struggle that's really affecting everyone. Then we won't need to beat up Iraqis or hang Osama to feel like we have a common goal.
In the end I think loneliness is an elephant sybling of hate and fear. It's a painful feeling that can drive some truly horrific behavior I'm sure we'd all agree humanity would be better off about. And talking about it is the only true way to manage it.