Everybody feels lonely from time to time. Like when we have no one to sit next to during lunch, or when we move to a new city, or when nobody has time for us at the weekend. But, over the past few decades, this occasional feeling has become chronic for millions.We are living in the most connected time in the human history and yet, an unprecedented number of us feel isolated.
Being ‘alone’ and being ‘lonely’ aren’t the same. You might be filled with bliss when you are alone and yourself. But when you are with people, you might feel exhausted and hate every second of it.
Loneliness is purely subjective and individual experience. If you feel lonely, you are lonely; doesn’t matter you are alone or you are with friends.
A common stereotype is that loneliness is felt only by people who don’t know how to talk to others or who don’t know how to be social and act around other people. But population based studies have shown, social skills make no difference for a person feeling lonely. Money, fame, beauty, social skills,etc. nothing can protect you against loneliness, as it is a part of your biology.
* What actually is loneliness? Loneliness is a bodily function, just like hunger or thirst. Hunger makes you pay attention to your physical needs, whereas loneliness makes you pay attention to your mental and social needs. In the long run of evolution, being social has become a part of our biology. Since the ancient times being social has played a major role. Being together meant help in hunting, traveling, building and thus surviving; being alone on the other hand, meant death. To our ancestors, the biggest threat wasn’t to be eaten alive by some animal, it was being excluded from the group. To cope with this threat, our body came up with social pain. Such pain is an evolutionary adaptation to rejection.
Social pain is much like an early warning system, to make sure we stop the behaviour which would leave us isolated. This mechanisms for keeping us connected work greatly for millions of years, until humans began building a new and smaller world for themselves.
* The downside of the Modern World: The loneliness epidemic that we see today only started since the late Renaissance,i.e, during the late 17 century. Western culture began to focus in the individual, intellectuals moved away from the collectivism of the middle ages, etc. This trend accelerated during the Industrial Revolution. People started leaving behind their villages to start working in factories. Communities that had existed for hundreds of years seemed to disappear, while the cities started to grow. As our world became modern, this trend spread out more and more.
Today, we travel vast distances for jobs, loved ones and education, leaving behind our social network. We meet fewer people in person and we meet them less often than we did in the past. In US, the mean number of close friends dropped from 3 in 1985 to 2 in 2011. Most people stumble upon chronic loneliness by accident. As we approach adulthood, we become busy with work, romance, university, kids and Netflix. There’s just not enough time. So to make up time, we try to find ways to avoid stuff, stuff that are indeed important to us.
The most convenient and easy thing to sacrifice is time with friends and family. Until you wake up someday and realise that you feel isolated and lonely, that you earn for close relationships. But as we all know, its hard to find close connections as adults. And thus, loneliness becomes chronic. While we humans might feel great about iPhones, Internet and spaceships; our bodies and mind are still fundamentally the same as our ancestors millions of years ago. We are still biologically fine-tuned to being together. We might deny it but deep down, we still want to be social and that’s alright, cause that’s in our biology.
( TO BE CONTINUED…….)
***Written by Saurav Baglari***
Lost Writer 