The weight of one

Reviewing recent posts I have realized that in the recent times I have been writing a lot about solitude, loneliness, belonging, and that had me wondering why. On Friday I wrote about who had the best possibilities to work from home and what impact that practices might have on them. On Thursday I discussed the mechanisms by which one finds reasons to feel as part of a group. On Wednesday I reflected on how being busy achieving our goals and serving the paradigm of neoliberal capitalism left us essentially without time to connect with ourselves, let alone with others.And on Tuesday I mentioned how the marketing machinery is refining their tools to sell us specifically what we need and we alone. Luckily, this loneliness-related streak does not reach into Monday, where I pondered the justice principle implicit in our social contracts.

If I did not know myself I would think that I might be sliding down a slippery slope, but fortunately that is not the case. It just happens to be a coincidence that in recent times a number of Facebook posts, series episodes, etc. have made aware of how deep-cutting this problem is. In particular, I have run into this remarkable article by Maggie Fergusson in The Economist from almost three years ago, where she reports from interviews she made to a number of different characters with obvious solitary histories.

Photo: Manfred Antranias Zimmer from Pixabay

It is remarkable that Rebecca, a beautiful and successful 35-year old woman, starts to feel very lonely because all her friends are getting married and having children, while her last romantic relationship ended four year earlier and she has been unable to find a new meaningful other. She has no one to come back to at the end of her workday, no one to provide support when she is in a difficult situation, no one to console her when she is sad. With everyone else going on with their lives and focusing their time on their jobs and families, she has been left behind being important to no one.

However, being married is also not a remedy, because Caroline was married for 12 years to a man that did not save her from her loneliness. He spent long hours in the office and even when he was at home he was thinking about work. With those preconditions it is not surprising that she did not feel accompanied: nothing she said seemed to cause any impression on him, which replied with vagueness or not at all. She held on to him for a few more years because she loved him, but in the end the loneliness was too hard and they parted ways.

The common thread of most of this stories is that lonely people have a sense of worthlessness, and understandably so, because worthy people get attention. In some sense it has similarities with being chronically unemployed: if you are unable to get something that millions of people around the world get on a daily basis there must be something wrong with you. You must be unemployable, or unlovable, at any rate with some kind of defect. And in fact Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has established that people in need of affection are less likely to receive it because their eagerness makes them awkward and less likable.

Growing up, I was a relatively lonely kid, not because I did not like the company, but because being among a big group often led the conversation away from my interests, so I spent most of my time on one-to-one company or alone. But the fact is I have always found company whenever I needed it. These days the situation is a little bit more complex, with everybody working from home it is much harder to run into someone that would be open to casual conversation, so I end up doing the rounds of my friends online and normally I find someone. And, if by any chance I do not succeed, I can always come to you to dump my heavy heart and you will have no choice but to read. Or you might stop reading, but then I would not know anyway.

At any rate, I still that face-to-face contact is much more rewarding than any level of electronic relationship, so I hope this situation ends soon. Until then, please stay safe, keep your distance and limit your in-person interactions to a minimum. Have a nice evening.