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Domingo, 26 de abril de 2020

“Love is the answer. Someone to love is the answer”

Loneliness is grief, distended. People are primates, and even more sociable than chimpanzees. We hunger for intimacy. We wither without it. We act fearful, defensive, and self-involved, all of which drive away people who might actually want to help

Do you often, sometimes, rarely, or never feel these ways?

I am unhappy doing so many things alone. I have nobody to talk to. I cannot tolerate being so alone. I feel as if nobody really understands me. I am no longer close to anyone. There is no one I can turn to. I feel isolated from others. Primates need to belong to an intimate social group, a family or a band, in order to survive

Separated from the group—either finding yourself alone or finding yourself among a group of people who do not know and understand you—triggers a fight-or-flight response. Cacioppo argued that your body understands being alone, or being with strangers, as an emergency. “Over millennia, this hypervigilance in response to isolation became embedded in our nervous system to produce the anxiety we associate with loneliness,”

Loneliness, Murthy argues, lies behind a host of problems—anxiety, violence, trauma, crime, suicide, depression, political apathy, and even political polarization. 

Murthy writes with compassion, but his everything-can-be-reduced-to-loneliness argument is hard to swallow,

"Maybe what people experiencing loneliness and people experiencing homelessness both need are homes with other humans who love them and need them, and to know they are needed by them in societies that care about them. That’s not a policy agenda. That’s an indictment of modern life.

Modern loneliness, in Alberti’s view, is the child of capitalism and secularism.

One tragedy of loneliness is that lonely people can’t see that lots of people feel the same way they do.

Facebook, which monetized loneliness. Some people say that the success of social media was a product of an epidemic of loneliness; some people say it was a contributor to it; some people say it’s the only remedy for it. Connect! Disconnect! The Economist declared loneliness to be “the leprosy of the 21st century.” The epidemic only grew.