They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
That’s Desert Places by Robert Frost.
I am used to being alone. I go to class by myself. I eat alone. I walk alone. I was never one who want to be in groups all the time. It’s not that I’ve never felt lonely. That’s actually one of the reasons why I prefer the main campus - the branch is my desert places.
Last year someone special showed me the other side. I got used to being with her, who filled my heart with joy and let me forget all about the loneliness of branch campus. However, ever since she left, I’ve been feeling down. Her absence has since been making me increasingly lonelier, the insufferable feeling that has been haunting me, day and night.
That got me thinking.
How many friends from middle school do I still stay in contact with? And how many from high school? Even from last year in college? Is this the way of life now? I just don’t get it. Loneliness inundated me.
I went on the Internet and found someone took this feeling further. John Koenig, who runs The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, coined “sonder”. It is, in his own words:
The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
Heavy stuff, isn’t it? We are so used to keeping to ourselves that even small talks with strangers would sometimes be considered outrageous and out of place. I gave my seat to a woman on the bus today. She thanked me, and I nodded. That was most likely the only interaction we are ever going to have for our entire life. We are two single instances of a class of species with a population of over seven billion individuals. I could have followed up and try to have a conversation with her, but I didn’t. So few of interactions like this have any more follow-ups. We choose this. We choose not to meet other people. We all have the opportunities to take initiatives to begin a fate much more intertwined with anyone. So many of us feel lonely, yet so little attempt to stop being alone.
Psychology studies have cemented the power of social support in numerous settings and problems. The well-known, if not classic for its stigma-shattering implications, rat park experiment conducted in the 70s led by psychologist Bruce Alexander, which showed that the best treatment for recovery from drug addiction is, quite simply, social support, is an elucidatory account for how much good being social can do for us. Rapport with peers is such an effective instrument for mental, and sometimes physical, health — being part of a meaningful relationship or a positive group is the cure or at least alleviator of suffering.
The contradiction of such cognitive dissonance, perhaps, is not a predicament at all. We plan things to do with our family and close friends. But our disconnection with others manifest in that we never thought of asking people standing next to us in elevators or on the streets how their day was, and then we complain about the lack of caring in life. We know being social benefits us, but somehow we just never think of it as something worthy of seriousness. The obvious lacking of spontaneity may be because of personal traits, such as introversion, or in some case, social anxiety tendency or disorder. Still, a simpler explanation may be our teachings since childhood prohibits it; instigating conversations with strangers outside of our carefully protected classroom environment may be dangerous, so our culture and parenting model never encourage such behaviors, and, as we grow older and able to take care of ourselves, our mindset never changes. This invisible conundrum exists in its own right.
They say that humans are gregarious animals, but over the past decades, how did we become so seclusive? The social brain hypothesis, a thesis propounded by the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, suggests that the complexity of human brains evolved so because of the need to comprehend and support a more convoluted social group and that the best size for a community is around 150 people. Do communities still exist? I have never had a real conversation with any of my neighbors. I don’t know anyone simply because they live near me. How many friends do we constantly stay in touch with? Why do we choose to be alone?
In such a vast world, easily, we miss each other. The ones who just walked by me today could all have been my future wife. Those could have been how we have met. We have built some sort of invisible walls around us that separates us from everyone else on the outside, living in a fortress of solitude unconsciously voluntarily, while blaming the world that rejects us. We walk on a flat plane. Everyone who wants to connect with other people needs only to speak. Technology, transportation, and urbanization have brought us so close, yet so distant at the same time. This reminds me of a quote by a British philosopher, Gilbert Ryle:
Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.
Although originally, that was part of an objection that raised doubts against dualism, I find it rather fitting to my feelings, under the analogy that the joining of souls is symbolic of true connection and the union of bodies is mere fortuitous encounters that result in no consequence whatsoever in each other’s life.
Many of us meet every day, but so few ever connect. We are like curves with negligible curvature. In this vast world, globally, we are mostly like parallel lines. Some intersect once. Some meet many while others few. Some of us are lucky enough to overlap for some parts, but however large the overlap is, those parts are infinitesimal in the grand view.
Maybe we’re doomed so; all of the strides of advances in human civilization have led us to this level of isolation. Or maybe we were never meant to be connected to each other; all of our urges for a little more heartwarming belongingness will forever be fleeting, inconsequential, petty sentiments.
Or perhaps the ultimate emancipation follows immediately from the realization of the futility of life? For should we embrace nihilism on interpersonal links, will we, in turn, discover true deliverance in that we should never have expected anything more from the world?