The Truth About Loneliness
This month we have been researching and reading about loneliness. Given everything that we are collectively going through, we know that many are struggling with their feelings of loneliness. We hope this article demonstrates that loneliness is nothing to be ashamed of and that it encourages you to open up and reach out if you’re struggling. Many times when we feel lonely it is just a sympathetic ear that we need, we are not always looking for solutions. You can ask for what you need, we can be there for one another.
The meaning of loneliness has changed over the years. Historically it was simply thought of as the feeling you get when you’re away from society, which of course is easily solved by returning. This is not to say that individuals didn’t harbour the complex feelings we would now label as loneliness but the term loneliness had a much simpler definition.
Today governments and health organisations are talking about a loneliness as an epidemic. There are ministers and organisations in charge of ending loneliness. Can it really be that simple? I’m not so sure.
Loneliness is is a complex matter, with no obvious cause and effect, it is subjective and therefore any definition of loneliness is tricky. Instead of looking to end loneliness, we might consider the following:
1/ Finding ways to understand how loneliness manifests for the individual and offering tools to help one cope with their feelings
2/ We must look at our relationship with the elderly. In Western society, where once our elderly would be cared for by neighbours, community and often times live with family, we have done away with that support system and replaced it with care homes and occasional visits
3/ The way we work and the systemic and systematic inequalities causing people to work in jobs that they have no connection to, causing a deep loss of self and little time or energy to change their circumstances leading to the death of hope. Marx talked a lot about alienation which I think is a cousin of loneliness
“The worker is alienated from the object he produces because it is owned and disposed of by another, the capitalist. In all societies people use their creative abilities to produce objects which they use, exchange or sell. Under capitalism, however, this becomes an alienated activity because ‘the worker cannot use the things he produces to keep alive or to engage in further productive activity … The worker’s needs, no matter how desperate, do not give him a licence to lay hands on what these same hands have produced, for all his products are the property of another’. Thus workers produce cash crops for the market when they are malnourished, build houses in which they will never live, make cars they can never buy, produce shoes they cannot afford to wear, and so on.”
— Karl Marx
4/ We could also look to repair our relationship with trust, something I would argue that modern government and media are damaging significantly
“Countries whose inhabitants exhibit higher degrees of interpersonal trust are consistently those with a relatively low prevalence of loneliness. Similarly, countries with low trust levels are consistently those with high loneliness levels.”
— Lars Svendsen
Philosopher Ben Lazare Mjuskovic argues that our primal instinct to avoid loneliness, along with the accompanying need for prolonged intimacy, from the cradle to the grave is the strongest motivational drive in human beings. If this is true, knowing that it is a natural urge could help us to accept ourselves and our feelings of loneliness when they come.
Existentialist philosophy views loneliness as essential to being human. Each of us comes into the world and eventually realises that we are a separate person, alone. We travel through life alone and ultimately we die alone. Interestingly the way in which Zach Bush MD describes his view on the human experience has some similarity to existential philosophy. He explains how in any situation the people involved would have their own version of what transpired, this doesn’t have to mean that one version is the truth, rather that we each have our own truths.
It could be easy to feel sadness when looking into these points of view but we could also see them as freeing. There is no shame in loneliness, your own experience of something is always valid so there is no need to seek external validation, in fact doing so would most likely be a futile endeavour. You could let it take the pressure off your relationships, knowing you are independent of them can make them more fulfilling and less like a heavy attachment.
The first noble truth in buddhism is Dhukka which translates to life is suffering, that’s not to say life is only suffering or that we cannot find ways to transcend this suffering. If we apply this thinking to loneliness we could say that we know we will experience loneliness in our lives, in that, there is no shame. We must remember that it will pass and we must find our own ways to sit with it and work through it.
We can use the feeling of loneliness as an opportunity for reflection on our relationship with others.
Loneliness is a complex emotion felt differently from person to person. In fact a lot of the time we don’t even recognise that it is loneliness we are feeling. Modern society offers many ways in which to distract or numb ourselves so that we can avoid this and many other uncomfortable feelings but avoidance only keeps us further away from truly knowing ourselves and others and the hollow uncomfortable feelings will keep coming back.
It is not social failure to feel loneliness. I think we all experience loneliness and it manifests differently in each of us due to our imprinted life experiences and even on an epigenetic level. Understanding how you experience loneliness is perhaps the key to accepting the feeling rather than fighting or avoiding it. Psychologists generally consider loneliness to be a stable trait, meaning that individuals have different set points for feeling loneliness, and they fluctuate around these set points depending on the circumstances in their lives. Identifying your own set points would be a good place to start.
So how do we apply this view of loneliness to our current world situation? Anxiety is at an all time high and trust at an all time low. Personally, in times when I have been in the depths of anxiety my loneliness would be so loud. My anxiety would keep me from asking for help, a feeling that no one would understand me which lead me to feel more alone. It is now that my anxiety is well looked after that I can recognise what loneliness feels like for me and without the anxiety attached I can own it, I can talk about it and I can accept it. So perhaps the first step to understanding your own loneliness language is to go within, do a thorough self-analysis and find you starting point, it is from this point that you will be able to understand your own needs and find the courage to meet them.
