“Solitude is not the absence of company, but the moment when our soul is free to speak to us and help us decide what to do with our life.” - Paulo Coelho

I have no friends. I have none to whom I could call and relate my day. I speak with my family once or twice a week. I stay in a rented home all by myself. I am slowly learning to cook and have been unsuccessful in every attempt until now. My routine is boring. I don’t party, I don’t hang out with friends (as already established), and I play badminton but not cricket or football. My job pays me enough to buy books, travel once every two months, and save money for my sister’s education. The people I face every day—my colleagues, college mates, and crushes—feel uninteresting to me, just like my image inside of them. It’s no surprise that I often feel like a protagonist from one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s brilliant works. This isn’t new for me; I have been like this since my college days. I had to jump out of a group to which I was a part, just because I thought they were uninspiring—without big goals and aspirations towards life. I started my own startup, and all those on whom I had the dependency were either lazy or undetermined. I was left alone to face it, where I failed miserably. Am I an introvert? The people who know me say otherwise. They say that I am a great conversationalist, that I can have a healthy conversation with anyone I want. It might be true, and I am unsure about that myself.

When it comes to romantic relationships, highly elaborated by existentialists like Albert Camus and Franz Kafka as a profound form of love that brings happiness and gives meaning to life, I have had none. To be honest, many ladies have shown signs of affection towards me—I don’t know if it is because of my body’s lack of melanin or my mysterious intellect; I haven’t reciprocated the same. How does it end up with me? Am I destined to be alone all my life? Won’t I be part of any meaningful relationships? Will I ever become a member of a community? I have no idea, but one thing is for sure. I am still in my early twenties, and the way I live right now is amazing. As I can clearly infer from my travel diaries and unexpected meetups, there are millions like me who don’t feel the need for another soul to console their daily being on earth.

The earth is vast, people are of different types, but those who stay alone by themselves are often ridiculed as psychopaths, anti-social, or gloomy. The truth is far from the perception of the majority. You might ask, ‘Who are these people who are committing suicides after being alone?’ and ‘Don’t we all need someone by our side?’ or ‘How can one survive without having friends?’ The answer depends on who you are and the priorities you give for your mental stability. The way I see it is explored in this article. So, let’s get started.

Let’s differentiate.

“When nobody wakes you up in the morning and when nobody waits for you at night and when you can do whatever you want. What do you call it, freedom, or loneliness?” – Charles Bukowski.

The introductory part of this article can be interpreted majorly in two ways. One: I am lonely, by those who are new to this arena. Two: I am alone, by the ones who are good in English vocabulary. You might have named it differently, but they end up at these two instances. Let’s begin with loneliness. Loneliness is a state of mind—it’s an abstract idea of being empty within and without. While being Alone is a physical reality that drags our being as an individual independent of others in society. To understand this analogy better, we need to compare these words to ‘Home’ and ‘House’. When you hear the word ‘Home,’ the images of family and your loved ones with colorful lives snap into your mind, producing emotions of happiness and belonging, while ‘House’ gives images of a real concrete structure where humans reside. A home is personal, just like loneliness while a house is real, like being alone. So, once we understand this difference, it would not be hard to tackle mental health issues. Without involving ourselves with data, I want to give a subjective opinion on the working of these two cases.

Don’t I ever feel lonely by being alone? It’s a perfect question to move this interesting work forward. The answer is ‘I do!’. I do long for a partner who would understand me, support me, and strengthen me throughout my future endeavors. But this fantasy is often erased by my realist outlook on life. Loneliness itself can be a part of being Alone, and one might feel like I am contradicting my previous statements, but here’s the full picture. I feel lonely just like I feel happiness, sadness, anxiousness, and fear. Everyone on earth, including those who stay among friends, feels lonely at one point or another. It’s just a unique feeling when certain neurons fire up to make us part of the herd again. Why would this happen? These instincts are not unpredictable and can be analyzed through evolutionary biology.

Let’s Survive.

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd.” - Bertrand Russell

Ever since we were kids, we were asked, “What separates humans from other animals?”. “Intelligence!” we would shout in groups and make the classroom walls echo our answers. The answer has always been attributed to our ability to think, which is partly true. Evolution doesn’t necessarily promote those that can think effectively but those who reproduce more and adjust to the environment. The best example of this can be seen through the movie called “Idiocracy” [1], where in the future, humans are no longer smarter than pigs or monkeys—shitting in their place, consuming food all along the day long addicted to dopamine-inducing entertainment while polluting the earth like a scrapyard. Humans can reproduce more because we could think, we could talk, and most importantly, we could coordinate. To understand it clearly, here’s a hypothetical situation. Let’s collect all the chimpanzees around the world and drop them in a cricket stadium and cut off all the exits. What would happen? Pure chaos! This idea itself gives chills of havoc and destruction, but humans gather there all the same without any disturbance. Chimps can talk in their language; they can think, but the problem is that they can’t coordinate. Humans are great coordinators while the language and the stories we build facilitate us in trusting each other, forcing us to stay close to each other for our own survival. We follow this instinct as we feel safe. With safety, we can reproduce more and continue our species forward. As Yuval Harari repeatedly points out in his book [2] Sapiens: Brief History of Humankind, he gives a perfect quote that says, “You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death, in monkey heaven”. The ideas of Nation, Religion, Caste, and State unite people to cooperate effectively.

Now, out of the blue appears all those people who stay alone without a need for security for survival. These alone creatures are of an odd nature to the majority as it doesn’t get associated with their basic instincts. Well, this feature in humanity where we are beginning to live independently is new due to many reasons that are far from countable. Why is this sudden surge happening? In his bestselling book, Enlightenment Now [3], Dr. Steven Pinker argues with factual data that the world has never been a safer place than now. Long gone are the days of plague, famine, and world wars; what we are dealing with now is too negligible like choosing the right amount of sugar for our coffee compared to our ancestor’s hungry stomach during the great depression. The world is globalized, and we have no longer needs, just wants to fulfill our desires. Barack Obama also points out this huge leap in humanity, saying “If you could choose a time to be young, gifted, and black in America, you’d choose right now” [4]. Although, this statement may be attributed to his pompous rule, the underlying fact remains true. Now is far better than any time in the history of humanity. If we are safe, getting enough food, can travel anywhere, talk with anyone from anywhere in the world, the question arises. Do we still need to be a part of a herd? Or a community? The answer is a direct No. We can survive the same being alone and being part of something meaningful. But being alone is not everyone’s piece of bread.

Let’s Analyze.

“Mental Health problems don’t define who you are. They are something you experience. You walk in the rain, and you feel the rain, but you are not the rain.” - Matt Haig

What happens when one stays alone against his will? Growing up in a well-bred joint family, playing with numerous cousins, sharing food with different age groups, not missing silly puns among school friends, if one were to get isolated due to their work life in a big city among strangers, it can be as hard as carrying a rock over their head every minute of the day. Humans are social beings, even though being alone is a fair option in present conditions, it is often hazardous to mental health. We are strange creatures; we go mad at work throughout the year with a grand hope that we would be free for some days enjoying a vacation around an exotic beach. But when we are granted with lots of money and no work to do, we would go mad the same as before. We like to do something, not just to earn money, at least to get rid of our loneliness. So, we go to movie theaters, we roam around shopping malls, we visit zoos, we eat around different hotels and gossip on celebrities. It’s a very rare phenomenon where a human would just sit alone and watch the clouds drift by the blue sky. If you are that person, you are either gifted or paralyzed from moving around. [5] An interesting statement was made by Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, where he says that “being socially disconnected has a similar effect on mortality as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day”. This was a shocking report that was flooded throughout the media houses; the probability of premature death due to loneliness was far greater than being obese and exposed to air pollution. So, isolation is not good anyway, and I am not going to argue against this statement, which should have been well-researched.

While this shouldn’t be happening to everyone, today’s social media and the need for attention are setting us apart without our knowing about it. According to multiple studies, the link between heavy social media use can bring an increased risk for depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts. [6]. So, is this sudden uprising of social media the sole reason for mental health issues? Social media is just part of the problem. It’s not like nobody before the invention of social media ever experienced loneliness. A soldier fighting against the Nazis in trenches went through this. A farmer resting under the shade after tilling the hard soil five hundred years ago experienced this. The kings experienced loneliness, rich people who have everything also experienced loneliness. Again, as the quote began with this part, none of them before social media identified themselves as being lonely.

Is it bad to address the situation by identifying ourselves as being lonely? In my opinion, it’s a great thing to say that we are victims of loneliness. But the problem lies in coming out of that problem. Everyone—knowingly or unknowingly—likes to play the victim card, either to get attention, to gain sympathy, or to fight the issue like a fighter. If everyone who is in depression and anxiety were a fighter, the issue wouldn’t be raised as a global phenomenon. People in the past had no channel to express their feelings, but now we carry numerous mediums under our disposal, and it’s up to us to navigate through it.

Let’s criticize.

"Artificial intelligence has the potential to alleviate loneliness, but we must ensure that it doesn't replace genuine human connection." - Fei-Fei L

You might have seen the movie “Her” starring Joaquin Phoenix, who falls in love with a virtual character named Samantha played by Scarlett Johansson. Throughout the movie, there will come an instance where the viewer starts to feel that there is nothing wrong with the decisions and aspirations of the protagonist. We start to think that everyone deserves love and will hesitate to shy away from the fact the companion may not be real. The reason being that loneliness is the universal phenomenon where everyone could easily relate to it. If this is the case with feeble human emotions taking control of our rationality into investing our sentiments towards in-organic beings, where will that lead us?

There are instances, which are not new, where a person named Akihiko Kondo has gotten married to a virtual avatar [7]. If AI can enact a human being and give meaning to the relationship, it's not so hard to cheat us into marrying it. The sole reason for technological development is to help in the betterment of every human on earth, and the problem is that we haven’t set any limitations to the extent of help it can provide. In case you are wondering about the physical beauty of human connections—the tender touch of a partner, the sweet whisper of voice, and intimate sex, you are already late to join the trend. Sex dolls and sex robots are currently being sold online. Along with that, if you are a fan of the phenomenal web series on Netflix called Black Mirror, you might have understood how far we are from recreating a true personality out of a doll from all our online data. The idea remains that our emotions and feelings are nothing but biochemical reactions due to firing up of neurons, that can be dumped inside the processing unit of a machine to re-enact a human being.

Now, let's ask the question that started this article. Will you still feel lonely when technology intrudes with colorful promises? Again, I am not going to answer this question. I am merely here to create a clear path through which you can navigate to the answer you want. Again, it’s a subjective opinion and nobody’s stopping you from making your own choices. And if in case your answers are out of the ordinary, don’t worry, people a couple of decades ago would have awed in astonishment if you’d told them that there would be a simulated world where nobody lived but had their real identities exchanging real money. The future is far better when you look from the perspective of a lonely man who seeks companionship and very gloomy from the point of view of a man who is poor and has established meaning relationship with another human. He who seeks will get what he wants, and he who has everything will find it absurd.

Its tough to imagine a world where a human is walking with a robot or an avatar on the street, kissing, whispering, and laughing all the same. If that world did come, I am sure that we wouldn’t be criticizing it, instead living with it as if its not new. It’s in every human to get used to things over a long term.

Let’s conclude.

“Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better” – Henry Rollins

So, loneliness is a mental disease brought upon by us. The reason may include our instinctive need for attention, loss of a dear one, or mistrust in society, but the results show themselves with the suffering of an individual. So, how do we tackle this issue? The answer isn’t far enough that one must travel a huge distance and meet a spiritual guru who would, with his palm, bless the sufferer and cure the ailments. We live in an information age, the answer is already available, and if you are suffering, you are stopping yourself from finding the answer. You only need to know where to look. There’s a great Buddhist philosophy that says, “The scratch becomes itchier when we try to ease it by scratching.” Why not just observe things and let them be? Don’t judge, don’t try to manipulate, and don’t bother about the future—just see and let it play. Staying in the present with no judging of the past and anxiety towards the future is the ultimate solution to every modern problem. Try meditation, try looking around you and feel the wind that slaps your nostrils, observe the flower and the shades of color. If we really get mindful, loneliness won’t be a disease; it would be a fleeting emotion induced by our brain to attain its material goal.

The advice might sound saintly and enlightening, but the modern seeker can never attain this state unless one dedicates themselves consistently.

Every forty seconds a man, somewhere in the world, commits suicide [8]. It’s an easy assumption that the majority of these cases might be due to loneliness and the study may support our claim, but here’s a backdrop of these studies—they just don’t know the complete picture of the person who is dead. So, suicidal thoughts due to loneliness are just another way of manipulation our brain brings upon us. It’s a fleeting thought, and one must not listen to it. As an optimist, I am sure that humans are brave creatures, and if the suicidal thoughts did make a human attempt death, I doubt if the earth would be left with anyone alive.

So, to end this article, I have a message for all those people who are feeling lonely. Reach out to your next person—it's not like they would push you away as a nuisance, let’s talk, let's laugh, and let’s share our stories together. Because there’s nothing better than an ear where we could pierce our words—doesn’t matter how stupid they are.

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Citations:

1. Judge, M. (2006). Idiocracy. Twentieth Century Fox.
2. APA. Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens. Harper.
3. APA. Pinker, S. (2019). Enlightenment now. Penguin Books.
4. Wired - President Obama https://www.wired.com/2016
5. US Department of Health & Human Services www.hhs.gov
6. NCBI - Social Media Use and Mental Health ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
7. NY Times - Akihiko Kondo https://www.nytimes.com
8. WHO - Suicide Statistics https://www.who.int/news