More on loneliness

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1.


My aunt – an elderly childless widow living in exile – feels lonely and phones me up to chat. "What are you doing today? And what did you eat for lunch?" I stifle my benign yawn, put aside the book - or perhaps the porcelain cup, or the snuff bottle, or the Ten thousand li of mountains and streams - and humor her: I am nothing if not filially pious, and if this sort of verbalization eases her loneliness, then I am glad to provide the outlet – be her receptacle, so to speak, when she needs to go. Yet, I do not have the slightest clue why or how this act of conversation should serve to make her un-lonely: I, for one, do not usually derive much spiritual gratification from learning that others have had, say, an oyster pancake for lunch. Do you?

A friend also feels lonely – despite having good, frequent relations with her family, gobs of friends whom she meets several times a week, and a job where she interacts with dozens of customers everyday. Frustrated, she’d overcome her loneliness, she is sure, if she only had a man to live with her. Taking walks together, she thinks, would splendidly do the trick.

But this is far from certain, as the case of yet another friend proves: he is married: he has a wife with whom to take his walks, a wife with whom, he says, he is intellectually compatible. Yet, he too, feels lonely, complains about his inability to connect (with her and others), and remembers wistfully some occasion on which he exchanged glances with a stranger; and another on which he told some insignificant other how he felt about this or that, stuff, he says, he couldn’t have told wife. "We connected then”, he continues downcast, as if that exchange of glances could possibly have meant a damned thing; and as if he could not have confessed his innermost feelings to a cat, or a fish, or a wall with the same result.


2.


Loneliness is one of the most basic concepts in popular psychology: it is used as self-diagnosis, as explanation for the actions of others, as a mechanism for successful business plans (e.g. Friend Finder et al.), of political ideologies even ("alienation"). It might seem therefore that we all understand it -- the term being so ubiquitous and so easily used by everyone; but the truth is that -- we don’t. The term’s dictionary definition -- “absence of others” -- how very Aristotelian of the Webster! -- seems weak. Furthermore, it does not appear to have an antonym, meaning that it is unfalsifiable (and thus, some might say, nonexistent): “presence of others” means nothing, certainly nothing good, and sure as hell does not cure the disease: as every other pop song will tell you, one can feel desperately lonely in the midst of the thickest crowd.

(OK, pop songs do not use big words like “desperately”. Still, you get the point).

The truth is that the term “loneliness” is used automatically, mindlessly, out of habit, to cover every instance of unease and discomfort for which we do not have some other, immediate explanation. If we have not eaten, we are hungry; if he have not drunk, we are thirsty; if we lack money, we are poor; if we want to take a holiday, but can’t, we are burnt out; if we experience sexual desires but have no release, we are frustrated; if we break our leg, we are in pain; but if we feel a kind of unspecific blah – well, then, we say, we must be lonely. It is a catch-all term, and like all catch-all terms, it means perfectly nothing.

"Loneliness" is a word we use out of intellectual sloth: when we do not feel like peering deeply into our souls to see just what it is that is really wrong with us.


3.


Watching The Wire (it may well be the best drama produced for TV ever) in the company of a pop-psychologists (i.e. every normal person) is instructive: observing the frustration, the drinking, the desultory sleeping around, the catastrophic marriages of the heroes and heroines, the couch pop-psychologist, if s/he gives it a thought at all (which s/he almost never will), will say:

"These people are -- oh -- so lonely".

And, having said that, s/he will get a chorus of appreciative murmurs all around from all the other pop-psychologists couch-assembled:

"Yeah, dude! Lonely!"

But the pop-psychologist is of course bullshitting us -- and himself (or herself): these people are not lonely, they are dumb. They work a frustrating, exhausting job -- in itself enough to make anyone unhappy and which therefore they should quit forthwith and god only knows why don't; but, as if it were not enough, crucially, when they are done with it, they don’t know what to do with themselves; a problem which could easily be solved if they learned how to read, for example. Really, would not an evening with Dem Zaubergberg be more satisfying than drinking and whoring and feeling miserable afterwards?

Alright, perhaps reading is not their forte, maybe they are dyslectic, or just not verbally minded -- they do all seem to know but four words of English (though they conjugate them rather well). But are there no other options? How about chess, for crying out loud, or Argentinian tango, or pickling cabbages, or collecting bottle caps?

Contentment, says Czikszentmihalyi, comes from performing an absorbing activity; but in order to discover what that activity is for us, we must be what he calls autotelic -- i.e. capable of setting ourselves our own goals ("telos"). The Wire illustrates what happens to people who can’t -- which is everyone around, it seems.

To call this problem “loneliness” is thus not just to misdiagnose it – which is bad enough, since a misdiagnosed disease is per force maltreated; it is also pathetic: an attempt to blame other people for these people's own failures. It is to say: "These folks do not feel bad because they are stupid and do not know what to do with themselves" (which comes down to saying, in simple terms, "they are so damn boring that they bore themselves"); "Oh, no! They feel bad because they are lonely!", which is to say, if you parse it with the help of the same Webster: "because nobody loves them". There: it is their parents’ fault, their wives', their girlfriends', their siblings', their colleagues’; everyone’s. Poor little unloved they. What did they do to deserve this, eh?

The maltreatment of the condition which follows from this misdiagnosis is the prescription of a relationship – usually understood as romantic love – as cure; which is bound to failure: take two bored, helpless, unhappy people, who have no inkling as to what to do with themselves, put them together and – presto! – you get... happiness? How is that supposed to work?

But the prescription is eternal: people have always and everywhere sought happiness in love -- without any proof positive that it is to be found there.

Says a philosopher: when someone tells us “I love you”, the correct reaction is to ask “what do you want?” Cute, but not especially insightful. After all, it is not necessary to ask. We know what they want. They want us to un-bore them.