Pardue | Final Post

 Silent Echoes | An exploration of loneliness then and now.

    It is strange to think that the word loneliness is so young (relatively speaking) when the word, only 224 years old, is a linguistic representation of something far older, far darker, and very hollow. A void that predates the English language or even the concept of language itself. Before it had a name, loneliness was there, a shadow in the background, gnawing at the edges of the human experience.

    Loneliness should not be mistaken and conflated with solitude. Though our modern times make it easier than ever to make this mistake. Solitude is a choice, sometimes a reprieve or a sanctuary; it can be as simple as taking some time for yourself to be alone and decompress. In contrast to this, loneliness is an involuntary experience, a chasm between oneself and the rest of the world. Setiya shares in Life is Hard: science has shown solitude lights up the same regions of the brain as physical pain. Many nations outlaw solitary confinement, classifying it as a form of torture. And yet, in other countries (including this one), it remains a tool wielded with calculated cruelty.

    The pandemic laid this bare for all the world to see. The Quarantine transformed homes into isolation cells. A global wave of suffering and solitude. For some, it ended up being a manageable inconvenience; for others it was unbearable. Setiya describes it as one of the worst periods in his life, and he had his family with him; he writes about imagining how bad it would have been for someone who lived alone.

    

    In some areas of history, human connections were transactional - a simple matter of survival. In medieval societies, friendships were often strategic, a hedged bet against famine, feuds, or the ever-present specter of death and disease. In theory, modernity should have freed us to pursue connection for the sake of connection, unshackled from necessity. And for a while, it seems we did; in 1990, 63% of Americans had five or more close friends, with the majority of those 63% having nine or more. But we've squandered our freedom. By 2021, that number had plummeted to just 38% of people having five or more.

    Initially, Social media seemed like it would bridge our divides and bring us closer than ever before. How wrong we were. Connection on Social media platforms reminds me of aspartame; it tries desperately to emulate true connection but only really manages a surface-level imitation with sick sweetness and foul undercurrents of something much worse than sugar. These platforms degrade the same connections they claim to promote. And as the number of users swells, so does the rate of depression. And what do we trade in exchange for having access to these wonderful platforms for free? Only our privacy and our attention! We lose our sense of self as we surrender everything we are for some fleeting hits of dopamine while we waste away in front of screens watching the funny videos. And still, after sacrificing so much the emptiness gnaws away at us from within, the aspartame leaves a disgusting aftertaste in our mouths and we are more alone now, maybe even more than ever before.

    Social media not only took our privacy but it erased our personalities. A vast colorful diaspora of people all with their own unique interests and experiences was algorithmically compressed into simple repeatable archetypes. Everyone is similar now. Everyone shares a similar sense of humor and sees the same things. Even the less common interests are still common within groups. While some may argue sub-commuities on TikTok, Reddit, Twitter and other similar social platforms allow these people interested in similar things to meet and discuss and collaborate, this is only a partial truth. It leaves out the herd mentality and resulting homogenity that happens when large groups of people clump up. And afte rall that makes sense, it is easier for the algorthims to classify people into a few thousand archetypes and serve whatever combination of those archetypes is most similar to the user than to make a truly customized feed. We've lost critical thinking, misinformation is at an all-time high, and creativity seems to be fading into a homogeneous cycle of reusing the same tired ideas over and over. 

    And our friendships seem to be more and more surface level. Everyone is afflicted by the concept of social desirability, where we can only put things out there to the world that make us seem as close to perfection as possible. Our lives can never be as good as the lives of the people on our screens. We hold ourselves to impossible standards; we compare ourselves to photoshopped models and filtered photos and wonder why we cannot match up. We can't just hang out. We have to take pictures so everyone who wasn't there can see how much fun we were having and how fun we are.

And for all of this we are still more alone than ever before.

    So alone that even the governments of some of the most powerful nations on the planet have taken a notice. In 2018 the UK announced and appointed a Minister of Loneliness, a title so bleak it borders on dystopian satire. But policy can only react; by its very nature, it can not pre-empt; the root of the problem is existential. We cannot put bandaids on gunshot wounds. Loneliness becomes a cycle - a self-perpetuating state where the effort to escape feels insurmountable.

    But things are not all bad. Breaking the cycle may seem to be a Sisyphean task, but one study showed that forcing participants to have a single exchange with a new person every day - a hello, a passing kindness - can lift this weight. And the study showed a massive reduction in depression and the feeling of isolation after just a few weeks.

   

     So where does this leave us? Are we destined to drown alone in our sea of plastic-aspartamey connection? Have we lost the plot so hard that we cannot find our way out of this Hell? I don't think so. But we can't rely on lawmakers and ministers to fix us. In my opinion, we have to disconnect. We have to break free of our chains. Personally, last fall, I deleted Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, and anything else that is algorithmically driven to keep you scrolling. And my life only improved after a few months. I didn't feel the need to waste hours of my time every day; I spent that time doing things I was actually interested in, from writing to reading to drawing to making music. My life has only improved.

And personally, though I have a deep-rooted hatred for social media, and I will admit I'm very biased, I think that's just the start. People should stop taking photos for the sake of posting. We need to stop orienting our lives around how we want to be perceived and focus on how we want to live and how we want to spend our time. When we can stop worrying about how we will be seen, we can start making real connections, strengthening our friendships, and becoming closer than ever with our friends.

This mini-essay / blog post was based on the research I did for my presentation on loneliness. In the comments below I will attempt to link as many of the resources I used. Though I will note, Statista (at the time of writing this WILL NOT ALLOW me to sign in)

Thank you for reading have a wonderful winter break. Put dow the phone and make some real connections.