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Loneliness, History, Boundaries, and Excuses


RoseGoesToYale

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RoseGoesToYale

I've been having a rough go of it lately. I already mentioned my lack of human contact in T&S. But it got me thinking, because I know I'm not alone (but I am, even though there are many people who are alone, I am alone, we're all alone... guh, society is alone together!) A lot of psychologists and sociologists have brought up the concept of a "loneliness epidemic" in which more and more people are reporting detrimental levels of loneliness in their lives. These scientists still can't pinpoint a cause, which is funny, because I believe the answer is right under their noses.

 

I hear a lot of excuses adults use for when others are less in touch or when they themselves opt not to reach out to friends. The major one is "adults have their own busy lives and it's natural for friendships to wane with age." I will be frank... this is baloney. I absolutely have to believe this because otherwise a whole smattering of pre-smartphone era sitcoms were amusing but highly synthesized baloney with little relevance to real life. Cheers, Frazier, Friends, Seinfeld, The Golden Girls, Home Improvement... all of these shows prominently feature adults with friendships that are sustained with regular or impromptu meetings outside of work. Whether it's drinks or coffee or lunch or book groups or building cars, they make a point to meet up, even when their lives are invariably filled with a million obligations and stressors. That's what made the shows funny... they'd each drag each other into each others crazy busy lives, and awkwardness and bonding ensued. You think of a typical day in the 90s, and how many more other little responsibilities people had, like checking your answering machine, tracking down pay phones sometimes, waiting forever to get to Alta Vista because dialup, and having to do taxes by hand, on paper, any one might look and think our 20th century forebears were way more busy than we are now, and they'd be right. We didn't create smartphones to make more work for us.

 

But there's a few problems with not being busy. One is the Protestant Ethic western countries (especially the US) love to live by. The idea is that if you're not busy, you're not being productive, and you are thus burdening society and engaging in sin. There is enormous pressure on people to look and/or be busy. The creators of social media didn't realize this, that what their platforms do is not bring people together, but amplify the Protestant Ethic. We see pictures of people working, driving, volunteering, doing this-that-and-the-other-thing, and we immediately feel inadequate, like we are failing society by not doing as many "things" as our peers. So we take photos of our food and signs on the road and pigeons and computer desks in an effort to advertise to the world that we are as normal and adherent to the Protestant Ethic as is impressed upon us from birth and have not slipped into the moral decay that is "not doing anything".

 

We are not any busier than we were fifty years ago. In fact, we may be less busy, because we have fewer children to take care of than during the Baby Boom and we simply don't have to wait for things as long as people did back then. Yet we tell ourselves that everyone else is busy, and feel inadequate when we are not busy, and so we wind up giving space to accommodate other's busy-ness, and in doing so we jeopardize our relationships by failing to put the required effort into them. Friendships require effort, and its that effort that makes the resulting bond worthwhile. It isn't that we don't want to try, it's that we believe we are not allowed to try, for fear that we are bothering others or disrupting their dayflow.

 

On bothering. By definition, bothering a person means intruding upon them, especially when they are doing things, when they are busy. By assuming everyone around is profoundly busy, we are also assuming that our act of reaching out and attempting to mutually bridge our time with this person constitutes bothering them. We are deeply concerned about bothering others, because bothering is bad and makes others scornful and irritated and we don't want our relationships to deteriorate into that. We also live deeply in want of interruption. We want things that break the stress and tedium of the day. Today, the internet is our interruption. In the past, this interruption was meeting friends for drinks, or going bowling on Friday night, or going to the movies or getting a book club together. Friends were western humanity's stress relief back in the day. "I'm busy, you're busy, let's get together, get unbusy for a while, and laugh at how absurd being busy is." It must've worked, because I can't find old scientific reports of mass loneliness. Even parents would hold playdates and do the same thing while their kids played. And it was somehow okay to be doing nothing, because if you were doing nothing, it left a window for another person to take you out of nothing to do something. We also seem to have a deep concern for when we see others doing nothing, as if we must swoop in and save them from their nothing-doing-ness. Protestant Ethic strikes again.

 

Then there is the issue of boundaries. Back in the day there was these things called "phone etiquette" and "mail etiquette" and "house call etiquette", and these things created clear boundaries within which we could interact with our fellow human without unreasonable fear of bothering. You didn't call someone at work unless it was an emergency. No phone calls after 9PM or 10PM, because that's people's private time. Even for youth, if you were calling your friends at 2AM, something bad was going down. No sending unnecessary amounts of mail, that's called spam and annoys all involved. You could knock on people's doors and visit them on the weekends, or you could call first to be sure they were available. If you weren't, you said so, and that was respected. Then came the internet and social media, whose aim was to connect people who otherwise could not due to geographic and time constraints, but we forgot to reassess how this technology would literally pervade every square inch of our lives and break down every single boundary we had established to interact with others in a careful and sane manner. I get texts at midnight, which I don't mind, but then my mother texts me useless things at 6 in the freaking morning when I'm trying to sleep. I could mute my phone, but what if it's a dire emergency? I'm also checking various forums, news, and social media all day, any chance I get, because that is my interruption from stress and the only manner I have in which to keep up with the people I love. Our technology is constantly violating our need for clear boundaries, so we start putting up random boundaries willy-nilly without communicating these to others, we simply assume we can turn other people off when our boundary has been crossed.

 

It doesn't work in practice. We take our human interaction where we can get it, even if that means checking the phone all day. We also feel compelled, by bosses and society, to continue working via the internet on smartphones even after our shift is over, and while they and their employees believe to be doing it in the best interest of the company, this a serious breach of personal boundaries and, if a person is not being paid time-and-a-half for this after-hours work, violates labor laws and healthy working conditions. (PE again, and I don't mean gym class) It's no excuse... we need to draw far reaching, if not universal, boundaries for communication and technology like the ones we used to have, so people are all on the same page on what counts as normal contact versus harassment or stalking, and so we don't accidentally draw so many unnecessary boundaries that we shut each other out when we need each other most.

 

Lastly, in line with the whole bothering quandary, is the now overly pervasive idea of self-reliance. I can't tell you how many times I've been told by somebody to "just Google it". When I ask a person for help, or when I ask them to explain something, it is specifically because I respect their knowledge and want the comforting benefit of their experience. Yes, we could just Google it. Yes, we could look up the recipe online, or watch a YouTube tutorial. But there is something communally healthy and soulful in being able to rely on those physically around us. Used to be you could borrow sugar from your neighbor. We as neighbors have not all degenerated into crazy serial killer gangster felons, no matter what TV and the news would have us think. It would still just be the most normal thing ever to borrow sugar from your neighbor. Except we think it isn't. We see it as bothering. Of course, there's always that one neighbor who wants to borrow every last one of your things, but let's give people the benefit of the doubt and say most people only ask for help when they need help. There is incredible social value in something as innocuous as borrowing sugar. Maybe your neighbor asks how your day is going. Maybe you chat a bit. Maybe they need help painting their house on the weekend, and you say sure, and they offer to get barbecue and make a day of it. Helping those around us was socializing back in the day. For people you know and trust, it's not a burden, because then they know they can trust you, too. But there is so much more pressure to know what you're doing, to look like you know what you're doing, and to assume other people don't have time to help you figure out how to know what you're doing. So even if we need help, we don't ask. We google it. We hire a painter, not wanting to bother others, not wanting to look lost or needy or unbusy. There's another side too... it's nice to be needed, to be helpful to friends. Makes us feel better, staves off the ol' depression.

 

If we want to be less lonely, we need to remember how to be unbusy, to be doing nothing at the moment, whenever that moment is, to reestablish 9PM (or whatever hours we prefer to be called/texted/visited), and actually remember to tell each other this, to force employers to respect labor laws and private time, and stop Googling every little bread crumb and rely on humans once in a while. Thoughts? Could we do this as a society?

 

Mother of posts, I did not intend to write this much. Yikes. AVEN, I promise I'm not trying to break your servers. :redface:

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AmorphousBlob

Wow, I don't really know how to respond to that. The part about bothering hit me pretty hard though, as it's a habit/mindset of mine that I'm currently trying to break. I think this makes a lot of sense.

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Anthracite_Impreza

I'm quite lucky to naturally not give a shit about being 'unbusy', and gradually I've taught my father the same. I only wish that my human friends would get the memo because I am sick to the back teeth of being the one who always initiates, and then gets ignored for weeks on end. Getting people together now, even for a few hours in an evening, feels like trying to climb fucking Everest.

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I was a teen/student in the 90s and yeah, in many ways things were harder. I had to use books or CD Rom for papers because we didn't have google. Not many people owned a cell phone so I can still remember using the pay phone up the street, most stores closed on a Sunday and the BBC switched off 1am-24 hour TV didn't exist. While it may seem like I have more now-I mean I have a phone that con do more than the first computer we had with internet that my Dad bought in 1996 in some ways I do feel more rushed and actually a little bit more disconnected. On the flip side, thanks to Skype I can communicate with my Sister in Australia. 

I think you also hit the nail on the head with labour laws. We now live in this live to work society when it should be work to live. We are encouraged to ignore and friends and family. 

I dunno...I did not like the 90s when I was there but now I find myself watching TV shows from that era or set in that era and pinning for simpler times. I think we are all told to be "self reliant" as Thatcher once famously remarked "there is no such thing as society" and our new toys just help us in that mindset. 

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11 hours ago, RoseGoesToYale said:

...I hear a lot of excuses adults use for when others are less in touch or when they themselves opt not to reach out to friends. The major one is "adults have their own busy lives and it's natural for friendships to wane with age." I will be frank... this is baloney. I absolutely have to believe this because otherwise a whole smattering of pre-smartphone era sitcoms were amusing but highly synthesized baloney with little relevance to real life. Cheers, Frazier, Friends, Seinfeld, The Golden Girls, Home Improvement... all of these shows prominently feature adults with friendships that are sustained with regular or impromptu meetings outside of work...

Hi. Well, where I live, it's certainly true that adults are busy taking care of their families, which include their children and spouse, driving them to school, to sports practices, etc. So, since I don't have any of those things in my life, they definitely assume and mistake me for a child; I've tried simply saying "Hello," to adults who I used to see exercise after work, and they'd just look at me strangely or confused. Everywhere I'd go, even at work, they'd ask me my age and whether or not I was old enough to work there.

 

Plus, personally, another reason I don't really bother to make friends with others is because I'm well aware that most are different from me, politically and religiously. For example, I grew up reading very negative and angry letters in the local newspaper from locals who mentioned that they didn't like people who were from the north, who were liberal, not religious, etc. and said that they "should go back where they came from." So, people back then weren't as nice and friendly as T.V. shows liked to portray.

 

Today, local adults still complain about LGBT+ people, about it being taught to children in schools and say that it's against their religious beliefs, that they don't think it's right, etc., so I'm aware that most of the population where I live wouldn't like me or want to be friends with me. Most are Republicans and religious, so, I stay away and don't bother with them to avoid conflict and confrontations; I've just been raised very differently from most, not only due to growing up in an immigrant family--with relatives from different countries, but growing up surrounded by POC. Plus, hearing neighbors and locals laugh and make insulting "jokes" against POC and Democratic voters doesn't make me want to reach out and be friends with them; so, I don't feel like wasting my time attempting to make friends with adults who might only pretend to be nice to my face, then talk badly or viciously about me to others behind my back.

 

Those shows you mentioned were "baloney, with little relevance to real life;" if you notice, they didn't include characters who were POC or show the reality of their lives, which weren't always great and cheerful (even shows with POC only showed a more "perfect" idealized version). So, I didn't--and neither did my parents--really watch those shows; we couldn't really relate to them.

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Wow. Rose, this post is amazing. I mean it.

 

I think, as a culture, we have lost the ability to relax because we associate it with being lazy. We are unable to pry ourselves away from our work because if we do, we are empty fossil fuels, burning but not creating any energy, not putting in anything to account for our worth. It's a social problem. So we race around like rats, trying to sustain ourselves, and going out with friends is seen as obtrusive, an obstacle. Asking someone out for coffee is seen, as you said, as "bothering." I am a victim of this mentality myself.

 

The way I see it is this: our lives are like novels, ones which we are all writing, but the thing about a novel is that you don't write it alone, no matter what people think. And if we are the sole character, can you imagine how boring the story would be? Think about it. That's why it's important to maintain relationships with people, to add more color and life to your story. Life, to me, isn't about surviving. Sure, we have to work and compete for what we want so that we can stay alive, but what's more important is experiencing all of the things you can before you die--filling your novel with as many experiences as possible, so that any person who reads it is enthralled by all that you've accomplished. You're not going to accomplish much of anything if you're always by yourself.

 

Anyway...those are my thoughts. 😅 Sorry for rambling.

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Calligraphette_Coe
15 hours ago, RoseGoesToYale said:

I've been having a rough go of it lately. I already mentioned my lack of human contact in T&S. But it got me thinking, because I know I'm not alone (but I am, even though there are many people who are alone, I am alone, we're all alone... guh, society is alone together!) A lot of psychologists and sociologists have brought up the concept of a "loneliness epidemic" in which more and more people are reporting detrimental levels of loneliness in their lives. These scientists still can't pinpoint a cause, which is funny, because I believe the answer is right under their noses.

But what if you're very introverted and you're gender variant to boot? If I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times from the few people with whom I resonate:

 

Quote

I’m never as lonely as when I’m in a crowded room.

I grew up writing notes to a future society and burying them in a cornfield in bottles. My version of 'a voice, crying out in the wilderness', I grew up lonely and feeling hated, and just wished that Mother Earth would just swallow me before the hatred and the memories of sexual assault ate me alive.

 

And you can't talk about this, except to a therapist, and that means admitting that you're sick. Even when YOU know, it's not YOU, it's a cruel world pretending that it's not cruel, it's just expressing its Freedom of Speech. You learn to deal with this when you're Queer, but you never find yourself in a Good Place about it.

 

I have a wide ranges of skills-- being an engineer, I simply have to . I have to keep up with technology and sometimes extend it to get any kind of respect. But what does  that respect buy me in the context of this dicussion? 'You know all about this stuff, can you help me?' Pretty much the only time I get calls is when someone wants something from me. And the very few special people that would just call to see how I was doing and talk for a half hour on the phone? They all died, because they were all older than me- I always seemed to resonate better with people much older than myself.

 

This is not to nullify or dispute any of your points-- just to say that there isn't a one size fits all cure for loneliness, And maybe that it's just the way things are, it's one of the 'Wicked Problems' which are intractable by nature not by human agency.

 

:::::throws Ninja smoke grenade and disappears:::::::

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nineGardens

I mean... on the question of busyness, we could probably assess that. My understanding is there was a whole bunch of people working double/triple service jobs because something something economy something.

 

 

I wonder how much is cultural and such.

Growing up in NZ, if you showed up at a friends house during highschool or uni years, this was just a thing. This was fine. Maybe less fine in adult time?

Still.

 

Studying last seven years in Canada?

HELL NO. ... that might be because more of my friends here are female, or living alone or whatever so boundaries are... stricter.

 

but like there's differences like

 

NZ:

"Hey, you should come and visit"

"Sure. Now?" or "When?"

 

Canada:

"Hey, you should come visit"

"Oh? What are we doing?" or "Oh yeah... that would be good... some time"

 

 

Hell, someone who spent two years calling me brother didn't even get in touch upon finding out I was leaving the country forever. Most people seem to have a 40% response rate to messages, and as far as I can tell, I'm the one initiating contact every single time.

 

....

which is kind of distracted from your discussion.

Sorry.

I guess what I mean is it feels like a lot of these things don't feel tech specific, and feel more like "being an adult is terrible" and "Dear Canada. Why?"

 

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You've brought up a serious topic and I try to reply to it as best as I can. I might be lacking the right words here but I give my best.I  hope my stuff makes some kind of sense. I only try to display my opinion here, so there is no offense intended because I'm just unsure if my English is good enough to deal with this complex topic.

 

On 4/13/2019 at 6:20 AM, RoseGoesToYale said:

I've been having a rough go of it lately. I already mentioned my lack of human contact in T&S. But it got me thinking, because I know I'm not alone (but I am, even though there are many people who are alone, I am alone, we're all alone... guh, society is alone together!) A lot of psychologists and sociologists have brought up the concept of a "loneliness epidemic" in which more and more people are reporting detrimental levels of loneliness in their lives. These scientists still can't pinpoint a cause, which is funny, because I believe the answer is right under their noses.

It doesn't surprise me that the scientist are missing the true cause. I've been long enough in the world of science and in my opinion quantification has blinded it long ago. The age of the enlightenment seems to be passing by. The central value of the enlightenment was the concept of causality, the interplay by cause and effect. Now, in the second machine age, the central value is correlation. To make it clear: correlation is fine if it is backed up with causality and sciences, like physics, are still doing the best to explain the world. But you have to remember that science only knows for sure what is wrong. Science isn't able to proof, it is only able to show that something is wrong. Nowadays there is a lot of correlation going on. Look at the algorithms that decide which advertisement is shown on your computer. They are all based an correlation. There far more and severe examples of the mistake between causality and correlation, but this would miss the point I try make here. I still belief that the scientific method is the best way to gain knowledge, but it got corrupted by the compulsion to quantify and to bring up economic measurable results. Emanuel Kant assumed that science without philosophy is blind and that philosophy without science is vain. In this sense science really got blind. Sorry for my rant on science.

 

On 4/13/2019 at 6:20 AM, RoseGoesToYale said:

We didn't create smartphones to make more work for us.

Technology always promised to save time. From some point of view this is true. I can write an email a lot faster than a letter. But the crucial mistake that has been made was to write more emails in the saved time rather than to use the saved time for yourself. Instead of writing one letter, you end writing ten emails. Ironically the situation now is even worse because I have to do ten times more work than before. I don't know how to put it but it feels like stagnancy at a tearing pace. Combined with the Protestant ethic it explains why everyone is so busy.

The ethic on work itself, that was born 200 years ago in Great Britain,  is very interesting too. Before the first industrial revolution it was a status symbol to not work. All the kings and the nobles emphasized that they didn't have to work, other than the lower classes and vassals. So it would be foolish to think that our view on work was always as it is today. It also might even change again in the future.

But back to the here and now. It seems we've lost the ability to relax and to connect with other people in real life and with nature. In my opinion there is also another reason for that besides technology and work ethics. I think advertisement had a huge impact on the collective consciousness in the past 20 years. Advertisement always proclaims to gain advantages against others. The thought of competition against each other for the best offer, work, space and time might have led to the egocentric and individualistic society today.

 

On 4/13/2019 at 6:20 AM, RoseGoesToYale said:

Lastly, in line with the whole bothering quandary, is the now overly pervasive idea of self-reliance. I can't tell you how many times I've been told by somebody to "just Google it". When I ask a person for help, or when I ask them to explain something, it is specifically because I respect their knowledge and want the comforting benefit of their experience. Yes, we could just Google it. Yes, we could look up the recipe online, or watch a YouTube tutorial. But there is something communally healthy and soulful in being able to rely on those physically around us. Used to be you could borrow sugar from your neighbor. We as neighbors have not all degenerated into crazy serial killer gangster felons, no matter what TV and the news would have us think. It would still just be the most normal thing ever to borrow sugar from your neighbor. Except we think it isn't. We see it as bothering.

This is the result of what I wrote before.

 

On 4/13/2019 at 6:20 AM, RoseGoesToYale said:

Our technology is constantly violating our need for clear boundaries, so we start putting up random boundaries willy-nilly without communicating these to others, we simply assume we can turn other people off when our boundary has been crossed.

It is ironic that we have now so many tools to connect with each other but we only use them to separate us from each other. The tools are not the only problem. The main problem is that we use these tools wrongly. We've made us a slave to these tools.

 

On 4/13/2019 at 6:20 AM, RoseGoesToYale said:

If we want to be less lonely, we need to remember how to be unbusy, to be doing nothing at the moment, whenever that moment is, to reestablish 9PM (or whatever hours we prefer to be called/texted/visited), and actually remember to tell each other this, to force employers to respect labor laws and private time, and stop Googling every little bread crumb and rely on humans once in a while. Thoughts? Could we do this as a society?

Yes, I think we have to relearn to be unbusy and to see these digital tools as what they are: just tools without a meaning in themselves. But I think we might have to wait a long time until society has changed that way. So we have to begin with it by ourselves, as far as we are able to do.

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what the face
On 4/13/2019 at 12:20 AM, RoseGoesToYale said:

 

If we want to be less lonely, we need to remember how to be unbusy, to be doing nothing at the moment, whenever that moment is

Agree 

Most essential in this regard,  to be unbusy in our heads. 

Doing nothing at the moment also means letting go when possible the linear verbal, mental and digital steams that have become our constant companions thereby displacing and holding space we might share with another present, sentient being.   

 

Most essential is the sensual component. 

We asexuals should not be avoidant/fearful of shared experiencing of our senses.

In the moment, sensual, dynamic, improvisational interaction is the antidote to the lonely.

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  • 3 months later...
InDefenseOfPOMO

I live alone and do almost everything alone.

 

It sure is not because people do not want to bother me.

 

I have been saying for many years now that I am one of the most flexible people anybody will ever meet.

 

I am never "busy".

 

Whatever I happen to be doing at any moment, anybody can join me.

 

If I want to do something with somebody the response is never simply "No thank you" or "That day does not work for me". It is almost always "I have to take my son to soccer practice", "I will be traveling for work", etc. In other words, they have more important things to do than spend time with me, and they will make sure that I know my place in their priorities.

 

I live alone, work two jobs, and do not drive a vehicle, yet I am always available to spend leisure time with someone else. Other people work only one job, drive their own car, yet if they feel like being nice they might be able to find an hour to spend with me.

 

I got every explanation I need by reading Christopher Lasch's 1979 classic "The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations". No loneliness epidemic explanation is needed.

 

The problem is, basically, capitalism. In "Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism" Richard H. Robbins says that capitalism requires a class of people willing to consume more and more stuff. People in the U.S. sure are busy-- busy being capitalist consumers. Without such constant consumption perpetual economic growth would not be possible and the system would implode.

 

We are a nation of consumers who have little time for relationships. To fill that void we do more of what we do best: consume commodities. Self-help / pop-psychology books. Therapy. Mobile devices to access social media with. The products of the tourism industry. Etc.

 

Meeting a friend in your home or a public place to talk requires no middle man, no money, etc. But capitalism needs us to be buying things, therefore it is no wonder that actual relationships with people is not encouraged.

 

I have had little interest in being a capitalist consumer. I have been alone my entire adult life. Connect the dots.

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