Loneliness
So both reading and having read some books on loneliness I
wanted to think through some ideas about it.
Definitions
Loneliness seems to me not an objective state that we are,
that one day could be definitively measured but rather a way of describing
human experience that has a history which has evolved since its initial uses in
the 18th century when it was a physical description more of being alone as
opposed to the emotionally charged aspect of current loneliness.
The definition that I would like to use here is:
Loneliness is the pain you have when you don’t have connections
with others you desire.
Therefore loneliness is both social expectation and social
disappointment.
Types of loneliness
Loneliness varies in both object of social desire and duration.
The social connection sought varies from a single person: romance
and best friends, to a loose social group like friends, or a tighter social
group, like a religious group.
Loneliness can be chronic, situational or event based. Chronic being felt all of your life time, situational
being the outcome of a change of situation, e.g. a partner dies. Event
loneliness is the loneliness we feel at certain events, for example at a party
when no-one talks to us.
Phenomena and effects
I’d like to look at loneliness from 3 aspect within person, between
people and its social context.
The within person aspect of loneliness seems to be the
experience around a persons being , valuing
and understanding.
Validation
With another person your existence can get seen and
validated. The process of your life can be offered back to you through the eyes
of the other. This offers two aspects to increase the
understanding you may have of your yourself and your life and the value you
have of yourself and within your life.
You know you exist as you are seen and you make a
difference. As much as you learnt about
yourself and the world through the eyes of the others, so there is something
seemingly ontologically fundamental about the being of the other in the forming
of your being. As you are validated thus
you can make understanding about yourself in the world and its importance.
Valuing
Part of validation is valuing. Value seems very much a
social concern, you could argue that the more people value something the
greater its value has to an individual. Indeed value seems to be a relational
concern. I do something for you that you value, you may repay me with something
I value, so value is the common currency of importance between people. Thus
whilst it seems logically possible for someone to value something that no other
person could value, it seems it would weaken an individuals valuing if no one
else valued it. So again we need another to be part of our shared value world,
to see importance in what we see important and to put the colour back into our
world. There’s a wonderful and twisted example of this that I read but now can’t
remember the reference, but if you could be the richest\cleverest\most
successful person in the world but you had to live on a planet of robots, would
you take it?
Understanding
Part of validation is an understanding and perspective on
the meaning you make in your life. Following
Wittgenstein’s private language argument, you could never have a private
language as you would need a third party to let you know if you didn’t follow
the rules. Without the other your grasp
on meaning weakens. In some ways I wonder if the same arguments around value
hold true for meaning? Would it be the case that the more people that believe
what you do, the stronger your belief in it would be and contrary wise? So as
you are validated you can live in a more coherent and understood world.
If you add that together there is something foundational to
a person’s being contained in their relation to the other and loneliness whilst
can be episodic, or more long lasting can be understood as the pain we might
feel in via our being, value and understanding. So loneliness in this view is
something of a social pain in the ontologies…
Event loneliness
There seems another aspect of loneliness being the restriction
of things you can do, things best done with another. Some relational being that
loneliness can call for is the desire for care, play, feeling safe, touch, to
be part of something bigger than self. Indeed attachment theorists would argue
that an adult break of a secure base would add to the lonely experience with a feeling
of not being safe. Whilst you can talk
about self-relation and how we receive our acts this would appear a glimmer of
the effect that another can have.
As much as there are relational aspects that can be had
fully without another, there are also events that are have a social expectation
to them, which can provoke both an experience of loneliness and or an
avoidance. These are some of the aspects of the stages of life, parties, key birthdays, marriages, births and
deaths. Society has constructed these in certain shapes, and these shapes
involves friends and if you don’t have sufficient of them at these events, then
the social pain you feel, for this lack can be loneliness.
Social Context and loneliness
Society seems to construct both our concept of loneliness
and also the factors to produce it. On
one hand there is the post industrial neo-liberal society in which we live. As
many of our jobs lead us to be cogs in a machine we can lose the meaningfulness
either of our job, or of our interactions with others. Here we can treat and be
treated like objects whose only worth is the quantifiable and competitively
increasing output that we can make. The
style of work plus the quantity of things to buy the objects to make our work
worthwhile, is a perfect breeding ground for loneliness. Where we might crave
the I Thou relationship of Buber as opposed the factory cog banging I It
relation.
Meta emotions and loneliness
To say there are meta-emotions to loneliness, would imply a
simplicity of unity and causality of it that I do not believe in, however there
is something in loneliness that can get constructed through social context.
In our society the general push is to success and
popularity. Both of these goals
reciprocally intermingle with each other, the successful becoming popular, the
popular finding power, or followers or customers which in turn can enable
success. So in this society then to feel lonely, to have social pain and
insufficient meaningful relations means there is something bad about you. In
this light people can feel their loneliness and then mixed in with this is some
unpleasant belief about self to explain this, I am unlikable, bad etc. Then on
top of this thought and emotion of course will match explanatory view of other
people who will persecute on this basis, who will judge on this basis. Again the unpleasant cocktail of these
meta-emotions can then add the experience of shame into the already heady brew
of loneliness.
Causes and maintainers
Loneliness is complex so to there is no simple answer to
causes and maintainers.
Development
To construct loneliness you have to have a social history.
Babies are social, children are social and it is on this background loneliness
grows.
To have unsatisfactory relationships then this can be due to
unrealistic expectations and inter-personal difficulties. This can then lead to
being rejected, humiliated, scorned, bullied or ostracised. All of which can
then lead to feeling unsafe.
To make sense of these unpleasant feelings and experience
then people can develop unpleasant beliefs about themselves: “I am boring”, “I
am unlovable”. This would then be an initiator to the chronic lonely. Likewise
it can also generate beliefs about other people, they are judgemental, persecutors
and not to be trusted and then in turn about social situations, which are
understood to be scary.
Maintainers
The combination of beliefs about self\others and social
situations will then lead to avoidance which can in turn maintain these
beliefs. Likewise it can lead to defensively paying attention to self for faux
pas, or for other in terms of attack which again can get in the way of the
meaningful connection that is sought.
With a history of loneliness, the desire for social
connection can also become so great that a level of social perfectionism forms
which is in turn very difficult to satisfy.
Social beliefs form a part here. When we believed in God
there may have been equal aloneness, but there was less loneliness, as you were
always with God, and indeed aloneness allowed a better relation with God.
Likewise belief in “The one”, your soulmate that will make your life complete, will lead to a lot of
dissatisfaction with prospective partners and can contribute to your loneliness
for this person.
Beliefs about self likewise play a part. Seeing others as
similar to yourself enables greater degrees of trust in the other to be formed,
trust in others being a core component of creating meaningful relationships.
Trust
Whilst trust is a verb that needs an object it is a broad
relation between people. Where it plays a part in loneliness, is a trust that
other people will be kind to me, wont judge me unpleasantly, reject, bully, humiliate
etc. There is a correlation between
beliefs in this type of social trust and levels of loneliness both at a country
level and at the individual level as current research shows.
Indeed there seems something logical about this, as mistrust
is handwork. You have to scan the actions of the other and yourself to defend
yourself against the unpleasant behaviour that mistrust points to. Likewise to
mistrust the other wont allow you or they to open in what is both a place of
connection and also vulnerability.
Bibliography
Svendsen, Lars. A Philosophy of Loneliness Reaktion Books. Kindle Edition.
Cacioppo, John T.. Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for
Social Connection . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Bound Alberti, Fay. A Biography of Loneliness (p. 38). OUP
Oxford. Kindle Edition.
