Loneliness

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.