Only the Lonely

(As published on LinkedIn)

(Ref.: Pexels - Photo by Anthony 🙂: https://www.pexels.com/photo/purple-petaled-flower-132422/)

I was listening to a specious radio show on the treadmill (so I was not in my most receptive mood). The show had a panel of people. They must have been very popular because I had not heard of any of them. They were discussing the notion of ‘urban loneliness’. There was a lot of talk around the usual buffet-listings of terms: mental health, breakdown of connection, isolation, and trauma. The solutions offered were heartfelt, earnest, and in my opinion, dangerously vapid. “Go out, make friends, reconnect, expand your circle, sneak into some other circle, etc.”

The solutions themselves aren’t not bad. They will afford some benefit at some point. But I think they (and we) may be misunderstanding a problem and therefore solving something that does not need to be solved. Because loneliness is not a contemporary, urban, 21st-century, post-WW-11, neo-industrialist problem.

It is an existential condition. Always has been. Always will be.

Which human being in what condition has not felt bereft or lonely? And I won’t get into this fine splicing of ‘alone’ and ‘lonely’ etc. I will stick to loneliness. That you are by yourself. You are for yourself. No one else understands you. No one else wants to. That kind of loneliness.

I wonder how long we need to live as a species or how much a population should grow before we realize that the issue we are so hard trying to eradicate is the essence of who we are. Which is why at 8.2 billion, we are still combating loneliness. Because we have come to believe that we must not be. We ought not to be.  (Once in Bangalore, I was working on the pitch deck for a founder. He was from an elite college. We were stuck in traffic from Koramangala to Whitefield. Exasperated, he mentioned quite seriously, “I’m so talented and I graduated from X! Why should I be in traffic?”)


This innocent (at best) and ignorant (at worst) reading of loneliness stems from the exclusion of reading Philosophy as part of our reading. This is why we equate avoidance of loneliness as an absolute goal instead of considering loneliness as a longing for the Absolute (the Platonic perspective) or misplaced dependency (the Stoic perspective). None of our stories or angst is new, special, or unique. People have lived through this, thought through this, and figured this out in different, elegant ways before.

Our drive for connection will be true when we are actually seeking the connection itself, not when we are avoiding something else. What will be the calibre of a connection if the only thing it is based on is a need and urge to escape? That’s not connection. That’s prison break – back into prison.
I have not been invited to any radio-based panel discussion on the subject.

So this is my response to the final question the host asked on the show, “How do we treat loneliness?” My response, “As a friend. Because of all the other emotions, this one has probably proved to be the most loyal of all – always by your side.” hashtag#reflections