The Loneliest Generation
“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” — Charles Bukowski.
Loneliness really, really, sucks. Even Aristotle suggests that anyone not worried about living alone isn’t actually a human, but instead an animal or a God. By nature, human beings are social animals — throughout history, our survival depends on being a part of a group. This is why isolation and ostracisation are forms of punishment within ancient cultures, and even today, in our modern prison system. So despite our clear aversion to isolation, why is it so prevalent in today’s society? Why have rates of mental disorders been on the rise for the past decade, and mental well-being among adolescents is on a consistent decline? The truth is, despite the presence of numerous other blog posts and articles like this one which ask why this is the case, the answer isn’t exactly all too complicated.
The truth is, we have isolated ourselves. Making things worse, when having much-needed conversations, people walk on eggshells out of fear they won’t be accepted by their peers if they speak authentically. The desire to be accepted by the crowd is often an overwhelming one which can easily strip us of our sense of reason. At the same time, this desire to fit in goes in tandem with our natural desire to be on the correct side of things, exemplified by the social trend of “cancel culture”. It is these two factors which stoke not only our inclination to be with the crowd but also the underlying pride which is in every person. To put it plainly, the main issue which our generation faces today is an excess of pride and judgment. The desire to be authentic is neglected because of the far stronger need to “fit in”. Likewise, our pride prevents us from accepting viewpoints which may be different from ours because they don’t “fit in”. Although there isn’t anything inherently wrong with this innate and natural impulse, it is creating an ever-increasing sense of loneliness and isolation among today’s population of youths and adolescents.
So how do we create a cure for this social epidemic? Through the following series of posts, I hope to share not only the different teachings of philosophers and their remedies to dealing with loneliness and existentialism but to also provide a nuanced view into the subject to properly diagnose why so many people today feel the loneliness and sense of purposelessness that they do. As Bukowski says, we are terrorized by trivialities and eaten up by nothing, so the natural question to ask next would be how we can begin living our lives unmoved by ourselves and those around us.
