Why people like me are feeling more lonely
Many a times, I find myself searching the internet for depression screening tests to make sure I am not suffering from it. But more often than not, the tests are positive.
I might be suffering from bi-polar disorder since that is what reports tend to suggest. But it does not disturb me much. What makes me ponder over my illness, if I may call it so, is that my friends feel the same. They too are lonely in their lives, though in different contexts. A bad childhood, a forced degree and a career choice — the reasons are numerous but the repercussions are similar. They are leading their lives with empty cabins that cannot be filled with people around them.
While we try to take care of each other in every manner possible, our own vacuums hold us in states of inaction, and sometimes indifference. Amid such lives that I live actively and passively, people such as Chuck McCarthy, who charge money to walk with other people, do not surprise me.
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| With just the internet, my only source of information in this part of the world, I am left lonely and confused. (Credit: Reuters) |
However, I believe the real question is what makes us feel lonely? Why do we feel lonely even among people? The more I delve deeper, the more I am told to love and forgive myself. I am advised to go out more often and try to sit with people. I am repeatedly reminded of "facts" like "depression exists inside my head and not outside it". I am told that whatever I experienced for being a woman was natural and obvious, and that I should get over it. I am remarked upon that I am mistaking my laziness for depression.
With just the internet, my only source of information in this part of the world, I am left alone and confused as to how to deal with my feelings and myself. Amid this crisis, when I see depressed people and read articles written on mental illness, I often ponder over the symptoms and the remedies. The one thing that therapists and "un-depressed" people tell me repeatedly is that I must focus on my career, my future, my ambition, and things I want to do in life. I should focus on developing myself individually as an individual human who can exist and achieve the best of things apart from feeling unloved and lonely.
However, I feel this is the very reason I feel depressed, an extreme form of individualism that surrounds me and us. Apathy, indifference, selfishness, lies, and hatred — our lives are filled with these, which makes me laugh at the solutions proposed by this very system. Capitalism and neoliberalism generate systemic loneliness, which goes much beyond what Marx had imagined. It not only isolates and alienates one from what one produces, but also seizes the opportunity from one to feel one's experience of producing those things and emotions.
Competitive self-centeredness teaches us from a young age to be hostile towards others, to make others jealous and be jealous of others' achievements, and to concentrate only on one's career. It provides a child numerous chores to do and skills to master in order to establish her individually in the world as soon as possible. Morning exercise, singing classes, school, sports club, debating club, coaching classes, and self study — most teens today go through this lifestyle, which reduces them and their identities to overly ambitious beings. It attacks them with what is famously known today as the disease of being busy at an age when they are supposed to learn the joy of sharing.
I often observe my sister, who is preparing for medical college. When she is not studying, she uses social media and television as her source of entertainment and company. This is to say that practically she has almost no interaction with human beings around her and is totally oblivious of the consequences it might have on her psychology.
It is also one of the major reasons why students preparing for engineering and medical colleges are committing suicides at an alarming rate. While this era urges us to form new relationships and boasts of its quality to let us engage in conversations with people across the world through social media, it also creates a devastating delusion of friendship.
It encourages us to measure the love we receive from the number of followers we have and trust in the power of our digital friends more than the people surrounding us. It allows us to communicate with Twitter and Facebook profiles at the cost of ignoring real people. Since it is an extended reflection of our society that definitely has more space than our physical worlds, it exacerbates the competition and narcissism in us. It takes it to a global level, where each one of us starts to believe in the transformative power of social media (that can make us famous, and sometimes rich as well) and ultimately succumbs to its weaknesses.
Further, it makes the delivery of the neoliberal argument that "I can do it all alone" even easier and we see it on every so-called "positive thinking" sites and pages. But if we could do everything on our own, individually, we would not have been living in a society in the first place.
Recently, I saw a video on Facebook depicting a woman being disturbed repeatedly by her cat. The title of the video read, "Tag your 'Needy' friend". I can assure that it is not the only meme out there mocking loneliness and depression, but this particular video interested me for the comments that followed.
People had tagged their mates who replied saying they are not that needy; rather, they are independent persons. Even our regular conversations consist of being independent and strong enough not to let anything hurt you or deviate you from your mission in life. And people usually pose themselves in such a manner.
Students are expected to give examinations on the days of their siblings' marriages, employees are ordered to come to offices the day after their parents die, and workers are forced to work even if they have tuberculosis or cancer. Happiness, pain, death — these are emotions that become obstacles in one's path to success — is what we are taught throughout our lives. However, we are never encouraged or taught to question: Success for what? Whose success? At what cost?
Since we are consumers (even if of our own productions) at our very best, the argument of a tricky road to success is often sold to us. We are told that people are selfish, advised that we should never trust, and made to believe that making money is the best thing that can happen to us.
Consequentially, we internalise all arguments in the process and forget the fundamentals of human existence. Cut from society in a unique way, we become so entrapped in our lives that we not only forget to share, but deliberately stop sharing. Children do not share their toys fearing others might break them, students do not share their assignments fearing others might receive higher grades, and employees do not share their work fearing others might reach the top (of the success) before them.
It is this inability to share and to talk about one's emotions and experiences, and our repulsiveness to listen to and understand others' emotions that leads to a state of depression for a lot of people.
At a time when fascism is on the rise and the capitalist powers have waged a war against people in Syria, Aleppo, Bastar, Kashmir and many other parts of the world, such neo-liberal individualism makes us utterly selfish and indifferent human beings.
On one hand, it makes us apathetic towards half of the world by propagating racism, sexism, and homophobia, and encourages our irresponsible behaviour. On the other, it snatches from us the ability to respond when we begin understanding things by sending us into pits of depression. It turns us into puppets that participate in the mad race of becoming "successful" and when the time comes for us to enact the climax of the show, run back and see what is wrong with the world and us, it leaves the strings that were holding us. We are then faced with the darkness of empty halls.
I am not a psychologist or an expert on the matter and I am not sure about the solutions. I try each day to talk to people and seek hope. I try to give meaning to my life and draw inspiration from the lives of people who fought the worst forms of oppression. Sometimes, it works, at times, it doesn’t. There is one simple, but less said thing, I have learnt in the process — we either stand together or fall apart!