The Collective Conundrum of a Lonely Endurance
(unpublished)On Sundays, the nagging tinnitus pitch of loneliness, normally muffled by the week’s hectic rush, blasts its sirens with no relief. The rhythmic pulsing uniform with each heart's beating is absent to other conscious beings. Low roars and high squeals unphased by its external surroundings, get louder and louder, all-engulfing as Sundays become Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays alike. Thursday’s getting bad, worse. Friday hisses, declining vacation for Saturday too. All I can hear is the odious clinking loop disregarding every occasion and every mood, joyous too.
Loneliness is the age-old plight explored by many. Existentialists claim solitude is essential to the human experience; emphasising our great individualism as we navigate through networks of different human bodies enduring their own. Nietzche himself viewed solitude as one of the highest virtues. He explained, “where there have been powerful societies, governments, religions, public opinions, in short, wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated, for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force its way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart and that annoys the tyrants.” Yet, in a letter written to Franz Overbeck, Nietzche says, “If I could give you an idea of my feeling of loneliness! I have nobody among the living or among the dead, to whom I feel related. This is indescribably horrible!”
As I walk through crowds of thousands in a busy tube station, each face passing me by while I move down the escalator in slow exhaustion, I question if all we can really ‘know’ are our own ideas and perceptions, how can we ever vanquish loneliness? Is it possible to reach the other conscious being with any sense of certainty?
In an all-crushing sentiment, philosopher Baudrillard refers to loneliness as a product of our machined environments where the anxious rhythms and paranoid modes of consuming become our own. Under microscopes and mirrored screens, 16 to 24-year-olds are ‘statistically’ the most lonely. Why are Millennials so incapable of achieving connection? Is it due to our immersion in social media platforms where we have followers instead of friends? Where everyone is little more than a thumbs up, a smiley face, or an eggplant emoji? Have we transposed our relationships into the cyber-domain? A nihilistic, capitalistic space that does not love us and regards us as nothing more than data with no apparent soul? It seems easy to denote this as the answer to my punishing nightly terrors but if it was true, that loneliness is a direct product of digitised social environments and not just inflated by it, the very feeling would not have been the centre of so many artworks before the cconception of a digital dystopia.
To this day, Artist Edward Hopper’s 1942 'Nighthawks' is hard to escape. A man sits opposite a beautiful couple, apparently having a pleasant time. A contrast to his own lonely state, that heightens, even amidst a crowd. Alone but not alone, he strikes a bleak despondency as he is hunched over a drink, foregone in lonely thought. Photographer Luca Pucci explores the concept of ‘lonely’ as cities imprisoned by their postcards, portraying isolated buildings and sites confined by their stereotyped imaginations. In films we watch and novels we read, characters are engulfed by their quest for something outside the languor of everyday life. Whether through romantic escapades in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood or Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, each exploration signals to the one escapist fantasy of finding contentment through perceived associations– a strive often ending in depressing altered states of hyperreal seclusion.
Forums and online therapy scams feed us the same narrative that loneliness can be helped with a friendly hand. But, as a dissociated observer of communes and open spaces, sitting in a crowd of 6, I watch jaws wide open in front of me; their red-rimmed gaps letting out noises alike to a hyena’s woos. An obnoxious sound sings out of my own, untuned. Yet, my soul lay trapped behind a locked door with a growling gut hoping to be fed. Staring at the food pass, I wait endlessly for a slice to satiate the growing hunger pains… A desire that may never be fulfilled because perhaps, I am one of those simply destined for malnourishment.
Upon closing up this essay and penning my last dot, I am still not whole with a writer’s remorse. Who will I upset with these words? Is it my mother or my friend next door? All I know is, our disposition towards loneliness is inevitable as each of us lives alone within the realms of our own minds, nestled inside our cocoons of revolving fantasies and crippling anxieties. Glimpses of understanding, short flutters eventually stomped down by the reality of obstacles and individual context. The only comfort we harbour is in the collective conundrum of a lonely endurance; till death do us part.