Only the Lonely
My weekend theme is loneliness for some reason. We all know that older people get lonely as the rest of the world carries on with it’s busy schedule. They seek out ways to stem that tendency, but it’s not clear to what end.
While it always remains that people are all different, I tend to think that as we age we have less tolerance to exchange comfort for adventure or companionship. Some people are happy and perhaps even happier to be alone for much of their time. What accounts for this and what accounts for those who can’t stand being alone? Is there a genetic predisposition to either or is this all about learned behavior and the wounds of youth?
To begin with, loneliness is deemed by most to be a normal state for at least some of their time. Social isolation is not necessarily a terminal illness. In fact, learning how to cope with being alone is probably a healthy skill. It probably fosters more imagination and creativity. It should also spur development of improved self-confidence. I know people who embrace being alone, but does that mean that they embrace loneliness or do they simply not experience loneliness as a natural part of being alone? The secret lies somewhere in the psyche and what makes us each happy. If being alone makes us unhappy, then loneliness afflicts us. Conversely, if we are perfectly content (is that the same as happy?) being alone, we stand strong. Obviously, this is all deeply effected by degree and duration. We know that people in a sensory depravation tank start going crazy quickly. That implies that socialization is right there with light, sound, smell and touch as necessary elements of life. I choose to ignore aberrants who choose a hermitic or monastic life since I think we can agree they are increasingly rare.
This gives rise to an interesting question about social media. Can it fully, or even sufficiently, substitute for direct human social interaction? My guess is that it cannot at all. I believe even young people raised in social media can come to feel their digital connections are a big part of their existence, but I doubt they could exist any longer without direct human contact than any of us. That means I am positing that social media is not really a substitute for traditional socialization at all. It is altogether something different. Nothing substitutes for other senses even though those senses can be enhanced. Nothing substitutes for human contact, though social media can certainly enhance it by expanding access, increasing knowledge and broadening our comfort with one another when we do meet face-to-face.
Kim and I met on match.com. We have often said that given the disparity of our worlds, we probably would never have met otherwise. We gained access to one another. Our online relationship consisted of reading profiles (gaining knowledge) of one another and only a few written communications. We then spoke on the phone a few times (gaining comfort) and met for a date shortly thereafter. There may be people like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, who online chat for an extended period of time and then only finally get together. I believe that’s more uncommon than not. Not everyone moves from digital connection to lifelong intimacy like we did. We hit it off immediately, began living together within a month and have been inseparable ever since. But there is and will be increasing fluidity between social connection and human relationships, though the sine qua non is the human contact.
I believe more and more people are choosing to control and not expand their social networking. I know more people who are dropping out of Facebook or Twitter than those who are just joining. I did recently join Instagram and my family group does use Snapchat a good deal. Kim and I, who I will ascribe “older generation” status to, tend to be social media voyeurs and responders, much less than active engagers. We find we read a lot of social media every day, with almost as much regularity as emails or texts. Unlike a growing portion of the populace, we have minimal privacy concerns, but that may change soon. I am installing a smart home system driven by Amazon Echo with Alexa in our home in San Diego. It seems to have gotten cheap enough and robust enough to be worthwhile. While reading about the various smart home options now available (I somehow doubt we will go to verbal command faucets and staple-ordering refrigerators), but it might be nice to turn on lights, optimize the control of the HVAC (we installed Nest thermometers already), open/close the garage and control the new Ring video doorbells. Others say they don’t want Jeff Bezos or Sergey Brin listening to their every command. I never cared much about the issue, but find myself drawing the line on inside cameras that others might monitor. Despite decreasing shyness as I age, I’m still not inclined to give my underwear a full public viewing.
I would argue that if we were inclined to remain unconnected (as one or two people in our new neighborhood, including our next door neighbor, seem to prefer), I’m not sure we would bother digitizing the house more. I think we would just hunker down and not bother being fully wired (or wireless). But the exact opposite is the case. We are moving to a lovely hilltop that is not remote, but not urban by a long stretch. We worry less about keeping people away than we do about staying connected. We, like most retiring people, are building in safeguards to make sure that loneliness does not become an issue. The recent trend toward urban retirement is driven by this same desire. It would not surprise me at all to find that after ten years (just to choose a random timeframe), we choose to return to New York City for our final lap. With all the lifestyle options around and the digital connectivity, it may be only the lonely that stay out in the sun cities of retirement.