The Anatomy of Loneliness
So what gives?
Why are so many people, in so many countries, so lonely — an affliction the AARP says is as detrimental to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day?
I’ve got good news. It’s not us.
Almost anybody who knows me will tell you that I am one of the most outgoing, talkative, social butterflies they know, and yet…
I am lonely.
Yeah. A lot, as it turns out.
But it’s truly not my fault, and neither is it yours.
Take a look at these pictures I snapped a moment ago on a beautiful summer evening in our nation’s capital, Washington DC, in the common areas of my luxury apartment complex.
The pool is lovely and clean. The air is warm and dry. A soft breeze is blowing. It’s Friday night about 7 PM, the end of the week. The outdoor grills stand ready and waiting for the hamburgers and marinated chicken they long to cook. Look at the space. It’s elegant and sophisticated. The gardens and grounds are meticulously kept by staff. There’s only one problem.
It’s empty.
Except for me.
Yeah, that’s right. That’s my one hotdog and my one glass of wine in the picture. I even brought down an extra glass just in case a neighbor dropped by…male, female, gay, straight, black, white…anybody…just to have someone to share a moment with.
Nope.
WTF? Is anybody out there?*
I’ve got to get out of this place. I’d rather have half the amenities with twice the people, except that two times zero is still zero.
Where will I find it? Not sure, but I suspect not in the US. Loneliness is embedded in our culture, as it is in much of the developed world. Loneliness is embedded in the built environment, where everyone has a private theater in their private homes with private expresso makers and a fenced in, backyard jungle gym where the kids play…privately. It’s embedded in the culture, where everyone stares at phones in the elevator and then jumps in their cars in the covered garage, driving off without so much as a wave.
We are fighting an uphill battle. I first learned that from Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, published in 2000. I think the problem is particularly acute for men, although we don’t talk about it.
***
Years ago, while visiting the tiny town of Vernazza, in the Cinque Terra on the Italian coast, I saw a group of men setting a long table in the town’s tiny Piazza. There was a white tablecloth, bottles of red wine, buckets of charcoal black steamed mussels plucked hours earlier from the nearby Ligurian Sea, and the golden glow of the sun setting over the higgly-piggly town. It was about 5 PM on a summer afternoon.
At 11 PM I returned from my adventures to find the men still there, drinking, talking, connecting in ways almost impossible for me to enjoy as a North American. I have never forgotten that scene, and I long to find it for myself, and to become a genuine part of it before I die.
There is a solution to my loneliness, and I intend to find it. I hope you find yours too, and if you can’t, please get in touch. I have an extra glass.
###
* Please understand, I do enjoy my alone time — just not too much of it. If it is in my power to change my circumstances, which in this case it is, then I will do so. Otherwise, well…as the Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.”
Books by Brant
Most Recent
For Christmas 2018, my brother, a pilot with American Airlines, gave me a gift that became the experience of a lifetime: 12 months of free travel anywhere American Airlines flies.
Thus began a year long journey that took me from the rocky coasts of Portugal, to the hot sands of Morocco, to the mangrove swamps of Panama, with many places beyond and between. In cheap hostels and the backwaters of the nomadic milieu, I discovered a treasure chest of colorful and fascinating people. I tell their stories and a bit of my own.
The trip became as much a spiritual and emotional journey inward as it was a literal outward one, and found me in a place those of you who are in the second half of life are likely to recognize.
With references to the philosophies of Carl Gustav Jung, Jesus, Bob Dylan, and the Buddha, Blue Skyways is an international romp by a man in his 60’s with not much more than a pack on his back, and still much to learn.
A suspense/thriller novel!
When a psychology doctoral student Brian Drecker uses advanced software to analyze dreams from around the world, he discovers odd patterns that cannot be explained. Where one person's dream ends, another's begins. Unique objects appear again and again...even though the dreamers are complete strangers.
Drecker discovers the patterns form a map pointing to an ancient, lost object. Soon after, he is mysteriously murdered, leading his deadbeat brother and estranged wife on an international race to find the treasure, and the murderer. Along the way, the troubled couple are opposed by dark forces of the religious underworld, who launch a global pandemic to ensure the map of dream's secret remains lost forever.
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.