The Lethality of Loneliness | Hacker News Reader

The Lethality of Loneliness

newrepublic.com

74 pointsmgh225 comments

I hope it's not annoying to people if I type this word yet again, but: meditation. If I had known how helpful it would be, I would have started many years ago.

It just doesn't seem possible that it's helpful, right? Sitting quietly and watching the breath? But as you do it and get better at it, you learn what it's about, and realize how it's helping in ways that might seem subtle at first.

I felt like an outsider my whole life, like an alien imposter, never getting the memos that other people seemed to get, and I know it caused me a lot of suffering, but after my almost two years of daily meditation, when I call up the subject of loneliness in my mind, I just can't get it to hurt anymore. I just can't get it to make sense anymore. It feels like the mental supports for my discontent have been eroded away. Now I feel as if it was kind of crazy that it ever hurt. I've never really been alone, and never will be. It's not really possible to be alone.

Yea I mean the solution to all problems, literally.

I don't know if you meant this in a snarky sarcastic way or not, but in my experience, through disciplined long term meditation (and/or with some catalysts) you may be able to gain insight into the nature of consciousness and through that the many worries and stressors of life just disappear or lose their power over you.

Ymmv, and meditation may not always blissful happy times and certainly is not a technique for 'just' relaxation despite what the mainstream western media may tout.

This may be helpful, or not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QC5MwElNb0

Oh I wasn't sarcastic, totally with you on it :)

What did you do to meditate?

I also found meditation to be incredibly useful. Far more than it first seemed. Meditation seems to take the edge off the highs and lows of the day so you're just a little more even keel.

I'd recommend the Headspace app to start with. After a few weeks you should be good to start meditating on your own and looking into more advanced meditation techniques. Or you can keep it basic too, there's no hard and fast really.

Thanks, will try.

There is a certain trade off between liberalism's individualism with all its virtues and the more group oriented concept of society it has largely replaced.

To a certain extent, this is a legal/phlosphical issue. We treat people as personally responsible for themselves and a "nuclear" family. Individuals are responsible for their own happiness, social environment, financial well-being.... Stresses, successes, disasters and windfalls are personal to a person/family. This leaves us more "uninsured" than we would have been in more integrated communities.

The philosophical/legal side, grew alongside urbanism, globalism, capitalism and all the other features of a modern world. The philosphy of liberal individualism may be more cause than effect, it's hard to seperate.

In any case, I think lonliness is a consequence of this way that our society is organized, a painful one. The "problem" is at its most acute among the elderly.

This is getting past the point (I don't have a fix to suggest) but I think one way of thinking about how society is organized is considering companies. Companies have replaced clans, villages, tribes, sects and such as the primary way cooperation is organized. Company dynamics determine who does what and with who. Company hierarchies are the relevant hierarchies in our lives. They are, very disconnected form our "home life," in a way that I think is unusual for a human system.

I wish more commenters would read the article.

It's not about garden-variety, dictionary-definition, transient, intermittent, universially-felt-at-some-point sort of "loneliness" many of you assume it is.

It's about chronic loneliness, the loneliness of an orphan, the loneliness of a closeted homosexual, the loneliness of a retiree whose friends are all dead.

It's about loneliness as a force powerful enough to change the sufferer's genetic expression. It's really something.

I think that you have to be lonely at some point in your life in order to be genuine. A lot of people are over-socialized and not in touch with themselves and it's difficult to be friends with them because it feels like work.

Experiences of loneliness, suffering and loss are essential for human development. You cannot be a complete human without it just like you need community/social bonds, happiness and birth. But excessive amounts can be harmful.

Accepting that we are at once alone but also part of a community/society/culture/nation is part of maturing and developing.

Well, not always. Sometimes people refuse to look inwards because they do not like what they see. In such a case, it's less painful to ignore it.

Really, I think that the impact of loneliness inherently depends on everything we have went through in the childhood.

I lived in a tent next to the Mýrdalsjökull glacier near Vík í Mýrdal for half a year; and I have lived for over three months in a tent in the rainforest, north of Panama.

It was always a kind of mental escape from the chaos for me. And I always felt alienated from most of society. Maybe it's some kind of latent autism? At least for me there's nothing more beautiful than reading a book with a gas lamp, hearing the sound of the sea and seeing the aurora borealis right over me.

Alone.

That sounds wonderful. Do you have any photos or writing about these experiences (or others)?

So relatable. I've struggled all my life with loneliness. I had up and down periods, but overall it is the biggest issue in my life.

Sorry to hear that. Pretty much the same for me since I started middle school up to now (in my early 30s). To this day I have no close friends. During my years as a student, after school it would pretty much be just me sitting in front of the computer. My cell phone call log? Mom and dad, and the occasional junk call. Post-school, as an adult, it was pretty much the same. Like the article states, it physically hurts sometimes to be truly lonely.

I hope loneliness is over for me, now that I got married very recently. If you're wondering how that happened, it was a blind date setup by my aunt. I was lucky to meet someone that liked me, and had things in common with. I was really lucky that she still liked me even after she found out I had no friends, and pretty much no social life.

I hope you are able to fight your way out of loneliness.

I can relate to the argument that loneliness, because of less social control, leads to unhealthy habits.

However, for introverts I don't think it's true that loneliness leads to reduced health because of negative feelings. For me at least it's more 'toxic' to have to spend large amounts of time with people than to be alone.

As an introvert, I don't really feel lonely when I'm alone. I'm actually more likely to feel lonely at a big social gathering. Small social groups are refreshing, but too much time with others will start burdening me.

I only start feeling lonely after a significant amount of time of being alone. This could be weeks or months. Yes, I've spent a lot of time alone and have "rejected" many of my social circles after starting to feel burdened. I now have only a few friends that I talk to and I'm very happy like this.

As a sidenote, I felt very lonely as a kid. I think I've just adapted.

I think this is the point; being alone doesn't equal loneliness. An introvert can be lonely too, for sure. But it's important to differentiate between the two.

I think for introverts, loneliness comes from the fact that you don't get to spend quality time with close friends, instead you're either all by yourself or surrounded by people you don't care about.

> or surrounded by people you don't care about.

Or surrounded by people who do not care about you.

There have been a lot of people in my life about whom I cared a lot, but most of them did not care (equally) much about me. I have always given them time to develop some kind of closeness, but more than often it does not happen, so in the end I tend to abandon this kind of relationship. It's too painful. :(

I find many are willing to invest sparingly in a facade to retain 'usefulness' for whatever net they gain, while concurrently mocking & deriding my shortcomings... I am socially awkward. This type if disingenuousness feels wrong to me, and as a result, I fail miserably in the 'networking' aspect of life.

There's a difference between loneliness and solitude. We introverts tend to value the latter more highly than extroverts do. The former still harms us all.

I'd be interested to know how this interplays with ASD (as I have HFA/Aspergers). I've spend decades in a high stress state... and feeling lonely/isolated. I'm really lucky that I have an understanding wife, but I'm really not that good with the normal "social situations" neurotypical people gravitate to, but where I end up feeling agitated and disorientated, and emotionally drained. I've often said I feel drawn to such situations but hate it when I'm in them.

It can reach into your physical life and destroy you, physically.

Once the physical symptoms become manifest, it becomes all the more self-reinforcing. You are all the more adverse to many social contacts, because you can no longer "hide" your state for periods of time while engaging in them.

A bad home environment (neighbors from hell) was the start of my isolation.

It's probably taken 20 years off my life, based on the state of my health, now.

It was a slippery slope -- one of vulnerability. Each additional adverse event eased by the former, and more greatly exacerbating the problem.

Early in life, I was forced through an extended set of circumstances where my own experience and needs were expressly discounted and I was coerced to work with and endure others' expectations, at great stress and expense to myself. I had no control. I had no agency.

I learned to shut down and "wait things out". I never learned how to advocate for myself -- not in the face of adversity.

As an adult, "waiting out" adversity just allowed it to grow, step by step, instance by instance.

And the more your life diverges from others', and the older you get while this happens, the more alone you end up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com