All the Lonely People

In my humble opinion, loneliness is among the most powerful, damaging, unacknowledged social crises of our time. I believe that it’s a killer worse than warfare, lethal diseases, automobile fatalities, and mind-numbing cable TV.

I am not talking about loneliness as in not having a date for Saturday night. I am talking about loneliness for the soul, feeling lonely in a crowd, feeling that no one deeply cares about who and what you are.

I call this spiritual loneliness. It’s a hunger for meaning and for meaningful sharing. It’s a hunger for self-expression with someone who “gets you.”

I think of spiritual loneliness as a great killer because it is a pain that when untreated leads to behaviors that kill. I suspect that if we were to probe deeply into people who have ended up in a wide variety of anti-social or self-destructive behaviors, we’d find at the root of it a near-horrific sense of loneliness.

I believe that many chronic diseases and psychological disorders are at their root the result of chronic, often life-long spiritual loneliness. Many people are conditioned in a myriad of ways to believe that they really do not matter. They’re just a cog in the wheels of industry or an objectified spouse/parent (of either gender) or another unwilling player in a global game of dodge ball.

I could list off a bunch of examples of how we’re conditioned to feel shitty and alone, but so could you. Think about it.

Are you honestly happy? Does anybody truly care what you think and feel?

The absolute irony I see about spiritual loneliness is that it is so easily curable. It’s not as if anybody needs to pour millions and millions of dollars into research to find a cure after twenty years, seven months, six days and three hours of grueling work. All you need is love.

Most of the work would come from unlearning the inhibitions and conditioning society imposes on us to keep us isolated, fearful, and miserable.

There’s a great deal of economic incentive to keep us isolated, fearful, and miserable. When you feel deeply loved and appreciated, you lose a whole lot of interest in acquiring material things. Love fills a lot of empty places in your life. You don’t need as much when you’re so fully satisfied. If you don’t need as much, you don’t buy as much, and all those business whose lifeblood depends on your needing to buy stuff don’t prosper as well.

If your love life is super fulfilling, you probably won’t want to anesthetize your sensations with booze or dope or whatever. That has a direct impact on the peddlers of booze and dope. If you take this same philosophy across product lines you can see how crucial it is not to let love get out of hand.

So succinctly put, having a bunch of lonely and frustrated people wandering around the planet is great for the global economy. Healing loneliness would force a lot of career changes. And that’s okay with me.

Millions of people today are suffering. I personally know a few of them. I firmly believe that much of this suffering could be dramatically reduced if people let love flow more freely into their lives.

I can personally think of a few people who are suffering directly from a rather acute and elevated sense of loneliness. They spend a lot of time alone or doing “busy” things to occupy their minds so they won’t think about how lonely they truly feel. I hasten to point out that some of these people are involved in relationships. Some even have regular sex. Others don't, and hunger for it.

Loneliness often comes with a related problem, such as a medical condition, lack of financial freedom, lack of self-esteem, whatever. Loneliness becomes a symptom of that other problem.

In my own case, I am under-employed as a writer. I have very limited cash flow. That in turn limits my freedom of movement because gas costs money and events cost money—and you know the drill.

A man I know has the opposite problem. His career is going great guns. He has a nice house and a great new dream car. It’s just that his needs for cash have increased so dramatically that he works long, hard hours without any time left over for love.

A woman I know has a painful medical condition that has ruined her sex life. She’s in constant pain, and has concluded—to make matters worse—that no man will ever love her “as is.” She’s chosen to endure an unfulfilling relationship only because it offers her a modicum of security.

It seems to me as if it would be an easy fix to inject some positive, loving energy into nearly anyone’s life. For example, I could see myself visiting with people, listening to their stories, perhaps helping them locate the bright side now and then. If mutually desired, these visits could include copious amounts of holding and cuddling, too, which I have found to be an excellent form of energy gifting.

But in this great pursuit of keeping everyone lonely, society has thrown up some effective roadblocks. One of them is our culturally conditioned dread of intimacy.

We’re not supposed to tell our truth if it’s not our “best side.” We’re supposed to put on a good show.

We’re not supposed to hold, cuddle, or pet (even non-sexually pet) people we are not “committed” to in an erotic pair-bonding. We’re supposed to keep our hands (and by extension our energy) to ourselves.

If we’re involved in a committed romantic relationship with one person, we’re not supposed to become more intellectually and emotionally intimate with another person, especially if that person is our desired sexual preference gender. We’re supposed to shut down from becoming too intimate with others.

If someone makes us feel really good, which may include sexual arousal, and we’re single, we’re supposed to scramble and immediately launch Operation Make a Commitment. We’re not supposed to enjoy the moment, enjoy the energy, and do nothing about tying that person down.

To my way of thinking, a whole lot more healing could be done on this planet if we’d just use our noodles, get a little braver, and put our love where our pain is. Why do we have to sit around in our empty houses feeling unloved and untouched when we could so easily make connections?

Often we put loneliness as the symptom of the frontline problem, and we don’t solve loneliness until we solve the first problem, assuming we do. But guess what happens when you bypass the first problem and make a dent in your loneliness?

The first problem isn’t as severe anymore!

In my own world, which may or may not work for you, I put a spiritual spin on all of this. Taking to heart the often-expressed religious concept that God loves everyone equally, as does his son, it makes sense to me that to the best of my ability, I can do that, too. I can give my love, energy, affection, and attention away freely.

We really don’t have to be prisoners of our cultural conditioning. We don’t need to find everlasting love before we can love in the moment. We don’t need to suffer in silence when with a small investment in energy to reach out and touch someone, we can make or connect with good friends.

What do you think?