For the Epidemically Lonely

[C C]

https://tuimh.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/f...ly-lonely/

EXCERPT: We live today in a world of social ubiquity. Connected instantaneously to the world, we have become a generation known for its tweets, its followers, and its selfies. So, of course, we must be the most socially content generation, and with hundreds of friends and hundreds of followers how could we not be? [...] so why aren’t we? Why do studies show that one third of adults report feeling lonely, a number that only seems to be growing? In a world where we are becoming increasingly connected why do we increasingly feel isolated?
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Ironically, the very instruments that sparked this age of unprecedented connectivity have also simultaneously catalyzed the modern epidemic of loneliness. Yes, we may have 200+ friends on facebook but what good are 200 friends if you can’t talk to any of them about the issues that matter to you, if you can’t confide in them [...] What good can 400 hundred followers be if they will only follow an incomplete version of you, a mask of false perfection [...] hiding those parts of you deemed too unacceptable for public exposure?

[...] While technology has a million merits, depth of social communication is not among them. It allows us to expand our social circles [...] but it also diverts our attention away from what really fulfills us. [...] In the often superficial world that social media constructs we are left with hollow friendships filled with platitudes and compliments but devoid of content.

Another huge problem is how...

[Secular Sanity]

Visiting and venting does not a friendship make.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.—C.S. Lewis

Once upon a long ago, friendship was necessary for survival.  I don’t think that we’d have to go all the way back to the Stone Age to find friendships that were, and are still necessary for survival, but this type of relationship is becoming more and more rare.

Many present-day friendships involve little more than talking and having fun together. We meet a friend at a pub, call him on the phone, or send an email, so that we can unload our anger at what happened today in the office, or share our thoughts on the latest royal scandal. Yet how well can you really know a person only from conversations?

In contrast to such pub buddies, friends in the Stone Age depended on one another for their very survival. Humans lived in close-knit communities, and friends were people with whom you went hunting mammoths. You survived long journeys and difficult winters together. You took care of one another when one of you fell sick, and shared your last morsels of food in times of want. Such friends knew each other more intimately than many present-day couples. Replacing such precarious tribal networks with the security of modern economies and states obviously has enormous advantages. But the quality and depth of intimate relationships are likely to have suffered.—Yuval Harari

 

[Magical Realist]

It makes sense that relationships formed and sustained remotely, thru wireless connections, would necessarily lack intimacy. There is no bodily co-presence. There is no tracking of facial expressions and tone in texted conversations. Nothing of the gritty physical reality of your being gets thru the filters of this virtual masquerade. Facebook. Don't we really mean Maskbook? We hide behind our favorite avatars and well-chosen words, projecting only the kind of person we want others to see us as. It is not the person we are. It is a persona, and one that is disembodied, sterilized, and polished to impress hundreds. A product mass marketed and packaged to appeal to many. It's all about connectedness at the expense of togetherness. All touch and no contact, as Peter Gabriel sang.