We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone" - Orson Welles
Loneliness is the purest form of self-realization where one can reflect towards their own being. Who we are is nothing more but the amalgamation of our social experiences, weaved slowly by the needle of time. Loneliness is only scary when we fear our own self. An individual that has gone through the process of self-realization is always alone, but never lonely.
The self is sculpted from interactions, whether these are objects or living entities. Who we love, who we cherish, the ones we hold dear or the ones we troll; a fishing outing at a cabin or shoveling snow from the street. Every single action is defined from a previous one. Every single action forms a new self.
Being alone is rather impropable. There is always something accompanying, keeping us in touch. The echo of a human voice or the ping of an electronic message, the view of a forest or the warmth of a book—everything is there to keep us company. Everything is there to form a new experience.
Some asphyxiate under the weight of the crowd and others feel revived. A given perception about a random interaction can either alleviate or imprison us. The way we perceive loneliness is our own tale lost in translation— nothing more than the deviation in perception from another human being. An inevitability.
Don’t let the “experts” fool you. We are all individuals formed by different experiences. Every single experience is a unique ingredient for the ongoing recipe of the self. When people express that they are feeling lonely they simply express that their perception is out of synch with the rest. It's ok.
We feel lonely because we live in societies that supply vast amounts of information—all of which we can process independently and uniquely. We develope our own perception, rarely synchronising with one another. We are not to blame—statistical variation is.
In the days with no internet or even further back with no books or written information, loneliness was not so dreadful. People used to live in small groups and shared pretty much the same information. Webbed information of the last decades allowed people to be exposed to different sets of experiences—accesing the totality of human knowledge. The process created individuals ready to question fossilised information whether those were about physics, religion, government or anything else in between. Free access meant that each individual was becoming their own knowledge bank ready to re-evaluate and re-compose. The process freed us from the shackles of the crowd and left us alone to reflect back on our existence.
Unique data banks are hard to be connected to other nodes due to their complexity and self sufficiency. Each person understands the same concept but with vastly different sets of information. This is how the sense of loneliness is formed. Generic words like love, friendship, god, empathy, are understood vastly different from each person since we all reach an understanding towards these concepts following completely different paths.
Embracing the process of being alone can elevate the individual from loneliness. Understanding that our knowledge is subjective can establish a sense of humbleness towards the awe of reality. Digesting the fact that we cannot fully know oneself or others around us is the first step from escaping loneliness and being freely and comfortably alone.
