Loneliness

     I asked my Senior-year High School English teacher, "What do humans want more than anything?"  I expected to hear, "Happiness," or some derivation thereof.  But, she said, "Not to be alone."  Initially, I disagreed about that being the most basic desire of humankind, but the longer I live, the more I am of the same mind as her.

     I am convinced that, outside of radical socio-religious ideology (Japanese Kamikazes, Buddhist self-immolations, Islamic terrorists), loneliness is the only cause of suicide.  The death of the natural self is the result of privation of our most fundamental needs.  Death occurs naturally from lack of physical needs, but not from lack of emotional or spiritual ones.  But those needs and desires are not less real or urgent.  That is why, when they go neglected, they can lead to that person taking their life.  There are sundry motives for suicide (e.g. acute depression, inability to bear responsibility, loss of stabilizing factors in life, etc.), but they all go back to feeling alone.  I've known married, successful men to commit suicide who had no reason to feel alone from an objective viewpoint, but deep inside they truly did feel as though no one else understood them and the burden they were bearing.  That inner isolation became a source of irreconcilable hopelessness, i.e. complete despair.

     Despair is the inability to formulate any hope under any circumstances.  It is the the most difficult pit to ascend out of.

     It is said that in the archetypal manifestation of Jesus Christ's passion, Judas' great folly was not his treachery so much as his despair.  His betrayal plunged him to the lowest place of humanity (that which Dante perhaps properly identified as worthy of the lowest level in hell), but his despair cut the rope of his redemption.  Had he reversed his ways, repented, and become a witness of Jesus' resurrection, he would have been the greatest of the apostles.  His testimony would have been the most powerful, being the most contrapuntal.  But, why did he kill himself?  Despair.

     And despair is loneliness in its purest form because it is hopelessness.  No man is hopeless who has another to understand him.  Even one interpersonal connection that is realized by a heart consumed with loneliness is an oasis.  This is the power of human contact.  Human interaction has the potential to redeem life even if the deliberate aspect of action is removed.  It is an ablution.

     Loneliness, however, is very deceitful because it is an illusion.  Why?  Because everyone retains a certain degree of loneliness.  Why?  Because who can know the plagues of a man's own heart but himself?  But everyone deals with their allotment of loneliness differently.  Some drown it in pleasures, some disguise it in multitudinous friendships, some seek fame, and others fight it head-on every day.  "Irreconcilable differences," as cited in divorce settlements, is a phrase which means nothing more than "lonely when together."  It becomes the unidentified cause of serial espousals.
     "Isn't that proof of its reality rather than its fictive nature?" one might say.  No.  Illusion is always a universal human experience.  We know loneliness is an illusion because perspective has the capability of destroying it.  We see this represented easily with optical illusions such as 3-D street art, but it tends to go unnoticed in its parabolic representation in the psychological realm.  Perspective dispels illusion.

     Most negatives are only shadows of positives, which means they are not real.

• Cold is not a substance - it is the shadow of heat.
• Dark is not a particle - it is the shadow of light.
• Loneliness is not real - it is the shadow of hope

Hope cures loneliness.

Questions about loneliness that yield subjective answers:

1. Does human interaction cure loneliness?
2. Can we be lonely while sharing our soul with another who voices sympathy and understanding?
3. Can one be alone and not be lonely?
4. In an instance of utter human abandonment, can belief in God relieve loneliness?
5. Can intrapersonal harmony (self-communion) sate loneliness?

     Theist or not, the opinions on these vary so much from person to person, they show how perspective can affect our loneliness.  Loneliness is felt - it is perceived.  It is because it is perceived that it is illusory.  It is because it is illusory that perspective can render it inert.

     No one is ever truly alone.  The feeling is real, but the state is not.  Even hate precludes loneliness because it requires an assignment of value to hate something.  If God exists, there is a perspective extant that could remove loneliness.  If He does not, you have to go through every human on the earth before you know there is no hope of being understood.