We are the loneliest generation in history and all of us are proudly responsible
Our ancestors were good at one thing. They weren’t bigger or faster or stronger than the animals they took down most of the time. But they were much better at banding together in a group and supporting each other. This was our superpower as a species, we banded together, we could collaborate and trust each other, family or otherwise. Just like bees are born to live in a hive, human beings are best when they live in a tribe.
We are the first human generation since the beginning of time to disband our tribes. We are the loneliest society in human history. There was a study which asked to people, ‘Do you feel that you are no longer close to anyone’ and 39% answered yes. Loneliness often leads to depression and depression is the saddest epidemic of today’s civilization. Why do I say it is the saddest and the most unique of them all? Because we can’t blame this on any one person, or a dictator or a rogue country. As a society, we have been systematically doing this to ourselves over 100s of years. It has now come to the point that the rates are becoming alarming higher with each generation. The graph below says it all — 1 out of 4 people in the current generation (US data) suffer from depression as compared to 1 out of 10 in the age group 60+. And these are just figures for people who have been diagnosed with clinical depression.
The problem isn’t going to go away just by throwing medicines and anecdotes at it. That’s what’s normally done, isn’t it? Doctors prescribe anti-depressants and friends/family prescribe anecdotes because they either can’t relate to it, don’t understand it and/or they don’t know what else to do.
The most alarming part of this is that we are not being forced to be lonely, we are choosing that route, thinking that it is the right thing to do. In fact, we actively preach it as the way of life. From functioning as a village to clans to joint families to nuclear families, we have been reducing the size of our tribes to the point where now, most people are convinced that a couple living together in a remote island for their whole lives with enough money and no one else to disturb them is a dream come true.
The problem is deep seated in our culture by now. We have built so many norms, conventions and stories that guide us towards being alone and ditching the tribe. I will give a few uncomfortable examples below based on my observations over the years (and no, I am not a doctor. So, I’m not claiming that any of these are clinically proven). We CAN change things, but only if we are honest about identifying the things that need changing.
- As a child, I, like many, was taught ‘Everyone is alone in this big bad world, and no one helps anyone else. So, you have to put yourself before others.’ Really? Aren’t we creating a world where being selfish isn’t something anyone is sorry about? At a macro level, aren’t we just creating more of the problem?
- We glorify personalities who have been to the top and done it on their own. We have a romantic relationship with stories of role models who fought adversities on their own and succeeded. We get inspired by them. While that is great and those people are truly inspiring, one of the by-products of the marketing is the over glorifying of the ‘done it own their own’ part. Every one of these people would have a family member or a couple of friends or a stranger who lent them a helping hand at crucial stages. Many of them would have had someone who always said, ‘I am there for you, come what may’. Many of these heroes would have a sidekick who were happy to be just the sidekick and happy to contribute. Every successful CEO or celebrity would have a shoulder or two to lean on, with whom they could discuss, show their weakness without being judged as weak. The by-product of neglecting that part of the story is that asking for help or receiving some has become a sign of weakness. If our role models didn’t need help, then why should we? In the quest for making stories sensational, we have been conditioning our minds to think that doing things alone is the ‘right’ way, the definition of being mentally strong.
- Another example is our relationship with friends. Partly due to the lack of trust in the ‘extremely social’ world, we have umpteen conventions similar to ‘Let me not ping him first. I don’t want to appear needy’. What if both do the same? Even if the other ping pings, social conditioning is such that there is inherently a downgrade of respect because he/she is now ‘more needy than you are’. Each such individual instance isn’t neccessarily wrong, it’s just that when everyone does it, no one wins. There are many such conventions, which, even in the best case scenario where two friends who simply find joy in talking to each other, widen the gap between them over time. Also, most of us have convinced ourselves that good friends talking to each other for 15 mins over phone once in many months is what’s normal, because that’s all we can manage given our lifestyles and societal norms. That’s actually true. In most cases, our lifestyle and society structure doesn’t allow for more than that. But, while all this may sound rational in our heads, if friends are the best bet against loneliness, isn’t our thought process at least worth a relook
4. Even when we focus on relationships, there are certain misplaced priorities. The stereotypical husband is jealous or even angry when his wife spends long hours with her best friend. We shrug it off, saying he is not entirely at fault and that its human instinct to feel that way. Well, us being able to curb our instincts and think, is what differentiates us from other animals. Cursing when angry is almost human instinct. Clearly, we don’t celebrate all our instincts. Cursing, as an example, is universally considered bad whereas actively trying to isolate friends is a socially accepted convention. Really? Promote a culture of isolating friends and then when someone is sad & lonely, prescribe group therapy with strangers. Makes sense! Good job world!
Speaking of misplaced priorities, here is a question. There are 2 couples. In the first one, both love each other. One day the husband, in a moment of weakness, has sex with a friend during a party. He still loves his wife and will always do. The 2nd couple have come to a point where the husband is indifferent to his wife. He has stopped caring for her.
Which husband will evoke a stronger emotional response from the wife and the society? But which wife will be unhappier over time? The instinctive answer to the two questions is different, isn’t it? We have been brainwashed over generations to develop those instincts. The first case is a taboo, a cause of shame and divorce whereas the 2nd is just ‘Oh that happens. You just have to deal with it’.
To illustrate this further, lets take marriage out of the equation. At the end of the day, a couple are supposed to be good friends. So, what should I be more afraid of — my best friend getting angry at me for something or my best friend being indifferent to me? I bet the instinctive answer here is the right one for most of you.
I was watching this great TED talk the other day where the speaker said something, which, to me is so profound in today’s times. What he said was that often in today’s times, when someone is down, we say to them — ‘Go out. Just be you, be yourself’. Whereas actually what we should be telling people is ‘DON’T BE YOU. Be us, be we, be part of a group.’
Having said this, there is no generic solution. Every lock has a specific key. For some, talking to a specific type of people in a specific situation makes them less lonely. For some others, for a specific problem, there is that one person they would talk to rather than everyone else. It’s not about having keys; it’s about having the right key for that person for that specific situation. The typical ‘If I were you’ anecdote doesn’t work anymore than someone being able to force a lock to adapt to another key. A lot of the times, we benchmark people against the ‘standard’ and treat people as if to shoehorn them into the standard. And the standard is — ‘You cant think like this. It is wrong! You have to be strong. You should look for positives. A lot of people face such problems, and they deal with it themselves. They do so by doing X, Y & Z. So why can’t you.’ And similar variations of ‘you need to be strong, do it on your own’ coupled with ‘You should follow the social conventions i.e. the standard’. The thing is, there is no ‘standard’, everyone is different. The only way out is to be able to find the right key, get it and use it. If someone has lost hope, we need to realize that either they haven’t found the right key yet OR are unable to get it OR are unable to use it. The only help that would work is for someone to put the effort in figuring out which of the ‘find, get and use’ is or are the problem and help them with it.
In emphasising the ‘I’, the importance of ‘We & Us’ has been side-lined. We have marketed the merits of ‘doing it alone’ to such a degree, created these social norms, conventions, and standards with such disregard for basic human psychology, that we have the collective willpower of the world working towards the anti-tribe mentality. As a result, a lot of us are either getting sucked in or are unknowingly but actively contributing towards someone else getting sucked into a dark hole from which it is difficult to come out of.
Depression is the most evolving, the biggest and the most inclusive club ever and its neatest trick is that everyone in it thinks that they are alone. Isn’t that clever? But here is a question. Haven’t we, by consciously training our minds that isolation is progress, made it cleverer that it actually is? As per the World Health Organisation, at least 5% in the world, which is greater than 390 million people, suffer from depression. And that’s only the people who admit their mental state. Think about that for a second. More than 390 million people admittedly think, on more occasions than what’s normal, that they would rather die than live. That’s almost 8 times the number of people who died in WW II and that’s just people who are open about it!
Disclaimer: Some of the points have been taken from Ted Talks and studies I have seen in the past. I remember the points from memory but not the title required to search for the videos/links. That’s why I haven’t been able to credit those authors while writing this. No disrespect intended.
