Hello Friend, long time no see, I know I know I missed you too. for me it feels like it been a long time since I wrote anything I’ve been busy avoiding my responsibilities and as always not doing what I have to do.
Today I’m talking about something that seems very personal, but it’s kind of all I’m thinking about lately (and by lately I mean the past few years). It might be surprising to people who “know” me that something like this consumes a big proportion of my mind.
Between all feelings, I think that loneliness is the most felt emotion in my life. since I can remember I’ve always felt like an outcast, I had to pretend to fit in and somehow I was good at it (pretending) so good in fact sometimes I even fool myself and the line gets blurry between my true self and the image I have to maintain in order to drive away my feeling of alienation. This actually made things worse because at the cost of having friends I started to lose my identity This may sound strange, but many times I can’t truly decide if my judgment of things and people is my own or it’s just shaped by the opinions of those who I desperately wanted thier approval. maybe that’s why I’m a liverpool fan becuase of thier “You’ll Never Walk Alone” motto I’ve always starved for a sense of belonging to something.
As I’ve progressed in life and started to know more people I started to develop some narratives about my self one to each group of “friends” family members and relatives. I have to stay in character every day all the time and change between them as needed, it hurts it’s mentally exhausting, but being alone is sometimes more painful than being hurt or at least that how I justified it to myself, but now I don’t think that it has to be. Loneliness is like color blindness but for feelings I can’t be truly happy angry or even sad everything is just a pale version of it self. I always wonder if everyone or at least a lot of people do this that’s why I’ve always questioned the genuintiy of any feelings toward me.
“Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egoistical selves.” Sōseki, ‘Kokoro’
A misconception about loneliness is that people sometimes tend to think that loneliness is cuased by family, friends or colleagues but I think loneliness is eternal feeling I think even people in happy relationships and those who have a loving family can still feel very lonely. Sometimes people don’t even acknowledge it, but there’s like an iceberg of loneliness to each of us we seek to be understood, like deeply understood, Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world. But it’s hard to communicate what we truly feel. I strongly believe that no matter how good we know someone and no matter how close we get to them we can’t in our final judgment of that person say we know them 100% even if they wanted to tell us, even if they wanted us to know. There’s always so much to people that you can’t know or comprehend. That’s why I started to take things less personally lately I don’t blame people I don’t hold grudges for someone. But unfortunately more likely than not my understanding for people decisions get confused for a lack of care about them. The way I think about it is that I’m doing people a favor by cutting them off saving them the troubles of dealing with someone who doesn’t even know who he truly is.
“ But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.” haruki murakami - wind-up bird chronicles
As someone who’s interested in A.I I wonder if in the future we would be able to create an A.I that’s so good it’s indistinguishable from human. Think of it as a highly sophisticated conversional chat bot where you can choose the theme of the conversation you want to have (or it can determine that automatically) and then generate exactly the perfect conversation for you (does this makes you think about the movie “HER” ?) and think this is achievable but the problem is that humans crave this things from other humans. Also one thing that this kind of A.I application will never be good at is creating a shared experience that what makes us connect with other people more than anything overcoming problems and enjoying happy moments.
Although the feeling loneliness is pretty messed up, still i owe a lot of good things that happened to me to it. If didn’t have the time that was available because my introverted nature I wouldn’t have known half of what I know now. It’s also helps you to understand yourself (and therefore others) better and reflect on your life decisions as long as you don’t drift away too much to the dark places your mind can go.
“The yardstick for a human being is: how long and to what degree he can bear to be alone, devoid of understanding with others. A man who could bear being alone during a whole life-time, and alone in decisions of eternal significance, is farthest removed from the infant and the society-person who represent the animal definition of a human being.” soren kierkegaard
Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.