Two books reviewed by Andrew Stark in the Wall Street Journal doesn’t a trend make, but perhaps there’s a wider cultural shift to communities-based approaches to wellness. As much as I dislike Malcolm Gladwell, for example, his book Outliers makes the (obvious) point that successful people aren’t self made, they’re a product of circumstance, culture and community. Remembering the social and cultural contexts in which “success” is derived can “lift all boats” in Gladwell’s view.
Obama campaigned on hope and change. But the role of the family was a big part of his world view: turn off the TV, communicate with your kids, be responsible. He’s also a big believer in the Nudge theory of libertarian paternalism: the idea that government should not REMOVE choice but should architect choice so that it nudges you in the right direction.
Assessing Loneliness
The books that Stark reviews in the Wall Street Journal, try to place the idea of loneliness in context, first reminding us that we don’t need to be alone to feel lonely:
“As we all know, a sense that one is isolated from the rest of humanity can descend at all sorts of times — not only on a bleak street at dawn, or in an out-of-town hotel room or during the kind of “solitary restaurant dinner” that F. Scott Fitzgerald saw as the epitome of “haunting loneliness.” The sense of loneliness can come upon us even at a raucous office party or a family dinner by a crackling fire or amid jostling crowds of bargain-hunting Christmas shoppers.”
The books argue that conquering loneliness would have public health benefits, that “among other things…a concerted attack on loneliness would improve public health as well as individual happiness.”
Loneliness, they demonstrate, “is actually associated with a raft of social pathologies: everything from addiction, depression and uncontrollable anger to impaired cardiovascular functioning and damage to the brain’s “executive control” center. Studies even suggest that a rejection by humans “can increase the tendency to anthropomorphize one’s pet.”
Now, this being the Wall Street Journal and all, their solutions don’t hold a lot of water with Stark. Apparently, the recommendation that “everything from saying “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” to the grocer and taking therapy to prevent negative thoughts to finding human connection on the Internet” is a cure that may be worse than the disease.
The Web as a Solution
What intrigued me was that the books argue that social media, including Second Life specifically, might be solutions to loneliness. Stark takes exception of course.
But first, the books argue that we all need three types of human connection to cure loneliness:
“With intimate or romantic partners, with close friends and with our “collectivity” — the community or nation as a whole. A failure on any one of these fronts is what produces loneliness.”
And I suppose my reaction was that there are a wide range of reasons that these things can be inaccessible: a sense of alienation from our “given” communities (say, being gay in a small town); the inability to find others who share similar interests or passions; or other more tangible issues of accessibility.
And doesn’t online media allow us, in some ways, to supplement our atomic connections, our sense of community, or to provide what maybe isn’t possible in the first place?
The reviewer argues that there are as many cons as pros, and I don’t entirely disagree:
“Think of YouTube. You may seek a connection with the “community” through your latest clever posting, but it may also attract the attention of the annoying “best friend forever” you hoped you’d left behind at your last job, not to mention the long-ago college amour who has built a shrine to you next to the computer monitor.”
But this doesn’t speak so much to whether youTube is a solution to loneliness, it speaks to wider issues of identity, our digital portfolios, and anonymity: and the solutions and concepts around these things are, indeed, some of the most challenging issues of our times. But just because they haven’t been solved doesn’t mean that the solution doesn’t work, it just means it has some kinks to iron out.
Second Life as a Cure for Loneliness
Stark writes:
“Even on “Second Life,” the virtual world in which participants assume the guise of onscreen cartoonish characters — and which Messrs. Cacioppo and Patrick endorse as a possible source of connection — one cannot act out intimate fantasies with one’s virtual partner without chancing that other virtual friends will saunter by and take a peek. Or that a real-life spouse will discover what’s going on and file for divorce, as happened to a British couple earlier this year, according to recent reports about the virtually faithless David Pollard and his corporeal wife, Amy Taylor.”
Stark takes the cheap way out. The notion that there’s a lack of privacy in Second Life barely holds water: I can think of very few platforms where the notion of anonymity is so furiously protected, where there is more pressure to uphold and respect anonymity and privacy.
Even IF your virtual friends sauntered by for a peek – how many times would they really CARE? Sure, there’s cheating and emo and jealous virtual spouses, but first, this ignores the fact that primarily people don’t CARE; second, anonymity is nearly sacrosanct (it’s written into the TOS after all); and third, it focuses on ROMANTIC intimacy.
It strikes me that Second Life is not just about sex and dating. It can work on all three levels in which loneliness can arise: it allows intimacy if you choose that, but more importantly it allows you to enter a community, to create close friendships with people that share your passions, and to join a collectivity that you may not otherwise have access to in the actual world.
Second Life as Story
I’ve written before about Second Life as a Story Box, and quoted Kevin Kelly:
A major theme of this present century will be the pursuit of our collective identity. We are on a search for who we are. What does it mean to be a human? Can there be more than one kind of human? In fact, what exactly is a human?
We get to play with answers to these questions online. In Second Life, or in chat rooms, we can chose who we want to be, our gender, our genetics, even our species. Technologies gives us the means to switch genders, inhabit new forms, modify our own bodies.
Thus, perhaps, virtual worlds go beyond notions of extending the cultural and social spaces in which we live – as places where we create friendships and form intimacies. They may in fact be testing grounds for new definitions of identity in an era in which both our collective and individual notions of community and self are changing.
Thomas Dumm’s book, Loneliness as a Way of Life, reminds us that our language is often inadequate to the task of describing loneliness. But through language we find common ground, says Stark:
“The greatest writers may have shown how language itself is inadequate to the experience of loneliness. But we have written our experience of loneliness deeply into the language. That too, though, goes to underscore the point that Mr. Dumm’s honest book makes: While the “lonely self will always be with us,” we can at least come together in search of imaginative ways of expressing that loneliness. We can “write and read to tell each other how we are to be lonely together.”"
Virtual worlds are perhaps in addition a new form of ‘language’. They are not only have a place in which we can forge bonds that can help overcome our feelings of being alone, but can find new forms for describing loneliness which, I’d propose, can not be entirely escaped, which is part of the human condition.
Virtual worlds are another response to our human condition. As I said in relation to Second Life as a Story Box:
But what strikes me is that these questions really aren’t so new – that in our rush to question the technology and its implications, we forget that we’ve been gathered around the camp fire before, and that we used to believe in magic, and we used to know what it was like to wonder whether we were appeasing or angering the ancient spirits, and that it was only through stories that we could craft our feeble response on those dark nights.
In his Massey Lecture, Alberto Manguel reminds us that in Anglo-Saxon the word for poet was maker (and what is Second Life if not a community of ‘makers’?), and that:
Makers shape things into being, granting them their intrinsic identity. Still in a corner of their workshops and yet drifting with the currents of the rest of humanity, makers reflect back the world in its constant ruptures and changes, and mirror themselves in the unstable shapes of our societies, becoming what the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario called “celestial lightning rods” by asking over and over again “Who are we?” and by offering the ghosts of an answer in the words of the question itself.
The world in which we live, whether the atomic or the virtual, is constructed as much from how we imagine it and the stories we can tell of being in it as a destination or a refuge or a home. The stories we tell are what give us the powerful protections and bonds, our silent spaces within which we feel alone, or our communal tales in which we feel our connections beyond ourselves.
Manguel beckons us with stories which, he says “can offer consolation for suffering and words to name our experience. Stories can tell us who we are and what are these hourglasses through which we sift, and suggest ways of imagining a future that, without calling for comfortable happy endings, may offer us ways of remaining alive, together, on this much-abused earth.”
Virtual worlds may not be the cure for loneliness, but in them we can share a space in which our imaginary tales can offer us the outlet for reminding us that we are, indeed, truly human.
Interesting subject, thanks for posting this.
For me, Second Life is most useful for cultivating a lot of “thin” relationships with several people, similar to online social networks in general. You can quickly get exposed and connected to lots of people around a shared interest or passion.
But for deeper connections to people, I find Second Life to be mostly unsatisfying. I’ve certainly become good friends with people that I have met through SL, but this has been spurred by offline real world interactions over time, not just in-world.
I find that when I am feeling lonely, that being in Second Life can make me feel worse, not better. YMMV.
Rikomatic – I think that’s a common experience. I often wonder whether it has to do with the richness of the interactions, or is a product of ‘geography’. Not to bring up ‘empty sim syndrome’ but one of the things I find is that the sensation of looking at the wonderful work of the artists and builders in world can also be an experience in loneliness.
I’m actually proposing, I suppose, two things: one, that virtual worlds are a platform on which you can form community, often geared towards specific tasks or functions, events, or settings. Warcraft, even, and guild raids, say. Or in-world dances, music shows, events. And second, that it can be a site of expression which helps to give us the tools for articulating our sense of self and place.
Hi Dusan, great post! From my view, there are several ways one might approach loneliness.
First, is to choose NOT to do anything about one’s loneliness, or rather to accept it, even if momentary. Inside that acceptance it can be a cause to its ending. Or another way of putting it, is to just BE with it, which may eventually reveal the source of ‘it’. Albeit, intimately, in friendships or collectively.
Furthermore, having to find a reason for it is not necessary. To be what you aren’t is to be what you wish. In other words, to not be lonely means to do things that are a cause to others not being lonely. For it’s when we step outside ourselves we become or enter into the collective. After all we are one; essentially, our ego gets in the way of this sense. Offering up ourselves to others brings it back, the trick is to do it in such a way as to not have any expectation of its return.
Moreover, on the subject of artists, and to address your last comment on your post; You are obviously very perceptive. Maybe more than you realize, but I wholeheartedly agree with your comment
“I’m actually proposing, I suppose, two things: one, that virtual worlds are a platform on which you can form community, often geared towards specific tasks or functions, events, or settings. Warcraft, even, and guild raids, say. Or in-world dances, music shows, events. And second, that it can be a site of expression which helps to give us the tools for articulating our sense of self and place.”
To fishtail on this, and take it perhaps deeper, one can relate it to our soul. From an artists perspective, mostly unconscious, and by nature, a true expression of creativity doesn’t follow analysis of who we are or whatever. What does or is a primary cause to expressing something artistically, is almost always from the point of view of suffering. Some refer to this as “A Dark Night of the Soul” (Thomas Moore’s book “Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life’s Ordeals) is probably my personal second best book I’ve ever read. In it he relates how even some artists choose to stay inside that suffering, whether it be loneliness or whatever. The point is, an artist wants to be recognized for his/her ability to express what we/they have felt or are feeling. It’s inside this need of recognition, where being social, and relating to others, that has the artist step out of their norm. This is all well and good, and no matter what our profession in life is, everything is a choice in this respect. Our plights in life might seem unfair, not our fault..etc., etc.. But, they happen, and can send us down deep into what feels dark, alone, even depressing or even hopeless.
What I’ve discovered, inside of Second Life, is the commonality of our ordeals in RL. This has helped me understand that I’m not alone; not to confuse this with loneliness. Even when there are many of us in SL that choose, request, disallow a relationship of RL into SL; this is fine from an artistic point of view, but is ultimately impossible. We have to function in RL, to give us the wherewithal to even be in SL. I could go on and on about this, but I don’t want my comments to take on a full post.
Anyway, again great post! I’d like someday to participate in a conversation between you, AM Radio, LightWaves, Eshi Otawara, Bettina Tizzy, Pavig Lok, Vint Falken and some others, and share our varying perspectives on this matter. In closing, I would say we do our best, creatively, when we are alone, and loneliness is only one factor that “might” be a source of that inspiration.
Gary: What an amazing discussion that would be. You’ve mentioned people who really do capture many of those feelings through their art. I’d add Bryn Oh, her immersive works tell stories that touch on so many of these themes of loneliness, love, sociality, and what it means to be human. Of course, I also think that nearly everyone on the Grid would have something useful to add.
In the first part of your comment you’ve touched on something that I think is really critical and deserves a novel let alone a blog post. The concept of acceptance or the almost Buddhist concept of living ‘in’ loneliness in order to simply be…and second, the idea of getting out of the way of our ego, ‘give and ye shall receive’. But regardless, what’s important about it, and why artists are my heroes, is that I resist the temptation to ‘cure’ what is part of our humanity.
A few of my own touch points, since you mention Moore, include Rollo May’s the Courage to Create and Matthew Fox’s Creativity.
And finally I’ll sign off for now with a favorite poem:
We must become ignorant
Of all we’ve been taught,
And be, instead, bewildered.
Run from what’s profitable and comfortable
If you drink those liqueurs, you’ll spill
The spring waters of your real life.
Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.
I have tried prudent planning
Long enough, from now
On, I’ll live mad.
- Rumi
OK, this is the sort of thing that, as an academic researcher, really burns me. To quote the most annoying part of the review:
OK, so here are some researchers who go to pains to collect empirical evidence convincing them that those who have strong connections of one type have strong connections of another type.
The reviewer’s counterargument? Anecdotes that support his own ideology. And from fiction, no less!
Arrrrgggghh!
@ Dusan and all…I want to say Merry Christmas, I want say just Merry, I want to say many things, to which and back at you, Dusan. While sharing with the rest, here is a gift to you, perhaps to help, even if for a moment (a poem I wrote called “Reaching For Sunlight”)
As long as I have cognition,
my tears will flow
of the sorrow, and the missing
inside her soul.
The bird will sing
as long as she will listen,
even when she’s not there,
even as the soft water glistens.
Singing of love, beckoning for love;
a tree where you may rest.
You will see the view;
please bring your nest
Let go your grasp,
spread your wings and fall;
flying will be natural,
as love cannot thrall.
Gary: And Merry back indeed.
I’m particularly struck by the line “You will see the view; please bring your nest”.
Thank you for your poem. I’m glad we can gather here and ignore the shaky logic of the reviewer (as Beyers points out) and remember that we’re on a journey that he might never be able to fully grasp…and which I hope I never can, because I’m less interested in the destination than the journey.
This is a great post Dusan. I would maybe add something of my own SL experience caring after a large international community. While it is really a cure for loneliness, Second Life also plays a role of smooth social therapy, for manys. If you are a total autist in real life, and that you start to engage every day with people in SL, there is a moment where it becomes like a Pavlovian attitude to start to say Hello to your neighbors…. and this is the smallest effect that SL can achieve withouth really looking for it… it just comes out of this dark, atomic, ultra-modern solitude… I really enjoy reading your blog.. and hope more french people would speak english to enjoy it too…