Mukkamala Sriram
Do you see how hyper-connected you are? You can pick up a phone in India, and talk to a professor in London on call, talk to your parents in India, join in research projects with your friends in Singapore, and catch up with people all over the world even before you can sit down for dinner. I doubt if human race has ever been as connected as we are today.
However, despite being so highly connected, we are lonelier than ever. This is what I call the Loneliness Paradox: While we have more connectivity at our disposal, people in our own community are alone, unseen, unheard, and unloved.
What we seem to be failing to see is that we have confused connectivity with connection. The two are fundamentally different things: connectivity is the ability to be able to talk to someone, while connection is the ability to be seen, understood and cared for by another person.
Although communications have certainly exploded in terms of their breadth with the introduction of the Internet, human connection, on the other hand, has remained stationary. Throughout most of human history, it was the community that gave each of us an anchor, a sense of belonging. We knew each and every one of the people around us, we understood them because of their physical closeness and from everyday interactions with them. Our communities gave us belonging, identity and a purpose to exist.
However, as globalization, mobility and urbanization expanded, we began to see the belonging and the communal spirit slowly disappear because we had favoured individualism over collectivism, hence distancing us from our roots and leaving us adrift in the middle of the world, lost.
With this began the Internet, promising connectivity, and delivering it to us in truckloads. The internet successfully kept us away from our family and friends, yet it provided us with a false sense of togetherness with people across the globe and helped us to find friends with common interests.
Ironically, however, the actual problem of the internet remains its core function, which is to provide connection. We often present ourselves in front of the camera through the medium of internet which have been filtered to such an extent so as to bring out our perfect persona; consequently we are constantly bombarded with an unrealistic image, this image makes us question our own imperfections, our own failures to be ‘like’ the persona portrayed by each one of us.
There is an ability to acquire millions of followers on social media and yet have not a single person on whom you can rely in times of an emergency; the Internet facilitates the spanning of a huge distance, but it results in the isolation of the intimate distance: we can have a never-ending conversation on the internet with a person for hours, but still lack somebody who can be trusted, or confided in, or perhaps even somebody to be needed by. We are fully connected and yet do not possess desirable connections.
The loneliness that grips an individual is not based on caste, creed, culture, class or even generation; this paradox can be seen in Mumbai, New York or London as well as in Chinese villages and all over the globe. In some western societies, this idea is even considered a failure as individuality, output and initiative are considered superior to all other virtues. The loneliness you feel is the feeling of being nowhere; you could be surrounded by millions of people yet utterly alone in your spirit, and on the other hand, you could feel utter togetherness with the slightest unknown if that individual ‘sees’ you for who you are. The number or the quantity of people you are surrounded with does not make a difference.
Technology avoidance or romanticizing the past cannot tackle this growing epidemic of loneliness; technology is only a tool and its functionality is dictated by those who operate them. What we actually need is more than just connectivity; we need a society; rather we do not need merely to be connected, we need to be intimately connected; we need to know other people and for them to know us. We need the workplace to provide more community, and communities to provide more homespun closeness.
Theodore Roosevelt aptly says, “The only way to help the lonely people over the obstacle is by cultivating stronger communal support and understanding.” We need individuals who know how to do more than just transact, how to help other people feel seen for what they are. Thus, the Loneliness Paradox in the 21st Century is discovering ways as we are increasingly becoming hyper-connected to increase belonging; success must no longer be defined by how well-connected we are, but whether we ‘see’ each other.
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