Defeating Loneliness

Loneliness is one great human weakness. It sucks out happiness and also hope from our lives, which means we will hardly have the strength to face challenges or dream big. But many of us don’t really try to comprehend it. It’s often accepted that beling lonely when alone is natural and inevitable. But it’s not. Not really. In this article, I’ve tried to understand the causes of loneliness and how we can fight it away.

The Causes:

Most of them are more or less related.

• The feeling of not belonging – Many of us have felt at least once like we don’t belong in some circle of friends. We don’t usually mind it much, unless we want to belong, but just can’t fit in. When we feel like square pegs in round holes, that’s when we get lonely.

• Low popularity among peers – This is highly disturbing for adolescents [I should know] more than for adults. Teenagers just long to be popular, even if it means they just end up losing their uniqueness.

• Fear of the society – There’s something of a little of a sociophobiac in many of us. As for me, I keep thinking for an hour before I comment on a post or decide to strike up a conversation. I’m sure not many are so paranoid, but sometimes we do worry about what others think about us. Such kind of fears make one feel alienated from society.

• Depending on others for emotional needs – When a child depends on its mother for his/her emotional comfort, s/he will be sure to get it. But when they grow up and depend on someone else for dealing with their feelings, it’s possible they’ll find that many people are hardly concerned about their little worries.

• Insecurity – There are times when we are afraid of losing something and most often, these fears belong only to us and there’s no way someone else can feel the same way about our qualms and forebodings.

• Failures or losses – This is rather very frequently observed, because people usually feel depressed during such times. During these times, we tend to think more negatively than usual and it makes us feel completely excluded from the rest of the world. It’s not an easy thing to keep the mind steady when one’s dealing with a loss.

• Not having someone to depend entirely on [someone like a best friend] – I’m pretty sure there are many of us who have longed for someone to simply hold our hands and say, “Everything’s going to be just fine” even when we know it’s not and someone who will look behind our fake smiles and know something’s wrong. But that’s more like a fairy tale for some of us and ‘true friendship’ has become something of a fantasy.

Root Cause:

Read more in Philosophy

« The Dark Side of The Needs of The Many

Censorship »

Many of us start longing for love, friendship, etc. and search for them everywhere we go. But the world doesn’t function that way. “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” There’s another saying that goes somewhat like this: “I went in search of a good friend and found no one. I became a good friend and found so many others.”

We often don’t feel one with the world. One person becomes our entire world and everyone else doesn’t matter. It might look like true love/friendship, but it usually makes the other person slightly disconcerted. We often forget to let the people we love free. Afraid of being alone, we hang on to them so much that they begin to feel suffocated around us. And in the end, we just end up feeling lonely.

What We Need:

1. Independence. The sense of freedom in our hearts
2. Unconditional and selfless love/friendship
3. Belief in the oneness of the world, in unity, in the society and belief in God [seriously, it helps]
4. A dream to inspire us for the future
5. Something worthwhile to do, something we love
6. Acceptance of every one’s existential aloneness
7. Understanding the purpose/meaning of our lives

What Can be Done:

1. Meditation – The belief that there is something incredibly and unfathomably beautiful inside oneself as well as in everyone else is what all meditations are mostly about.
2. Psycho-Analysis – Analyzing one’s own emotions is pretty difficult unless we understand that there is no one who’s good or bad as a whole and that it’s only the qualities in a person that are.
3. Getting Inspired – Reading an inspirational book or posters or quotes can help a lot in times of need.
4. Friendship – Find a friend whom you can call up at 3:00 A.M., someone who will ask how you are and then wait to hear the answer “A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.” ~ Bernard Meltzer. But like the saying goes, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

^_^

_____________________________________________________