Time To Unlearn Obstructive Vestiges Of
Obsolete Wired Notion About Loneliness
We have in our popular cultures, a rather stupid situation. Most of us now know and believe in evolutionary theory of human existence on Earth. We always talk about how things are hard-wired and how, things are there in our brains, about which we cannot help much. It is rather fashionable and also considered an intellectual exercise to say that this is so visceral and that is not. Still, many of us do not accept the fact that modern life-living realism has almost stopped the very natural process of evolution and in modern times, what we see at best is the vestiges of the crumbled empire of evolution.
Therefore, the contemporary human civilization and cultures have one huge task to talk about and take in our hands. That is, we now have to ascertain very objectively as what evolutionary traits, we had and which were once of great or some good use and utility, now needs to be unlearnt and pruned in a smart way. We have ourselves stopped the natural stream of evolution way back and therefore, we surely carry a huge burden of decrepit and degenerated traits of that outdated and even dead evolution.
We need to understand this. Scientists believe that loneliness is also a wired response of body-mind mechanism, which seems like a trait, we developed during long years of evolution. Scientific studies have accepted that in some species, the male may live in isolation of the group, but most species live in large groups as it suits their survival and living needs. Human species have larger needs to live in tribal groups as human offspring have such long period of body-mind maturity that it needs the nurturance of large number of families, apart from its immediate one. Humans have the largest Social Animal Needs (SAN).
That is why, we all are wired to feel safe, sane and happy in social environments, where high levels of nurturance and interdependence is a very positive element. Scientists define loneliness as a body-mind response, indicating us to move into the collectivity, the larger family, friends, peer groups and society in general. We all are somehow, wired to feel lonely and as evolution ensures; emotion of loneliness is as good a friend for we all as is the core emotion of humanity called fear. Scientists term fear as humanity’s first intelligence. If we didn’t have emotion of fear, we would have poor survival chances.
Similarly, loneliness is also an intelligence, which is wired in our brains. We all are born with this intelligence of fear as well as loneliness. However, as since long, we have changed the nature and its raw forms in such lateral and vertical ways that we do not need to accept this raw emotion of fear, as evolution has bestowed on us. We do not fear things, the way our ancestors needed to, thousands of years back. We now have the technology for assured safety and security. We fly jets and walk the space on a space shuttle. We have simply gone much beyond fear, as our first intelligence could decide our horizon.
However, we still have this emotion of fear and it still helps us in some good way. But, we have learnt to use this energy of fear and this valuable emotion of fear for our larger wellness and excellence. But, the fact remains that till date, even when we have greatly overcome the raw elements of fear in our daily life-living experiences, there are hundreds of phobias humanity still grapples with. Millions of people all over the globe are badly affected by phobias. And, the fact remains that modern living adds loads of more phobias, which we were not even aware of a few hundred years back.
Similar is the situation with this wired intelligence of loneliness. We live in a world, which seldom allows us this precious liberty of being alone. We live in such crowded cities. Everywhere, there are many times more people than necessary. We are far more connected in so many ways. Distance and time have been bridged successfully. However, as the researchers say, people tend to be lonelier even in crowded world and the same person, who happens to be the centre of all intimacies and wellness becomes the trigger of loneliness.
The difference, which we all need to understand, is – evolution wanted us to live in communities and live a life of interdependence with each other not because being in the group or tribe had any goodness. The virtue of community living was in the nurturance and mutuality, which human kids needed for their better survival. We still live in communities; we still are part of societies, which are much larger than societies, when evolution wired this emotion of loneliness in us.
However, contemporary societies are no more the same nurturing and empathetic group, which it used to be. Rather, we have a modern society, which is calamitously competitive, where this race of one-up-manship and exclusivity has withered all the nurturance and mutuality sentiments. We live in modern cultures, where individualistic pursuits, attainments, possessions and consumptions have unleashed such competitive feelings, which make us get more pain than pleasure, more hurts than happiness when we are in collective spaces.
This celebrity culture has shattered the nurturance element of societies. In a society, where 95 percent resources are with only 5 percent people, how can average people be in happy nurturance and mutuality feelings? This five percent of celebrities have created a societal space for the rest of 95 percent, which is calamitously competitive for very survival. In such a society, how can one get the wellness emotions, which is required for being nurtured!
That is why in contemporary clutter culture, we are surely not requiring social and cultural connects for the type of nurturance and mutuality, for which evolution designed the emotion of loneliness in all of us. This emotion is therefore not as useful, rather a huge burden and we have to unlearn that. Loneliness and its primeval utility to drive us into societal and cultural connect is an obsolete mental wiring. It is the vestiges of the dead evolution.
We need to redesign and reshape this emotion as per our contemporary needs, which is just the opposite of what old evolution wanted. We are in modern age, the victims of collectivity. We need more nurturance and mutuality but the societal space is not giving these to us. Rather, it is taking them away from us. Therefore, we have to reverse things. We have to accept that we are somehow better off, when we are lonely and in exclusive audience with ourselves. Quality leisure time for ourselves, this golden solitude for us is now far more nurturing thing for us. This new realism tells us to accept the fact that we as individual are the prime source of our own nurturance and empathies. If we have them, we are better placed to survive in the collective space, which is devoid of the same.
It is, therefore, very evident that like fear, loneliness is also our great asset, a facility of crucial intelligence, yet, they stand as largest crippling phenomena in contemporary cultures. Looks like; we are at a stage of civilization, where we have grossly mismanaged our instincts and turned them into our predators, which were once placed as our key survival intelligence. This somehow, points to the fact that in some way or the other, loneliness is essentially an individual mismanagement of body-mind poise, which is aggravated by a clutter culture, to which contemporary life-living is being subjected. That is probably why scientists say, races and species, which become intelligent, become extinct as often, intelligence is suicidal. We are not elaborating this hypothesis here but it is for all of us to understand.
We have a big task at hand. We understand and accept that evolution is no more the guiding principle of our action and behaviour. We are all well past evolutionary essentials and still carrying many obsolete and even obstructive traits and behaviour patterns of old world. We all need to unlearn such obstructive vestiges and remnants of past.
Loneliness was genetically wired to our consciousness and it had its utility and worth in the past. Loneliness in the past served us a warning signal, as part of the evolutionary simple plan of fight or flight. Our survival depended on collective living in the past but things have changed. We live in a different world with different set of challenges, in which survival has different meaning and survival is no more the core question. The core question is wellness and sanity.
The core question of survival has taken different shades and it is now expressed in terms of wellness and poise of purpose. That is why we too have to unlearn many of our obsolete perspectives. We are still in our obsolete perspectives and that is why these crippling perspectives are in us. We need a new consciousness, which has a new cognition strategy that puts in right and contemporary causality for our larger wellness and personal excellence.
At the very outset, we have to unlearn that loneliness is a dysfunction. We need to unlearn the obsolete perspective that loneliness is a flight sign of mind, urging us to fall back to the crowd of collectivity. We have to accept that loneliness is not the correct wired response of the old brain in contemporary times. This cognition and causality of archaic world has to be unlearned.
The new learning is that loneliness is a conscious choice for self empowerment, not a wired optionlessness. Loneliness is a positive state of mind consciousness, which is required very urgently in contemporary clutter and claustrophobic cultures, to focus on empowered individualistic energies, for overall life-living wellness and personal excellence.
In contemporary world, liberalism and consumerism has created a very powerful individual, who is very competitive and demanding, but he or she has landed in a drift and flux. The raw and core question of survival has been replaced by this brutal competitiveness to be successful, be a celebrity, be happy always, be thrilled all the time and be in the drowning ocean of non-stop instant self-gratification in all times. This cultural and populist benchmark of being successful has now become the new primary drive of survival. This makes people live a life of drift and flux.
This dualism is killing people, mentally and intellectually. There is this mad cultural brouhaha about empowered and endowed individualism and this on the other hand makes individuals a slave of collective chaos, conflict and confusion. We as individuals are no more the victim of our own making. We are victims of the making of a clutter culture, where inappropriate benchmarks of successes, self-worth, utility and righteousness are splitting the individual personality.
We live in times, where cultures and societies are the prime source of disconnect and alienation. It is time for individuals to unlearn this populist perception of true individual and his or her right empowerment.
We need to unlearn the wrong hypotheses about individualism and self. We need to sit focused in our own self to question and re-question the populist hypotheses of successes, self-worth and happiness. We require to challenge the populist and clutter-culture hypotheses of attainments and possessions. We must ask to ourselves, why it is important to be happy all the time? Isn’t grief a realism; an empowering thing too?
We should focus on our deep consciousness and ask the crucial question – why should I not be lonely and feel empowered and be in the pool of wellness and excellence, rather than being in the drift and flux of inappropriate collective benchmarks of success and righteousness?
It has to be accepted that only a higher consciousness of a lonely and focused person, who has this facility of quality leisure for self, who can understand and accept this simple realism that if a hypothesis is wrong, the theory based on such hypothesis can never be right. Populist sense of both loneliness and contemporary benchmarks of successes are based on a wrong hypothesis of individualism and empowerment. This individualism in holistic sense is surely very empowering. However, we have the trouble of accepting the partial and wrong perception of individualism, ingrained in our minds by clutter culture, mass media and celebrity worldview. That is why all those populist theories based on this wrong and inappropriate hypothesis can never be right. We need to understand it in detail.
To understand this dualism of contemporary culture, we need to test the validity of this hypothesis-theory connection by picking up something, which is humanity’s most misunderstood and destructive natural drive. Yes, we are talking about sex and how this entire populist perception about the utility and worth of sex in contemporary clutter culture is flawed, because of wrong hypothesis.
This shall reveal how, even while evolution has stopped, no more a guiding prudence for us; still, we mindlessly carry forward such obsolete and obstructive drives, which are causing us and the cultures a great distress. This is aimed at arriving to this new realism that loneliness is also such a drive, which is crippling us and we all need to unlearn it. We talk about it in detail in next chapter.
**