The importance of loneliness: Brendan Myers at TEDxGuelphU

I would like to describe a problem that everyone experiences and that everyone knows about, but very few people like to talk about it. It is a very real problem, a very widespread problem, but there is such a social stigma surrounding it that people don't like to talk about it and those who try to talk about it are often accused of being weak, for example, or of not being modern enough, maybe it is a problem that you all know, by the way, the photograph behind me has nothing to do with the problem itself. It's just a beautiful photograph of a field in Germany, but it's also the exact place where I first had this idea in 2004.

What's interesting about this photo is that it was taken in one of the most developed modern industrialized rich countries. countries all over the world, right, modern Germany, but you won't see a single sign of human civilization here except the little hunting post in the corner, and you won't see people either, that tells you something about what my topic is, this is an experience. that you all have had even when you were babies, even when you were very, very small, you first felt it when you were a little baby and your parents put you down in your bed so you could get some sleep. or maybe running some errands you felt it as a child when someone who was you was very close to one of your best friends maybe someone you admired wanted to spend time with someone else instead of you uh you felt When you moved alone, away from the nest of your parents for the first time in your life, you felt it when you went to any kind of public place full of people and you could see all the relationships that other people have with each other. you cannot join or you are not invited to join the experience it is called

loneliness

a very deep very deep experience that we all have

loneliness

is a very, very complicated experience uh it is full of our relationships with ourselves and with others and our relationships with ours mind, heart, body, etc., you can feel very alone even in a very crowded place surrounded by thousands of people like in this photograph I took of a cultural festival in France, there are many trips around the world in my photographs The way you can feel deeply close and connected to someone even when you're like on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic and you're 3,000 km from the nearest human being, you can crave companionship even at the same time you crave solitude.

This thought, as paradoxical as it may seem, is actually also surprisingly common. It appeared, for example, in actor Steven Fry's very brave admission of attempted suicide in 2012. He wrote on his blog that he wants to be left alone, but he does. I don't want to be alone, so it's a complicated experience, it's also a much more widespread experience than most people recognize. In 2006, a study I found in an American study found that a quarter of all the people they surveyed had no friends at all and half of all the people they surveyed had only one person in their life who they could confide in about problems. deepest and most serious of their lives.

The same study also found that about 1/4 of all American households are the most trustworthy. Information about this is from the United States, so that's where I'm using that data: a quarter of all American households surveyed at that time consisted of a single person who was, you know, more than double the isolation rate social 20 years earlier and By the way, in the 1930s, the US census found that only one-tenth of households consisted of a single person. Let's think about this for a minute in light of all the connectivity we have, primarily through Internet technology, we all have things. like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr and all the different mediums where people share information about their lives with each other, we even have the telephone.

I don't know if anyone still uses the phone, but you know that's what the phone is really for. We have many, many new ways of connecting with each other and getting in touch with each other and connecting or something like that. Notice the machine's use of language and the way we talk about our relationships. because of the way we say things like let's hook up or hook up or broke up, we have so many more ways to do it, and yet all the major social indicators show that we're more isolated from each other, not less. Just as interesting, now many people might say that there is an important distinction between loneliness and being alone, they might mean that one is a deeply painful psychological experience, the other is the mere absence of people and that's not so bad afterward. of everything. being happy or unhappy with or without people, that is certainly true, some people may also want to point to social, economic or political explanations for why there is apparently more social isolation in our world now than there has ever been before than we could point to. factors such as increasing population density in major cities, which creates stress for people, or factors such as the increased disparity between rich and poor, which also creates a lot of stress in people's lives, especially now that the poor in developed and developing countries, I know.

Those are strange categories, but I'll live with them for the moment. The poor in those countries can see all the wealth that they are not allowed to have and this also creates a lot of stress in people's lives for various reasons. I can even feel that individualism, the most modern of all the social values ​​we have today, increases the distance that people have from each other, isolates people from each other and why is that so? I am sure that all the social, economic and political explanations are true. I have no doubt that they are true, but I believe that they are not the real explanation.

I'm a philosopher, so I like to see things from a different point of view. I want to see what the explanation is. the nature of the problem at its highest and deepest level and I believe that loneliness is a real problem and that we will not be able to deal with this problem properly until we recognize it as a real problem, see it for what it really is and understand it. uh, what's it like to experience that, it makes sense so far, okay, now many of you might say that there are, uh, there are some obvious ways out, you know, you might say that all you need is love, right, love lifts us up to where We belong, love is something splendid. like something that's written in every pop song ever written and that's why we never have any kind of alternative narrative what to do if you want someone to tell you that you're alone that's somehow your fault because there's everyone else around you and everything What you need to do is fall in love, that can be useful and you will be able to enjoy a wonderful life very close to the person you love and always be happy because you spend every waking moment with that person, but at the end of the day, one of you . falls asleep before the other and sends the other to Solitude for a while, so even that is not an escape and I'm sorry to remind you, but at some point in your future one of you will die before the other as well and By sending the other person in that relationship to Loneliness again on a more permanent basis, some of you might be religious and so you might say that the solution to loneliness is to get closer to God and that is a very plausible solution for many people who happen to be religious. and uh, however, I think even that is not a very good solution, let's imagine that God exists and that God is some of the things that people say about God, they can say that God is an infinite being, for example, around the Middle Ages. people started using mathematical language to describe God, they said things like God is an infinite being, well if that's the case God is probably lonelier than you and here's why think about God's creation, think in all those galaxies and supernovae and black holes and nebulae and things you know, our telescopes can now see objects that are about 37 billion light years away, think about all that wonderful, beautiful universe that we live in.

If you are religious, you might believe that it was created by God. wonderful now let's think about all the empty space between all those objects what is the distance between here and the nearest star besides our sun is the star um Proxima centari is approximately 4.2 light years away you and I can contemplate mathematically rationally This number we can Imagine that distance, if God exists, God probably feels that distance as a pain in his heart, because it is a large amount of mostly empty space, so if you are religious and believe that getting closer to God is the answer to your loneliness No, I'm not.

I'm sorry to tell you that God is lonelier than you because loneliness is not just a social condition, it is not just a political circumstance or an economic agreement, well, it is those things, but it is also an existential condition, it is a way of living. being in the world and since it is a way of being in the world there is nothing you can do about it, there is really no cure for it, there is not even prevention. I know at Ted we usually like more uplifting and optimistic conversations and I just told you that you are inherently alone and there's nothing you can do about it.

That's horrible and no one wants to hear that from Ted, but I'm afraid I think it's probably true and I think unless we face that existential loneliness properly. So, can we start to lead better lives, create better relationships with each other, and find a truly lasting, permanent, and worthwhile life? Let me describe what I think might not exactly be a way out, but rather a way of pushing boundaries. of loneliness so that its strength is not so strong and that our lives can be a little better, by the way, before we get to that, I want to tell you that loneliness is not really the problem, many, many.

Crazy, ridiculous, self-destructive, harmful things we do to avoid loneliness, that's the problem and that's a problem we can solve too and some of those problems are very simple and probably won't hurt anyone. Think of someone when he comes home. and they find themselves alone for a few hours the first thing they do is turn on the television or radio not because they want to listen or watch but because they can't stand the silence of you know people who are like that, many of you may do it yourself and They don't want to admit it, they know that it is relatively harmless, there are other things that people do that could be more destructive to others and to themselves and that they do in order to prevent the experience of loneliness from arising in their mind.

Think about people. who go online to troll, they just create suffering for themselves and others, they create stress, they create, you know, resentments and all kinds of peer pressure. and bullying and that kind of thing, the only attraction or attention they draw to themselves is hostility, but at least they are drawing attention to themselves and that is better than loneliness for many of these people, that is one of the reasons why people do it right, uh, and other things that people do to prevent the experience of loneliness are even more destructive than that and I'm thinking mainly about addictions here, Internet addictions, gambling addictions, shopping, video game addiction, substance abuse, uh. addictions to violence, in fact, addictions of all kinds whose true purpose is to allow your minds to contemplate something other than yourself and your own existence and your own situation here as a human being on Earth at this moment in the history of the universe.

That's where the problem really is, it's in all these destructive things we do to ourselves and others to avoid loneliness. Why don't people want to look at themselves? Why do you want to avoid this experience? Because when you are alone and you only have yourself and your own thoughts in front of you the place you look is inside yourself right, you examine yourself as Socrates would say many people really don't like what they see and will do almost anything have to or avoid having to see themselves as they really are they may be afraid feel fear they may feel anxiety they may feel guilt or shame or they may feel um you know, the pain of unrequited love or the pain of big plans and dreams that broke down, they may feel like you know, reluctantly, resentment, all you know, the kinds of problems that arise when you don't have any stimulus outside of your mind and then you look at yourself and people often don't really like what what he sees and social pressures. excab qualifies that and makes it worse, um advertising for example, which creates anxiety in the minds of many people, but there is also more than that, actually there is also an existential level where if you are alone and you only look at yourself same.

You might suddenly entertain the idea that your life has no meaning, you might entertain the thought that your life has no value and that you will disappear at some point and that no one will miss you, and many people just don't want to face that possibility, You know, it's one of the deepest fears we have, the most unacknowledged and yet the deepest fear people have that their life doesn't really mean anything, no one wants to contemplate that.and that's why they will almost do it. Anything to avoid that experience Now I would like to describe to you what I think we can do about it, it doesn't exactly solve the problem of illness because, as I said, it is an existential condition, it is part of our appraisal of being in the world, so it really doesn't There is nothing you can do about it, but there are things we can do about it.

We can do to push back the boundaries of loneliness and create more meaningful relationships with our world and a more valuable and meaningful life, and this is how I came up with the idea: This is a photograph near a highway in northern Ontario of an ANUK shuk now when I came back to Canada in 2006 people were building a Shooks nuk everywhere, partly because they had just created the new nunet territory and there is a shaken nuk on the flag and Canadians were adopting the ANUK as a new national symbol, it was even the icon. from the Vancouver Winter Games not long ago and for a while I had a government job working with Aboriginal people and someone I was working with explained to me why the Inuit build the inukshuk, what it means to them.

They told you it makes the land less lonely if you've never been in the hierarchy. You know you may not know what to look for. You may see a landscape that looks very empty, very desolate, very arid, just rocky stone fields in the summer fields. of ice in the winter, but if you pass by a place where someone built a shaken ANUK, you know that there have been people here before, now you know that you're not actually passing through a totally empty land, you know. that there are people somewhere, right, what yukook does is that it shows us that there is a sign of human presence somewhere in the world.

It was also explained to me later that there is a code on those ANUK Shooks, right, if the ANUK shook. it's just a pile of rocks that means there's a clean water nearby if it has arms there's a food stash nearby if it also has a head that means there's a human settlement nearby too by the way if you're a tourist in the north that's why They ask you not to build a Nook Shooks suitable for those who have to survive up there the tourist built a Nook Shooks to mislead people when they need it do you know the real signs to survive that apart from the existential part that I want to draw attention to However , it's the fact that this is a way of showing that this is an inhabited world, that there are people out there and whatever else the symbol may mean, whatever other codes involved about the location of food stamps and other supplies, what does it mean? this symbol tells you I am here the basic statement that was enacted by the person who built this Monument the statement is I am here and then I started to wonder Maybe This is what really tells us everything we build about what a monument like this that we really don't I know what it is, I photographed it on the way here and no, I'm just joking, but I mean it's also a practical building, right, it's a radio and television transmission tower. that was the reason it was built in the first place, but it is also a sign of human presence.

It also says anything else, it also says I'm here, there are people here, that's not all we do, we also say anything else. I could say, isn't it also saying I'm here? The best way to experience this is to listen to music composed and performed in a language you don't understand. That's okay, because you won't know what's being said. I don't know if it's a story about great heroic deeds done in the past or if it's a story about a heartbreaking relationship that ended or if it's a story about something funny that happened on the way to the Forum, it could be something like that. but it's also anything else, it's someone somewhere saying I'm here and what this does is push the boundaries of loneliness a little bit back.

In fact, even now there are things that we have built. You could call them monuments, I guess, but things that we've built whose purpose is utilitarian in a way is to collect information for us so that we can learn more about the world and then we can use science to be more inspired about the world and also use technology to apply what we've learned to market products and things like that, but it also makes a statement about who we are, that we're here, it makes a statement about our human presence in the world and it's sending that message to we don't know.

Who am I thinking of? About the message that was placed on this Monument. I had a hard time photographing this by the way, it was one of the most expensive photographs. No, I'm just kidding, this is Wikipedia, it's a creative um. Image from Commons, but on the Voyager space probe there is a gold plate and also a gold disk that has information about the fact that we are here, the mere fact that we are here is a much deeper kind of message than what we think. we could. At first I realize and it says something about who we are, we are also a society that is able to build this well and has this technology and has this interest in science and this kind of curiosity, it tells us that we are here and that this is what we are, there is also a third segment of this message, this Revelation.

He also says: is there anyone else out there? That's why we have a plaque that tells us that you know the universe, whoever can discover it, something about the location of our planet in this galaxy and something about who we are, there are greetings recorded in 50 languages, for example, and songs in a variety of languages ​​and styles. He also asks anyone out there to hear the question: Is there anyone else out there? What all these same monuments I was describing also ask the same thing with the Neolithic stone monuments. The same with the monuments in the cemetery.

The CN tower. Anything we build not only for its utilitarian purpose but also for its statement of presence. the world asks if there is anyone else out there, someone somewhere could answer and say yes, I am out there too, there is more than you in the world, there is also me and when people come together and can create a new statement between them, change the look from I am here to we are here, this I think is the basis of art, music, theater and architecture and all these things. I believe it is also the basis of strong interpersonal relationships, as well as healthy, meaningful, valuable and enriching human relationships.

Relationships with each other, with each other individually and in groups with our environment, with anyone else who may be out there and who may one day discover the space probe, is what we build that asks the question: is there anyone else out there? and if someone answers and says yes, then with that person you have the opportunity to create, we are here, even me, standing here on the stage, talking to all of you, whatever else I may be saying, I am also saying that I am here , right, and you all are just showing it too. above also saying with your presence I am here and this is what I am and if there is someone else out there maybe one day someone will say yes and then you will be able to meet that person, you will have the opportunity to overcome the limits of loneliness again, create something sacred you know what the sacred is is that which serves as a companion in your search for the highest and deepest things so it could be something religious it could be God but it could also be something very simple like the kitchen table where you and your family and your friends have dinner together, that is the sacred and that is what the I am here allows to arise, it is what arises from relationships when those relationships are healthy, but when we found our relationship on this declaration of presence that transcends the limits of loneliness push back a little it makes our world more interesting, more inhabited, more beautiful, maybe okay, so something I would like all of you to do today sometime during the break or after get in touch with someone who is very important to you but who you haven't talked to in a long time and remind that person that you are there and remember that that friend of yours is also here on Earth and see if you can re-create a meaningful relationship with that person. person.

See if you can push. Going back over the limits of loneliness for both of them, as he once did, seemed like a good idea. Very good, thank you very much for your time.