loneliness

‘We Must Think Beyond Reason’: Lessons From 2020

Life since March 23, 2020 – the day lockdown was declared in India – was indoors. But another life, the life of the mind, was elsewhere. However, reason won’t help us understand this shift in our new condition.

The year 2020 passed by like a ship in troubled waters. Time was slow, and the mind was full of anxiety. Life since March 23, 2020 – the day lockdown was declared in India – was indoors. But another life, the life of the mind, was elsewhere. Elsewhere was many places. It was the past one lived, now a cradle of memories. It was also the past of reading, and knowing the world. Elsewhere comprised of people in the world posting about their lives on social media. It was also about migrant workers walking home, some dying on the way due to hunger, or accident.

Elsewhere was places near home, the café and restaurant in the marketplace. The nearby was also elsewhere, for they were no longer safe places, so one stopped visiting them. Today the whole world lives elsewhere. No one lives at home because home itself is elsewhere. This connects to lives simply lived indoors in self-isolation as well as life under state confinement.

In The Discovery of India that Nehru writes in the Ahmednagar fort prison in 1942, he speaks early of an experience uncannily similar to ours: “Time seems to change its nature in prison. The present hardly exists, for there is an absence of feeling and sensation which might separate it from the dead past. Even news of the active, living and dying world outside has a certain dream-like unreality, an immobility and an unchangeableness as of the past. The outer objective time ceases to be, the inner and subjective sense remains, but at a lower level, except when thought pulls it out of the present and experiences a kind of reality in the past or in the future. We live, as Auguste Comte said, dead men’s lives, encased in our pasts”.

Prison is the metaphor of our times. The time of the anti-colonial struggle often meant time spent in jail. Today we have political dissidents and activists facing a similar situation, while the free world is also undergoing the paranoia of distance and self-imposed isolation. The present is so unreal that it hardly seems to exist within a structure of perception that is easily familiar to us, and it may appear that we are living in a time that is rapidly and strangely going past us, the way Nehru suggests.

Reason won’t help us understand this shift in our new condition. Often things happen in life and in the world defying rational expectations or understanding. Things emerge from the depths of nature and we are thrown off the saddle by its winds. The imaginary horse of progress runs with its back full of dead bodies. There are reasons behind it.

Also read: Social Distancing For the Brain

‘We share nature’s madness, but we must be responsible’

On May 20, 2020, the dreaded cyclone, Amphan, made landfall in the state of West Bengal. Huge damage was expected. I was particularly troubled for my 80-year-old mother who lived alone in the northern outskirt of the city. I was late in calling her to ask how she had prepared herself for the cyclone. The phone lines to Kolkata were switched off. I had a pang of guilt, and panicked.

The cyclone was expected to hit the city by late evening. The lockdown would prevent her from getting anything she needed urgently. I felt reassured after my sister who lives in Mumbai, informed that mother had managed to get candles for the night. The cyclone hit the shores of Kolkata as expected. Photographs and videos posted on social media – a bus damaged by an uprooted tree, upturned electric poles lying in streets, a tin roof thrown off from a building – spoke of the dramatic impact Amphan had in the old, colonial city.

A north Kolkata road, waterlogged in the aftermath of Cyclone Amphan. Photo: Abhishek Hazra, Twitter/@swastika24

The chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, said the next day in the press, “This was another virus from the sky.”

The cyclone, damaging life and objects, takes on the metaphor of a “virus” from nature. After COVID-19 entered the scene, the lethal impact of nature was suddenly being felt. It was time for a paradox to appear: we had to be careful about nature, even as we realised the need to mend our ties with nature.

Nature has lost its head. Why will a tree ever want to kill a man? Using the language of personification, one wants to raise questions on human life: Nature is nature, and has nothing to hide. It is not constrained by morality. You can’t blame a tree for killing a man. But we owe to each other. Our relations with the world are ethically binding. Our relation with nature is one of closeness and difference. We mirror a complex relationship: we share nature’s madness, but we must be responsible.

In an unfinished prose-poem, I tried to capture the broken language of devastation: “The cyclone tore the city’s flesh like a razor used by a madman. The city tottered like an old man’s bones. Trees fell like elephants, and the city broke like the back of a tortoise. Who will stitch it to life? Where will they bury the giant banyan tree?”

In such a moment of widespread loss, only the language of affect wrapped in metaphor can address the pain and bewilderment. Human reality is not rationally lived, only rationally controlled. When that reality (like nature) is out of control and throws us off balance, we can’t find much meaning, or solace, through reason.

In 1914, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a song that began with the lines: “The night the storm tore down my doors, / I did not know you had come home.”

It is the language of enchantment close to the heart of nature (or the nature of the heart) that is remniscient of the 19th century German Romantics. Tagore seems to say, when nature, like the beloved, arrives in a tumultuous form, we may fail to recognise nature as beloved. In the end of the poem, Tagore wakes up in the morning and finds the beloved storm in the middle of a house full of emptiness (desolation).

Is it the seeking of harmony in the aftermath of (natural) calamity?

Friedrich Hölderlin wrote in the Preface to Hyperion: “We have fallen out with nature, and what was once (as we believe) One is now in conflict with itself”. This conflict with nature is modern in nature. Reason seeks to control and dominate nature, but all its concrete citadels of stability get shaken (and broken) when nature loses its head. The Romantics sought a sensibility other than reason. We must look for it too.

Even when the postscript of a cyclone involves a material task of cleaning up the mess with cranes and human labour, we need to heal the heart that faced damages.

Also read: Lockdown Tales From a Privileged Household

The modern (capitalist) world

Just as we are vulnerably exposed to the violent interruptions of nature, and the looming crisis triggered by the Anthropocene, we are also facing a social and existential one: of the capitalist world’s growing solitude.

In January 2018, troubled by the growing cases of lonely people in the country, then British Prime Minister, Theresa May, appointed a minister for loneliness. The problem of loneliness became a public affair. Everyone wore their loneliness bare. It was a matter of care, and the government responded with a ministry.

After the end of his 2019 film, ‘Family Romance, LLC’ shown on MUBI (about a strange, new phenomenon in that strange country, Japan, where a company rents out people playing the role of husband, friend or other, to step into the shoes of someone’s absence in people’s lives) Werner Herzog took part in a Q&A session. He did not sound cynical about the subject at all. He believed that “renting out people who help you along in moments of solitude is going to be big time coming because ageing populations in the industrialised countries create an enormous amount of solitude”.

What Japan is doing may play out in other, similar forms in the rest of the world. The promise of the modern (capitalist) world is ending for everyone across the class divide. Herzog gets specific, acknowledging that “with the explosive increase of tools of communication, meaning television, radio, cellphones… something was coming at us.” Solitude was waiting to get us. The future (of solitude) is no longer undefinable.

Herzog proclaims, “Twenty first century will be a century of solitudes.” Solitude is also a sign of devastation. Not just a natural, social and political devastation, but a spiritual one: of our relationship with ourselves, and the world. The pandemic fast-forwarded Herzog’s prediction. The whole world experienced a new structure and meaning of solitude. We were learning new things about ourselves, as old certainties gave way to new uncertainties. The time and language of rational argumentation and abstract theories have come to an end.

Postscript: We recently learnt that following Britain, the Japanese government created an isolation/loneliness countermeasures office in its cabinet on February 19, 2021, to counter issues like suicide and child poverty. The idea and appointment of a minister of loneliness spreads in the world. Reason cannot prevent – or cure – loneliness.

Also read: Breathing While Black: The Virus of Racism

Racism

At George Floyd’s funeral service in Minneapolis on June 4, 2020, his brothers and nephew spoke about their hard and simple life while growing up, washing clothes and sharing the table – hard life is simple. The most memorable speech on the occasion was given by the Rev. Al Sharpton. He said with sarcasm, he never saw anyone in his life hold the Bible as (instrumentally as) then President Donald Trump did before the church. He would like him to open the Bible and read Ecclesiastes 3: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.”

Sharpton meant that you can’t use the Bible as a prop for an agenda that isn’t about justice. Trump was out of tune with time. Sharpton then came to the emotional part. He said “the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed to be is you kept your knee on our neck.” He turned the policeman’s knee into a cruel metaphor of White supremacy. And he said it was time to “get your knee off our necks.” Racism is an unequal encounter between bodies, where the soul is forgotten.

A demonstrator holds a sign during a Black Lives Matter protest following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, in Hemel Hempstead, Britain, June 13, 2020. REUTERS/Andrew Boyers

One of India’s foremost political thinkers, Babasaheb Ambedkar, had reiterated in his long essay, Untouchables or The Children of India’s Ghetto (1935) that while untouchability was a social practise sanctioned by Hindu religion, slavery in the West “had no foundation in religion”. He emphasised that even though “Roman law declared the slave was not a person”, the “religion of Rome refused to accept that principle.” However, Ambedkar wrote, since “Hindu Law did not regard the ‘Untouchable’ a person, Hinduism refused to regard him as a human being fit for comradeship.”

Slavery has metamorphosed into modern racism. It does not come from the Christian religion, but from a phobic notion of difference based on colour. Racism does not allow colour to remain colour. Racism is the paranoia and disgust of difference. It commits violence upon colour. Racism is not a matter of religion, but a matter of law. The West is trapped between the law of religion and the law of racism: Blacks are also Christian, but face discrimination from white Christians. Can one law help western society, overcome another? Help to heal its survivors?

Secular law cannot eradicate prejudice. It can only punish the perpetrator. But racism does not reside in any perpetrator. It resides in the colour of language, the language of colour. Sharpton spoke the language of faith with eloquence and feeling to prove his adherence to the law that binds both blacks and whites together. There is a reason to invoke faith. Pity a nation that can’t be redeemed by faith. The Constitution is important to swear by. But as people of language, we need (the poetry of) Ecclesiastes 3.

How Single Parents Are Coping With the COVID-19 Pandemic

“Loneliness has hit single parents so hard. Our situation is the same as two-parent households except we don’t have anyone to share the load.”

Chennai: Reema Ahmed, a writer and counsellor, was among the first COVID-19 patients in Agra, Uttar Pradesh. She was put under home quarantine in March and suffered prolonged complications for two months. On day 10 of isolation, her 12-year-old son pleaded with her to let him inside the room. They managed a brief chat, facing away from each other. The single mother and her son had never stayed apart before.

There are 13 million households run by single mothers in the country, an estimated 4.5% of all households, according to a United Nations Women report in 2019. When the lockdown was announced, single parents, doing twice the work with half the assistance, saw their key support systems collapse – schools, daycare and the community. Through the pandemic, they have endured mental health struggles with grit and discovered fresh perspectives on parenting.

Kochi-based lawyer Laila Zafar had to leave her five-year-old son home when she went grocery shopping. Six months later, the child is used to managing himself in the playroom till she finishes outdoor errands, with a sense of independence. On odd days, when Laila did take him for a walk, she was invariably questioned by neighbours. “Loneliness has hit single parents so hard. Our situation is the same as two-parent households except we don’t have anyone to share the load. I am in solitary confinement with a kid. I haven’t interacted with another adult for so long, there are no breaks and escape from being a parent 24/7. My counsellor keeps checking on me. For single parents, both the left and right sides of the brain are constantly engaged, leaving us physically and mentally exhausted,” she said.

Laila Zafar, a single mother of a five-year-old who came up with ‘The Village’, an online support group for single parents, said that loneliness has hit them the hardest. Photo: Special arrangement

In November 2019, she started an online support group for single parents called ‘The Village’. Laila said that unlike Dubai, where she was raised, Indians lacked acceptance, understanding and empathy for single parents. She is planning to file a public interest litigation seeking welfare measures for single parents. “We don’t want to be pitied. In contrast, we are independent, strong, brave and happy parents who thrive and multitask every day. Our struggles can be mitigated by government policies granting child and healthcare support along with economic security,” she said.

Zafar recalled the experience with a yoga instructor who didn’t allow her child inside the classes, even though he was quiet. Her friend, a single mother of toddlers, was told by a landlord in Chennai to not bring any man to the house. When Zafar and her friends decided to log on to a dating app as single mothers, none of them received any response. “Therapists have advised me to remarry or get back with my child’s father. Single parenting needs to be normalised,” said Zafar, who is working on a single parent-centric wellness programme by mental health professionals who are single parents.

Reema Ahmed tested positive for the coronavirus amidst daily updates of death counts by her brother, a respiratory consultant in the UK. “The fear of losing to COVID-19 did worry me but above all, children are intuitively resilient and emotionally intelligent. My son became more independent and stayed in a separate room, away from my elderly parents,” said the single mother.

Also read: Adoptive Parents Are Being Short-Changed by the Maternity Benefits Act

Single parents (widows, divorcees, separated or single by choice) face huge challenges on a daily basis. Sevanti Ghosh, an Ahmedabad-based consultancy firm employee, lost her job in May. The mother of two school-going kids battles the constant terror of being infected. “I am taking virtual therapy sessions for depression and an eating disorder. COVID-19 patients overcome severe exhaustion only by family support. Where would that leave me and the kids? Rigid family structures have put single parents in a social blindspot. We have never felt more isolated. My relatives chided me that I would have been better placed during the lockdown had I not divorced my abusive partner, but I have no regrets. My quarantined single mother friend had to leave her kids with their 80-year-old grandparents who had co-morbid conditions,” she said.

“Kids of single parents tend to be clingy but that changed as my son Imaad went through emotional struggles and became independent when I was quarantined,” said Reema Ahmed, a single mother.

On August 27, Saurabh, an entrepreneur from Gurugram and single father of boys aged 13 and 11, was admitted to the hospital and later ICU for coronavirus. He got discharged 12 days later only to be re-admitted on October 3, when he spoke between bouts of breathlessness and drips. “Small acts of kindness like my friend sending a cake to my kids and a book for me when I was hospitalised that made me sail through. What has helped the parent-child bond is honest conversations and sharing household chores,” he said.

Latha, a single mother of boys aged 14 and 7 and domestic worker from Chennai, had no work since the lockdown. COVID-19 fears don’t bother her as much as the inability to cough up school fees for the children who have been barred from attending online classes.

“I have been denied work by reputed companies for being a single parent. One employer had asked me to assure in writing that I won’t be taking excess leaves while another gave me low rating because I used to rush to relieve my daughter from the crèche by 9:30 pm,” said Rajashree Menon, a single parent of a six-year-old in Bengaluru who has now switched to freelance content writing.

With courts shut, parents like Kochi-based hotelier Cherry Sebastian going through custody battles had been left in the lurch. Earlier, he used to meet his 11 year-old son in the church or school but since March, they haven’t spoken or seen each other even on video calls. “He stays with my ex-wife. I miss him terribly and strive to keep myself distracted by cooking,” he said.

Devender Khari, a software engineer and single parent from New Delhi, has a son and daughter who are 17 and 15 respectively. “The initial news reports showed clips from the movie Contagion. I was so petrified that when I looked down from balcony, I saw people as dead bodies. I had lost my wife to a mental illness in November 2013, following which I took professional help to overcome the grief. Over the years, I have encouraged my children to build a support system exclusive of me,” he said.

Also read: The Eternal Juggling Trick Called Motherhood

Swati Dasika, a single parent of a four-year-old and an engineer with a Dubai-based private company, said that moving to Hyderabad to live with her parents was the best decision. “Once when I was down with fever and lived alone with my two-year-old daughter in Mumbai, I requested my neighbour to oversee her while she was asleep so that I could buy milk and return in ten minutes. She bluntly refused. I was going through depression as divorce proceedings are an emotional overhaul. Mental health support must be made affordable for single parents, who are already financially hit,” she said.

Paromita Mukherjee, Kolkata-based psychologist, said that single parents are all struggling: those going to work leaving their children with caretakers and then the ones working from home with kids. “One of my patients is a child specialist on COVID-19 duty and a single mother to a four-year-old, who is homebound with a babysitter. After returning from hospital, when the mother desperately wants to nap, she has to instead engage with the child, leaving her depressed,” she said.

“The biggest support system for my school-going kids are their teachers who have helped them deal with the loss of their mother,” said Devender Khari, a single father.

Dr C. Ramasubramanian, psychiatrist and founder of the MS Chellamuthu Trust and Research Foundation, Tamil Nadu said that single parents need timely help for their psychological turmoil. “There is heightened mental and physical fatigue as they wrestle coronavirus related fear psychosis and overwhelming negative perceptions, which if ignored, can lead to depression and other spiralling outcomes. Stress among kids must be addressed too. Being a COVID-19 survivor myself, I have seen my role change from a caregiver to a receiver. Unlike other illnesses, this is emotionally, physically and physiologically isolating. As far as reasonable and quality mental health care is concerned, the best options are government hospitals,” he said. According to Dr Samir Parikh, director, Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences, a solid support system is the only cushion in times of a pandemic.

Luvena Rangel, a Bengaluru-based holistic health practitioner said that single parents must have a mental health backup plan and an emergency caregiver ready along with important documents. Seek help, take a break and focus on what’s in one’s control – the safety and health of children and the parent.

Please call on these helplines if you know anyone facing mental health issues or feeling suicidal.

MS Chellamuthu Trust NGO, Tamil Nadu: 9375493754 (Operational from October 10, 2020).
Mental health rehabilitation helpline, KIRAN, can be called from landline and mobile phones across the country at the number 18005990019.
NIMHANS helpline: 08046110007.
Helplines by Government of Maharashtra, BMC and Mumbai based mental health organization mPower- 1800120820050.
Assam Police and the Department of Psychiatry, GMCH helpline: 6026901053/54/55 or 6026901056/57/58.

Nalini Ravichandran is an independent journalist who has worked with The New Indian Express and Mail Today and reported extensively on health, education, child rights, environment and socio-economic issues of the marginalised. She is an alumna of the Asian College of Journalism.

Movie Review: ‘Family Romance LLC’ is Werner Herzog’s Exploration of Loneliness

The film, a combination of drama and documentary, is cerebral, but also cold.

Money can buy everything – it’s one of those statements that, bordering on exaggeration, approximates truth.

But even the most hardened cynics will tell you that it’s not wholly true. They know that some things will remain untouched by wealth. That is the beauty and futility of money – that no matter how much you accumulate, it still feels inadequate.

But what if that “everything” becomes literal? What if money can give you all: love, compassion, solace, even…family? Werner Herzog’s latest drama, Family Romance, LLC, interrogates that possibility, a world where capitalism is a step away from its ultimate victory.

But Herzog hasn’t conceived a dystopian scenario; he’s just responding to the weirdness of life. In Japan, relationships – or the lack of them – have been an industry for long.

One of the first alarming signs appeared more than a decade ago in the form of anonymous group suicides, which redefined shared misery in a peculiar, morbid way. Of late, old Japanese women have begun committing petty thefts in order to get arrested. Lonely and broke, they hope that prison would at least guarantee companionship and medical care.

Most societies battle depression and desperation in closed confines, but in Japan, discontent has become a public performance and a private enterprise. It has become a country where you can rent nearly everything: pets, cuddles, friends, foreigners, dates, even… family.

This pandemic of loneliness then, quite unsurprisingly, has piqued the interest of a great filmmaker. Herzog, a director for more than five decades, knows that life can be strange, fascinating, scary.

His documentaries are fine testaments to that, and his feature films too. Family Romance, LLC, though, has a strange relationship with truth: It is both fiction and non-fiction. Take, for instance, the film’s title. Family Romance is the name of an actual company in Japan that rents out actors to different families.

The protagonist, Ishii Yuichi, who plays himself in the movie, is the owner of that company. The film is about a 12-year-old girl longing for her father. In a 2017 Atlantic piece, Yuichi was interviewed by a journalist about his business.

When asked “what was your first success?” Yuichi said, “I played a father for a 12-year-old with a single mother. The girl was bullied because she didn’t have a dad, so the mother rented me. I’ve acted as the girl’s father ever since. I am the only real father that she knows.”

That’s exactly the story of Family Romance, LLC. (That journalist, also Herzog’s student, became the film’s producer and additional photographer.)

This tug persists at the level of form, too. Even though Family Romance, LLC is ‘fictional’, it looks and feels like a documentary. There’s a distinct ‘realness’ to the set-up. The camera, at most times, remains close to the actors. Conversations aren’t filmed via the usual shot-reverse shot method; instead the camera angles are minimal. All of this makes perfect sense in this Hiesenbergian universe where the only thing certain is uncertainty: you are family and an outsider, a father and an actor, an imposter and a sympathiser.

This world raises fascinating questions about life and cinema, carving out a separate genre. Because in any art-form, the concept of artifice is shared; both parties know that they’re performing (or faking). But what happens in a situation when only one of them is aware that it’s fiction? What happens when real keeps colliding with the reel: can fiction outsize life – should it?

These are loaded questions, and in Family Romance, LLC, Herzog is right at their centre.

He keeps it simple at the level of story – too simple in fact. Yuichi and the 12-year-old Mahiro meet at the start of the film; their initial conversations are awkward and stilted but, as time passes, their relationship evolves. They visit amusement parks, laugh together, share stories. Meanwhile, Yuichi keeps doing his day job, giving people fragments of life they long for: someone wants to be a celebrity (so Yuichi’s team photographs her on a busy street giving the passersby an impression that’s she is indeed one), someone wants to relive the experience of winning a lottery (so Yuichi’s team ‘surprises’ her one day), someone else wants a father for her wedding (as her own is an alcoholic).

Rethinking Education in the Age of the Coronavirus

Our ‘modern’ universities have burdened us with the packages of specialised knowledge. Yet, we are almost incapable of engaging with the inherent uncertainty of existence.

It is unfortunate that even as educationists and teachers, we refuse to learn any meaningful lesson from the crisis confronting the entire humankind. As the coronavirus pandemic shatters the modernist notion of ‘order’, we ought to contemplate and reexamine what we have taken for granted till now—our ‘academic’ and ‘technical’ skills, or our pride in the ‘intelligence’ that universities cultivate.

However, what is ironic is that even at this puzzling moment, we fail to see beyond techno-managerial solutions; seldom do we go beyond what is popularly known as ‘online’ learning. The assumption is that the lockdown period should not be wasted; and students and teachers must keep their ‘normal’ activities alive, complete the ‘syllabus’ through ‘online’ learning, and get their degrees in due time. Hence, nothing, it is thought, is more important than reading the same texts, completing the same kind of assignments, and listening to the same monologue of the teachers. Use technology, work from home, and continue the ‘academic production’!

I see its absurdity. I feel this is the time for an honest and a rigorous self- reflection; this is the time to understand the deeper layers of our consciousness; and this is the time to examine where we have gone wrong. Yes, this is the time to rethink education. It doesn’t matter even if we do not complete the official syllabus; it makes no difference even if, for instance, sociology students do not write yet another standardised term paper on Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, or philosophy students miss a couple of routinised lectures on Spinoza and Descartes. What, I feel, is really important is to unlearn the old baggage of knowledge, and derive a meaning of existence in the period of existential and ontological uncertainty.

From arrogant conquerors to humble wanderers

I know modernity has given us many things. It has activated our physical and vital energy; it has sharpened the power of the intellect; and it has given us ‘comforts’. Yet, modernity with its triumphant agenda has destroyed the possibility of an organic relationship between the human species and the universe. Instead, its Baconian science has asked us to manipulate and conquer nature; its Cartesian dualism has separated reason from emotion; technocrats and economists have made us believe that we can go on with the gospel of unlimited growth, and reckless exploitation of natural resources; and the spectacular success in bio-medicine makes us think that it is not far away when we can even conquer death.

Also read: Teaching in the Time of Isolation

In a way, we have become arrogant conquerors. The self-perception of being ‘modern’ is to be a conqueror filled with the power of instrumental reason and techno-science, and capable of keeping everything under his or her commands.

But then, the coronavirus has shattered this confidence. No, we are not the masters of the world. And not everything can be fitted into our notion of mathematical precision and engineered order. Not everything can be predicted—the way we predict whether it will rain this afternoon in South Delhi. In other words, the coronavirus has brought us to the domain of uncertainty and perplexity. And herein lies the importance of what the enthusiastic champions of modernity wanted us to forget: the inherent mystery of existence. To acknowledge this mystery is to redefine ourselves. This is to transform us from arrogant conquerors to humble wanderers.

It is in this context that we have to rethink education. Our ‘modern’ universities have burdened us with the packages of specialised knowledge; we have learned to acquire all sorts of ‘technical skills’; we have cultivated the prosaic intellect. Yet, we are almost incapable of engaging with the inherent uncertainty of existence—or, say the possibility of death knocking our doors at this very moment. Hence, when a crisis of this kind confronts us, we are terribly shaken, we fail to see beyond masks and sanitisers, and yesterday’s conquerors become today’s fearful mortals.

A view of deserted BMC headquarters due to the coronavirus pandemic during a nationwide lockdown, at CSMT in Mumbai, Saturday, March 28, 2020. Photo: PTI/Kunal Patil

And hence at this crucial juncture, as educationists we must ask ourselves whether we should redefine education as a new quest of a wanderer. Should education give us the psychic, spiritual or aesthetic strength to understand our location in this vast universe, cherish a sense of gratitude and humility, and live gracefully even amidst the fragile character of the phenomenal world—the way a tiny blue flower blooms for a couple of days, and then withers away with absolute grace?

And if we do not ask this question, and continue to do what we have been doing for years—say, working in our science labs and publishing papers in journals with high ‘impact factor’, or like a parrot quoting from Derrida and Lacan, or fetching an M.Tech or MBA from ‘top ranking’ universities, we would prove to be utterly callous and insensitive.

From ‘social distancing’ to engaged responsibility

Think of it. The term ‘social distancing’ can emerge only from the kind of society we moderns have created. Yes, we are used to the pathos of the lonely crowd; anonymity or heartless indifference characterises our urban spaces; new gadgets further take us to our solitary cells, even though we might have thousands of ‘followers’ and ‘subscribers’; and above all, the normalisation of surveillance in our times has erected huge walls of separation and exclusion. Furthermore, the prevalent practice of education has already transformed us into reckless competitors or warriors. We have almost lost the ecstasy of the communion. Is it the reason that even at this moment of crisis we can only think of ‘distancing’?

Also read: We Will Survive the Coronavirus. We Need to Make Sure We Survive Ourselves.

I admit that there is a danger of community transmission, and the spread of the coronavirus can be combated reasonably through physical distancing. However, physical distancing is not social distancing. In fact, through a new mode of education, we can generate an ethos of socially enriched engaged responsibility and ethics of care, despite the temporality of physical distance.

This is like realizing that while obsessive fear makes us selfish and insulated, it is love that heals the wound. To love is to connect. And hence, all these meaningful gestures—say, talking to a friend who lives alone in the distant suburb over the telephone, or not hoarding extra grocery material for one’s own family, or, for that matter, persuading the neighbours in the gated community not to be solely preoccupied with the new apps for the undisturbed supply of fish and meat in their 1500 sq.ft apartments, or with their own ‘safety’ (which, anyway, is a myth – in a ‘risk society’ there is no winner, and even Prince Charles can get it) and start a fundraising drive for migrant workers suffering severely because of the lockdown – would matter a great deal.

This is the time for realising the need for sharing and togetherness, and love and therapeutic healing. However, if we do not change ourselves, and, instead, continue to cherish the mantra of ‘distancing’, we would eventually find ourselves in a world where the victims would be more and more stigmatised, a new form of untouchability would emerge (it has already begun as we see the way the doctors dealing with the coronavirus victims have been asked to vacate their houses), and in the name of ‘safety’ the authoritarian state would further dehumanise us through the chains of surveillance. We would enter a frightening dystopian age.

Hence, as educationists and teachers, we are required to make a choice. Should we continue with the kind of education that only makes us ‘logical’, yet ethically and spiritually impoverished self-centric careerists? Or should we learn some deep lessons from the present crisis, and redefine education to undertake a new journey: from the narcissism of modernity to the poetry of connectedness with the rhythm of life and death; from certainty to mystery; or from weapons of destruction to prayers of redemption.

Avijit Pathak is a professor of Sociology at JNU.

Lockdown Reading: 10 Books The Wire’s Staff Recommends

From fantasy to historical and literary fiction, our team’s picks include books by J.D. Salinger, Alice Munro, Ocean Vuong, Olivia Laing, Amitav Ghosh, Jerome K. Jerome, Frank Herbert and Robert R. McCammon.

Cooped up at home, there is definitely one upside to social distancing: we have more time to read. It’s also good to take a healthy mental break from ingesting current events to quell the anxiety most of us are feeling as news stories pour in at breakneck speed.

We asked our team to share their recommendations for what to read during the national lockdown. From fantasy to historical and literary fiction, our team’s picks include books by J.D. Salinger, Alice Munro, Ocean Vuong, Olivia Laing, Amitav Ghosh, Jerome K. Jerome, Frank Herbert and Robert R. McCammon.

1. Jahnavi Sen, Executive News Producer

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

My phone’s gallery is currently just a series of photos of paragraphs from this book, which I’ve been sharing with friends also stuck in their houses. It’s been the one thing that has successfully taken my mind off the news in the last week, and honestly I was more than a little sad when I finished it and that escape was over.

Vuong’s writing is stunning; his use of language is both surprising and natural. Written as a letter from a young man to his single mother, he tells the story of a Vietnamese-American family that spans generations. Covering themes from addiction, queer identity and violence, to the struggles of a working class immigrant family from a different world, it’s difficult for me to summarise what On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is ‘about’.

What I can do, though, is show you what I’ve been showing my friends – here’s one of the many paragraphs I saved from the book, which I know I will keep coming back to in weeks like this.

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”

2. Sidharth Bhatia, Founding editor

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

There is no particular reason why this book just popped in my head, but I suddenly thought about re-reading Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. The theme of the book has no connection with any infectious disease or pandemic, and there is no reason to think of it now.

But the book describes the protagonist, 16-year-old Holden Caulfield’s romp through the throbbing streets of New York, and now those same streets are eerily quiet and deserted – something that has never, ever happened. My thoughts perhaps got triggered by a photograph I saw of a quiet, empty Times Square. Holden goes dancing, meets friends, heads to Central Park to feed the ducks – all normal activities which are now forbidden.

All along, he keeps railing against the ‘phonies’, and even when he is being unfair, it is difficult not to see his point because there is a lot of pretence in the world. In the middle of that unstoppable city, he feels strangely isolated and depressed and it is worth asking how New Yorkers – and for that matter those who live elsewhere, and have busy lives in cities that never seem to sleep – must feel now.

It is not an allegorical book, and certainly not one that in any way forecast our times. But it is a book about loneliness in the middle of the multitudes and thus strangely appropriate for our current lives.

3. Monobina Gupta, Consulting Editor

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

Battling loneliness after a broken relationship, Olivia Laing explores New York City through fractured lives and the works of artists. In the art of Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz – artists “troubled by loneliness” – Laing discovers her own state of mind. Her part memoir, part cultural critique, haunts and reveals art, life, love, friendship and the political establishment. For Laing, loneliness is not a stigma, but a path to creativity. It could even be uplifting.

The AIDS epidemic was exploding when Laing was in New York. Many have recently drawn parallels between HIV and the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in terms of the sluggish government response, the stigma of the illness and the courage displayed by frontline healthcare workers.

Quarantine – as is the fate of much of the world today – leads to isolation and loneliness. But loneliness in the present context is “also a point of connection with billions of strangers,” as Laing recently wrote. Billions of people across the world are now connected to each other in their shared loneliness. Like Laing, finding consolation in art during her loneliness, we have a chance now to create our own worlds of images, words, and music. Our own loneliness.

4. Vasudevan Mukunth, Editor, The Wire Science

Dune by Frank Herbert

Dune has to be one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy novels ever written. The year 2020 has been truly bizarre, and just a fourth of the way in, over 1.5 billion people are in some kind of quarantine, lockdown or isolation; many of those who aren’t pass in and out of fear about the abilities of an unseen foe, and anxiety about what the next day will bring.

Escape of some sort is on many people’s minds, either out of what they suspect now and then is a fevered dream or just to step outside the house and stretch their legs. But inside your head itself, nothing will take you as far away from our twisted reality as good fantasy fiction, and in my view one of the goodest works of fantasy fiction is Dune, Frank Herbert’s 1965 masterpiece.

It is the story of a young aristocrat’s rise to power on a fictitious desert planet, with allies fanatically adapted to a world without water, against cruel foes whose every action is war, in the shadow of empire, a superhuman sisterhood and the strange drug that makes the planet so precious.

I first read the book over a decade ago, but its mystical spirit uniting ideas in environmentalism, history, religion and power have stayed with me – and are bound to with anyone who has read the book. Herbert has also been celebrated for his exploration of the depths of ingenuity and madness in Dune and the other books that followed in the series, but the first book simply towers them all, as well as the rest of the science fiction landscape.

If you’re not yet convinced to pick it up, here are two more reasons. First, Dune is a work of soft sci-fi: technology and technological ability don’t interfere with what the characters can or can’t do, so aside from the book’s fantastic’s setting, it’s easy to see the book as a great work of fiction, period (and who knows, it could become your gateway to sci-fi and fantasy). Second, a film adaptation is set to release in December this year, directed by Denis Villeneuve, who also made Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. Villeneuve hasn’t made a misstep thus far but Dune’s story is very easy to get wrong, so read it if only so you know what to expect.

5. Aleesha Matharu, Assistant Editor, Editor of LiveWire

Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon

When an avid fantasy and horror reader hears of a virus romping across the globe, it’s the ever mutating and deadly Captain Tripps from Stephen King’s The Stand that most obviously comes to mind. A hefty, genre defying epic from the master of horror himself, The Stand is beloved pandemic novel that is on nearly every quarantine list.

Which is why I want to recommend Robert R. McCammon’s Swan Song. I find it unfortunate that I stumbled upon the author only somewhere in my mid-twenties. His book Boy’s Life, which is a masterpiece of magic and mystery, blew me away with its coming-of-age tale in a small town. One of my favourite quotes of all time comes from Boy’s Life:

“We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.”

I know I’ve sneakily recommended three books under the guise of one. So let’s get to Swan Song, which may be clunky in parts in telling its tale over 850 pages, but it never gets boring. It has certain unmissable parallels to The Stand, but instead of a virus it deals with a nuclear fallout and the birth of a new world – one full of monsters in the dark where survivors get roped into the age-old battle of good vs evil. This one of the books I most looking forward to re-reading – it may be dark and scary, but it is also full of hope, love and beauty. If you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, Swan Song is an absolute must read.

6. Raghu Karnad, Contributing editor

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

I can’t escape the sense of there being some ecological design to this moment (I would say justice, except the wrong humans will suffer the worst of it.) After a year of climate strikes and failed appeals to modernise our economic system, a non-human event has come and iced it – first freezing commercial aviation, then nearly all human industry. Two recent books by Amitav Ghosh, one non-fiction and the other a novel, heralded the uncanny quality of global events in 2020.

The Great Derangement is an urgent but non-polemical essay challenging how we write, think and believe in the Anthropocene. It helps us “grasp the error of treating the environment as an inert resource, of denying that purpose or prerogative can exist in any part of nature other than ourselves,” I wrote, back in 2016.

That book sets out a specific challenge to fiction-writers, and Gun Island is Ghosh’s effort to meet the challenge himself. It’s a literary book but also a mystery-adventure, a story of human fates driven by much larger forces. It links ancient idioms with new visions of the natural world as a responsive, powerful being – and mocks the human pretension of drawing borders on an interconnected and injured planet.

7. Nandini Sundar, Contributor

Transit by Anna Seghers (Translated from German by Margot Bettauer Dembo)

A strange liminality has gripped us all – caught up in a soundless war without bombs or sirens, of the seeming normalcy of an oncoming spring, where the danger cannot be seen or heard or even felt till it is too late. We are enlisted in a counterinsurgency where we are all now potential hostiles – to ourselves, to our families or neighbours. Perhaps then, this is not the time to read about the anxieties of another time, another place – except to find our own sense of estrangement reflected back at us, and to feel resettled by the fact that humans survived that and will survive this.

Anna Segher’s Transit is, among other things, about people waiting to get passes at Marseilles and leave a war-torn occupied France, the acquaintances and friendships one makes in waiting rooms or in a waiting city, the passions that lead people to take steps from which they then draw back at the very brink.

It is about fate like that of the woman who will get a pass because she is entrusted with looking after the two dogs of an American citizen, the invoking of old friendships for survival, the sharing of limited food, the slow draining of cups at cafes in order to sit longer because there is nowhere to go, the inscrutability of bureaucracy, the preciousness of official documents. Different nationalities are thrown together in this city of last exit from a fascist Europe – fleeing different pasts and looking towards different futures. Some will have no future, and some who boarded what they thought was a ship to safety are sunk on high sea.

8. Soumashree Sarkar, News Producer

The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro

The View From Castle Rock is a book of short stories with a tenuous but heartening thread connecting all of them, across two centuries. The book is by Alice Munro, a champion of literary quietness and a writer who has treasured the act and purpose of being a woman with great effortlessness.

In this book especially, Munro uses domesticity and its inevitability as a superb device. She hooks you to the simple unobtrusiveness of taking the trash out, to the cobwebs that need dusting while the oven hums with dinner, and to how treasured the act of combing one’s hair becomes when you live for and in the house. For obvious reasons, the novelty of domesticity – forever the domain of women – is a great thing to wake up to at these times.

9. Tanya Jha, News producer, LiveWire

The Anatomy of Hate by Revathi Laul

Revathi Laul’s book The Anatomy of Hate is a story of three men who joined the 2002 Gujarat riots. One of them looted shops of Muslims, one takes pride in raping Muslim women and the third (an adivasi) gets brainwashed by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. I would like to recommend this book for two reasons. First, the stories are similar to what happened in Northeast Delhi last month. While reading the book, I actually felt that it was a live-telecast of the carnage that took place. The chapter when the men are having fun while looting one shop was strikingly similar to some of the reports we read just last month.

Second, I like how the book doesn’t treat the men as villains. They are normal human beings who read books, climb trees, watch TV serials and fall in love. For me, I never thought I’d ever want to read about a man who raped a pregnant woman. But when I read how he was constantly bullied as a child by his father and later by his friends for his disability (his name is Suresh Langdo), I realised the importance of engaging with those who we think are not like us, or those who we believe come from some external universe. The truth is that they are just pawns playing into the hands of an external power. We need to identify that. That is what the book taught me.

10. Raghavi Sharma, News Producer

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome

The book chronicles the misadventures of three unassuming hypochondriacs who decide that a row up the Thames is the perfect antidote to all their maladies. The late Victorian era novel – originally intended to be a travelogue – is a rare classic whose wit and humour has stood the test of time.

The book routinely digresses to narrate anecdotes about their ill-conceived attempts at packing and the writer’s cantankerous Uncle Podger. The account of three clumsy friends, and their fox terrier Montmorency whose “ambition in life, is to get in the way and be sworn at”, is almost always an uplifting one – but even more so during gloomy times of self-isolation.

Chaos of the Unseen

A poem on how coronavirus has affected the simple activities of humans.

An unseen organism,
Painted fear and suspicion,
Spread throughout humanity,
Increased sadness and insecurity.

Every interaction loaded with doubt,
This is what a virus has brought about,
Getting ready for a forced hibernation,
Every person in every nation.

Every sneeze suspected,
Leaving the person dejected,
Every cough analysed,
As if the group would be vaporised.

Houses wrapped in insulation,
Young and old protected by segregation,
Future brood left without personal interaction,
Students surviving on distant education.

Men travelling on deserted roads bend,
Think twice to help a fallen human,
Vendors’ services across glass walls,
Not conversing the short and the tall.

A day not too far,
When people greet only from miles afar,
Display emotions only on digital forums,
Adding to the personal conundrum.

Sreeyantha is a person who sees the world in all the colours of the rainbow. A creative homemaker who wishes to capture the universe’s beauty in poems, paintings and short essays. You can read a collection of her poems here.

Featured image credit: Claudio Schwarz/@purzlbaum/Unsplash

The New Normal: A LiveWire Series on Life Under Lockdown

The world we once occupied has been yanked from beneath our feet. Write in to us – in 200 words – and tell us your lockdown story. We want light, frothy tales and the darker reality.

As a paralysed world grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, millions have been asked to not report to work. States are issuing lockdowns with no end in sight.

But even as many of us are at home, anxious as we are, let us also acknowledge that there are millions more who cannot afford the option, and who are facing a loss of basic livelihood as this pandemic rages across borders.

Plenty of Indians don’t have the luxury of withdrawing from the public. For many, the work is already gone. Others face talk of salary cuts and layoffs.

Discrimination has also taken off – a recent LiveWire story pointed out how many from Northeast India have faced hostile, racist comments. As the crisis continues, let’s hope people fight this with love and support, and not hate and bigotry.

Mostly we’ve got to sit tight at home and do our best to “flatten the curve”.

Some of us are taking to isolation like fish to water, taking in the joys of doing laundry at lunch time, rustling up magnificent meals, committing to fitness regimens, nurturing their plants and soaking in all that family time.

People are turning to books, Netflix, learning languages and the like to occupy all the time not having to commute to work (or meet anyone) can create. It’s not unlikely that many artists and writers will use this time constructively – these are mad times after all, making it all the more likely for inspiration to spark.

Cabin fever is never far off; neither is loneliness and longing for a past pre-2020 life.

Or the unending anxiety as news floods in continuously on our phones.

Many are fighting battles at home – where family members are still defiantly stepping out despite our pleas. With the higher mortality rate among the elderly, a novel role reversal has kicked in – with young people protecting their older family from misinformation, WhatsApp forwards and egos.

There has also been a spike in domestic violence cases – the crisis makes it harder for victims to seek help.

Vox’s Ezra Klein warned of a “social recession” – an epidemic of loneliness brought on by isolation. So checking in on your friends is more important than ever.

Let’s not forget the overjoyed pets, who are ecstatic to see you at home 24/7 – but is your cat jumping on your laptop in the middle of a conference call? Is your dog just too needy?

Taken together, the world we lived in has been yanked from beneath our feet.

Lives are going to be lost, jobs and savings will disappear. And we will adapt – it’s already begun.

It is a new world full of new stories.

We want to hear yours – every week in this new column breaking down what it’s like living in this new world.

This is the new normal.

Write in to us – in 200 words – with the subject line ‘The New Normal’, and tell us your lockdown story. We want both light, frothy tales and the darker reality.

And while you’re writing: Stop touching your face.

Featured image credit: Pariplab Chakraborty

How to Look After Your Mental Health

A lot of the conversation around mental health focuses on mental illness, but mental wellbeing doesn’t just mean the absence of symptoms.

“Mental wellbeing is the sense of being comfortable with who we are and what we are and where we sit in the world,” says Chris O’Sullivan from the Mental Health Foundation in the UK.

While the term “mental health” usually conjures thoughts of mental ill-health, like depression, anxiety and addiction, researchers like O’Sullivan say it’s important to think about mental wellbeing as more than just having or not having symptoms.

Instead, it can be helpful to think about mental health as a spectrum, on which you’re position is likely to fluctuate throughout life.

Mounting evidence suggests positive mental wellbeing is linked to our physical health and the connections we build with others. Here are some practical, everyday things to keep in mind for your mental wellbeing. Note: If you’re in the thick of a severe mental illness, these tips might not be useful for you.

Being Active

Your mind is attached to a body. Movement has been shown to release chemicals in our brains that make us feel good. It can help you sleep better, reduce feelings of stress and anxiety, improve memory and cognition, and even potentially mean you’ll have a better chance at experiencing positive events throughout the day.

“There’s very strong evidence for the role of exercise in both prevention and treatment of mild and moderate depression and anxiety,” O’Sullivan told DW. “So doing some exercise, even though when you’re in the pits of depression it’s the thing you’ll least likely feel like doing, can help.”

Although technically “being active” doesn’t just mean running and working out — it can also include activities that increase your heart rate, like gardening, vigorous cleaning, and cycling to work — studies show the positive effects are higher when these things are combined with moderate to high intensity exercise.

Going outdoors has also been shown to improve people’s state of mind — in a 2015 study, scientists compared the brain activity of healthy people after they took a 90 minute walk in a natural setting or an urban one. Those that took a walk in nature had reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is a region active when we’re anxious or focusing on negative emotions.

Eating well

A growing body of literature suggests eating well — a balanced diet rich in fruit and vegetables and low in processed foods — is a key part of feeling well. Nutrition, or lack thereof, has been found to affect the formation of human brain cells, particularly in the part of the brain that is associated with mood regulation.

Recent research has found a link between bad eating habits and bad moods, finding that a plant-rich, anti-inflammatory diet can help prevent depression. This is in part because of the way inflammation affects our gut microbiota, which increasing evidence suggests has a remarkable impact on our mood and behavior.

A healthy diet, O’Sullivan adds, also means being conscious of how much alcohol you drink. “Monitoring and controlling your relationship with alcohol drugs is a big one,” he says. “A lot of suicides are associated with alcohol use.”

Sleeping sweet spot

While it’s not known exactly how long it would take a person to directly die from lack of sleep — an American high school student once stayed awake for 11 days and 25 minutes — many of us know that not getting enough at least makes us feel a bit closer to death.

Research shows that sleep deprivation can negatively affect our mood, concentration and even our emotional intelligence.

“Generally, we don’t sleep as much as we should,” O’Sullivan says. “But we know sleep is very closely related to mental health.” Whether enough is five hours or eight and a half is dependent on the individual, but experts recommend finding your sleeping sweet spot — and try sticking to it.

For people who aren’t able to sleep through the night, like shift workers and parents of young children, studies have shown that short naps of around 20 minutes— long enough to doze off, but not long enough to enter a deep sleep — are a fairly effective way of catching up.

Mindfulness

It might be a concept you’ve heard of but aren’t so clear on — mindfulness. O’Sullivan defines it as “paying deliberate attention to what is happening as it happens.”

It’s “not yoga or visualization,” he says, but more like a frame of mind where we are conscious of what is happening to our mind and body, while managing our attention and emotions. This can be particularly helpful in bringing us out of rumination, where we repetitively go over negative thoughts.

“It’s not always the best thing to learn mindfulness when you are depressed or in a period of acute anxiety but learning mindfulness as a tool to keep you well when coming out the other side can be really helpful in preventing relapse,” O’Sullivan says.

It’s also about recognizing feelings as ephemeral and fluctuating. “We all have ups and downs, and experience periods of good mental health and challenges,” O’Sullivan added. “And it’s something we can all work on just the same as our physical health.”

Community

Most human beings crave connection. There’s evidence that belonging to a group and social connectedness are as important for our health as diet, movement and sleep. But despite myriad modern inventions for connection, O’Sullivan says “being lonely is a problem of our time.”

“Loneliness is as bad for our health as smoking,” he says, referring to research comparing the influence of a lack of social relationships on death with the well-established risk factors associated with smoking.

Social connections and being able to talk to people about your problems are important, he says, “not just for people who have a mental illness but for everyone — people are increasingly hyper-connected on digital devices but not connected in real life.”

But if doing all of these things all the time seems overwhelming, O’Sullivan says he often tells people to identify “which ones you would like to work on — find a few things that are really good for you and prioritize them.”

Most importantly, he adds, it’s about “finding what works for you, and trying.”

This was originally published in DW. Read the article here.

Featured image credit: Unsplash

Survey Shows 16- to 24-Year-Olds Are the Loneliest. But Is It Social Media’s Fault?

Social media can be a great tool to keep in touch with friends – but if you are already lonely, it could make things worse.

Young people are lonelier than all other age groups, according to recent findings from the BBC Loneliness Experiment. In a survey of more than 55,000 people, 40% of 16- to 24-year-olds reported feeling lonely often or very often. This trend for high youth loneliness has also been captured in other national surveys by the Office for National Statistics in 2017 and the Eden Project in 2015.

Loneliness is typically associated with older generations, who may live alone or be less capable of getting out and about. But young people can experience loneliness despite having friends, being surrounded by people at school or having supportive parents. This indicates that youth loneliness is more about finding it difficult to connect with other people, as opposed to being alone.

There are more opportunities today to connect with others than ever before: social media, instant messaging and even online gaming all allow people to share messages and experiences without being in the same place at the same time. But research has shown that high use of the internet is linked to loneliness, social anxiety and depression. Young people are the highest users of social media, and some have raised concerns about the impact that might be having on their mental health.

For instance, in her book Alone Together, MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle has argued that people are beginning to favour communicating with others using new technologies over speaking face to face. She argues that online communication lacks intimacy, and though we might feel we are constantly connected or in the loop, it actually leaves us feeling alone.

Depends how you use it

When my colleagues at the University of Chicago and I conducted a review of the research linking loneliness to internet use, we found that using the internet socially can lead to both increases and decreases in loneliness – depending on how it is used.

When social technologies are used to connect with people and maintain existing relationships, they can reduce loneliness. But when internet use replaces offline interactions with others, it can increase feelings of loneliness. To fully understand the relationship between loneliness and social media, it’s important to be aware of how people behave when they are lonely.

The BBC Loneliness Study found that 41% of people felt that loneliness can sometimes be a positive experience. Periods of time spent alone can be important to promote self-care, reflection and creativity. In another review, my colleagues and I argue that loneliness is an important and useful feeling, because it lets us know when we lack social support and prompts us to reconnect with others.

But problems arise when our attempts to reach out to others are unsuccessful, and this is when loneliness is linked to poor mental and physical health. When people are lonely, it means they will seek ways to avoid being rejected or further isolated by others. This leads people to be particularly tuned into negative behaviours; for example, they will be more likely to notice feelings of anger and frustration in other people’s communications.

This focus on negative aspects of social communication can cause lonely people to remain quiet and reserved during social interactions. And if they remain lonely for a long period, they might avoid social gatherings altogether. These behaviours make lonely people more vulnerable when they use social technologies, because they are more likely to focus on negative information online, view content rather than share, and generally use social media in ways that continue to make them feel lonely – or makes those feelings even worse.

Changing your ways

The BBC Loneliness Study showed that lonely people have more friendships that are online only, indicating that they may go online to feel connected and may avoid face to face interactions with people. But research suggests that this is not always the case; some people may spend time online to communicate with family or friends who live too far away to meet up in person.

Young people who already feel lonely, are socially anxious, or have difficulties maintaining friendships are less likely to use social media in a positive and meaningful way. They may need support to change that, but it is possible to start by actively engaging with other people online, and avoiding spending too much time passively reading status updates or watching YouTube videos.

Of course, spending long periods online without interacting with others can aggravate feelings of loneliness. Communicating with others face-to-face is important, and everyone needs to make time for that. But we cannot blame social media for high levels of loneliness among young people, because smart phones and social media can be used in ways that allow us to feel connected with others, make new friends and share our experiences. Young people who feel lonely can address this problem by changing the way they use social media, so that it supplements the time they spend with others – rather than replacing it.

Rebecca Nowland, Research Fellow, University of Central Lancashire

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One Is the Loneliest Number: The History of a Western Problem

Loneliness is not a universal condition, nor is it a purely visceral, internal experience. It is a cluster of multiple emotions that play out together.

“God, but life is loneliness,” declared the writer Sylvia Plath in her private journals. Despite all the grins and smiles we exchange, she says, despite all the opiates we take:

when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter – they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

By the 21st century, loneliness has become ubiquitous. Commentators call it ‘an epidemic’, a condition akin to ‘leprosy’, and a ‘silent plague’ of civilisation. In 2018, the United Kingdom went so far as to appoint a minister for loneliness. Yet loneliness is not a universal condition; nor is it a purely visceral, internal experience. It is less a single emotion and more a complex cluster of feelings, composed of anger, grief, fear, anxiety, sadness and shame. It also has social and political dimensions, shifting through time according ideas about the self, God and the natural world. Loneliness, in other words, has a history.

The term ‘loneliness’ first crops up in English around 1800. Before then, the closest word was ‘oneliness’, simply the state of being alone. As with solitude – from the Latin ‘solus’ which meant ‘alone’ – ‘oneliness’ was not coloured by any suggestion of emotional lack. Solitude or oneliness was not unhealthy or undesirable, but rather a necessary space for reflection with God, or with one’s deepest thoughts. Since God was always nearby, a person was never truly alone. Skip forward a century or two, however, and the use of ‘loneliness’ – burdened with associations of emptiness and the absence of social connection – has well and truly surpassed oneliness. What happened?

The contemporary notion of loneliness stems from cultural and economic transformations that have taken place in the modern West. Industrialisation, the growth of the consumer economy, the declining influence of religion and the popularity of evolutionary biology all served to emphasise that the individual was what mattered – not traditional, paternalistic visions of a society in which everyone had a place.

In the 19th century, political philosophers used Charles Darwin’s theories about the ‘survival of the fittest’ to justify the pursuit of individual wealth to Victorians. Scientific medicine, with its emphasis on brain-centred emotions and experiences, and the classification of the body into ‘normal’ and abnormal states, underlined this shift. The four humours (phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, melancholic) that had dominated Western medicine for 2,000 years and made people into ‘types’, fell away in favour of a new model of health dependent on the physical, individual body.

In the 20th century, the new sciences of the mind – especially psychiatry and psychology – took centre-stage in defining the healthy and unhealthy emotions an individual should experience. Carl Jung was the first to identify ‘introvert’ and ‘extravert’ personalities (to use the original spelling) in his Psychological Types (1921). Introversion became associated with neuroticism and loneliness, while extroversion was linked to sociability, gregariousness and self-reliance. In the US, these ideas took on special significance as they were linked to individual qualities associated with self-improvement, independence and the go-getting American dream.

The negative associations of introversion help to explain why loneliness now carries such social stigma. Lonely people seldom want to admit they are lonely. While loneliness can create empathy, lonely people have also been subjects of contempt; those with strong social networks often avoid the lonely. It is almost as though loneliness were contagious, like the diseases with which it is now compared. When we use the language of a modern epidemic, we contribute to a moral panic about loneliness that can aggravate the underlying problem. Presuming that loneliness is a widespread but fundamentally individual affliction will make it nearly impossible to address.

For centuries, writers have recognised the relationship between mental health and belonging to a community. Serving society was another way to serve the individual – because, as the poet Alexander Pope put it in his poem An Essay on Man (1734): ‘True self-love and social are the same’. It’s not surprising, then, to find that loneliness serves a physiological and social function, as the late neuroscientist John Cacioppo argued: like hunger, it signals a threat to our wellbeing, born of exclusion from our group or tribe.

“No man is an island,” wrote the poet John Donne in a similar spirit, in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) – nor woman either, for each one formed “a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” If a “clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” For some of us, Donne’s remarks take on special poignancy in light of the UK’s departure from Europe, or the narcissism of Donald Trump’s US presidency. They also return us to medical metaphors: Donne’s references to the body politic being destroyed is reminiscent of modern loneliness as a physical affliction, a plague of modernity.

We urgently need a more nuanced appraisal of who is lonely, when and why. Loneliness is lamented by politicians because it is expensive, especially for an ageing population. People who are lonely are more likely to develop illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and depression, and 50 per cent more likely to die prematurely than non-lonely counterparts. But there is nothing inevitable about being old and alone – even in the UK and the US where, unlike much of Europe, there isn’t a history of inter-familial care of the aged. Loneliness and economic individualism are connected.

Until the 1830s in the UK, elderly people were cared for by neighbours, friends and family, as well as by the parish. But then the parliament passed the New Poor Law, a reform that abolished financial aid for people except the aged and infirm, restricting that help to those in workhouses, and considered poverty relief to be loans that were administered via a bureaucratic, impersonal process. The rise of city living and the breakdown of local communities, as well as the grouping of the needy together in purpose-built buildings, produced more isolated, elderly people. It is likely, given their histories, that individualistic countries (including the UK, South Africa, the US, Germany and Australia) might experience loneliness differently to collectivist countries (such as Japan, China, Korea, Guatemala, Argentina and Brazil). Loneliness, then, is experienced differently across place as well as time.

None of this is meant to sentimentalise communal living or suggest that there was no social isolation prior to the Victorian period. Rather, my claim is that human emotions are inseparable from their social, economic and ideological contexts. The righteous anger of the morally affronted, for instance, would be impossible without a belief in right and wrong, and personal accountability. Likewise, loneliness can exist only in a world where the individual is conceived as separate from, rather than part of, the social fabric. It’s clear that the rise of individualism corroded social and communal ties, and led to a language of loneliness that didn’t exist prior to around 1800.

Where once philosophers asked what it took to live a meaningful life, the cultural focus has shifted to questions about individual choice, desire and accomplishment. It is no coincidence that the term ‘individualism’ was first used (and was a pejorative term) in the 1830s, at the same time that loneliness was in the ascendant. If loneliness is a modern epidemic, then its causes are also modern – and an awareness of its history just might be what saves us.

Fay Bound Alberti is a writer, historian and consultant. She co-founded the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, where she remains an honorary senior research fellow in history. Her books include This Mortal Coil (2016) and A Biography of Loneliness (forthcoming, 2019). She lives in London.

This article was originally published on aeon. Read the original article here.