It has been over a year since I moved cities, and with it, I felt a new sense of longing and loneliness. Previously, I would have dealt with these anxieties and familiar feelings by consuming copious amounts of caffeine or obsessively obsessing over all the things that have gone wrong in the past and the things that could go wrong now—leaving me panic-stricken every time.

​

Unlike before, this time around, being in a completely different city, I did not have the familiar backdrop for me to fall back on old habits. Despite my truest attempts at not falling back in them over time, I fell harder on old ones and new, possibly worse ones. Despite the good, the bad, and the ugly, my mess-ups and small victories in my year of loneliness in a brave new world have brought forth a lot of realisations.

​

One of my first revelations was how easily susceptible and subscribed we have become to the idea that hoarding materialistic possessions like scented candles or a sobering light blub of a myriad of colours will somehow make us feel less lonely. This whole continuum can be traced back to our romanticisation of loneliness and choosing hyper-independence as our primary trauma response. In a deformative way, we are all trying to become Casper David Friedrich’s solitary figure. Cause we believe he is privy to some keen information about the human experiment he has gained living in the trenches. In a way, we must follow him into those and reach the mountain's peak and invertedly peak of human understanding. Isolation is not a direct result of a hyper-commercialised society where we spend every second trying to simulate every nerve in our body. The constant stream of information has riddled us with passivity and egoism.

​

Loneliness is not a malediction bestowed on us by the capital overlords but rather something that happens to good people. We are not somehow above human connections. Instead, we would stay inside and consume more irrelevant media hoping something excites us. Rather than accepting the need for deeper interpersonal relationships, we are more than willing to take the mundanity on offer because it is convenient, projects an image of independence, and somehow saves us from being hurt and avoiding vulnerability. 

 

However, the way out of this bottomless, sedated pit of loneliness is not to pull people from whatever comforts them, be it forests, libraries or taverns and force them to go to arcades. To rectify modernity's loneliness epidemic is to let go of our perceived assertions of what a fulfilling life should or should not be. We should also be more willing to learn new experiences and people and make more attempts at making real friends or real experiences. We must also ensure not to fall into the desperation of trying to get out of this rut we often find ourselves in, and as a start, putting ourselves around people and new experiences that excite us. While you are at it, do not get trapped in discord servers, Twitter spaces and paying for courses that supposedly teach you to be less alone. There is a whole world outside.  

​