Aside from God and love, happiness is probably the most tedious topic to listen to anyone else talk about. It's true that you get a glimpse of the soul (and if not the soul, certainly the intellect) of the speaker, but at what price? 

Discoursing on happiness has become the religious diatribe of godless liberals.  They're in your face with it.  The New York Times' often oddly pensive Happy Days blog acknowledges with a postmodern wink that "happiness" is a Sisyphean task...


While Slate's "Happiness Project" actually bills itself as a how-to.  The blogger, Gretchen Rubin, spent a year "test-driving scores of different strategies for being happy" and shares her earnest insights (which are more earnest than insights, really) with readers.  I have to admit I don't read it for the tips so much.  I know what makes me happy, and where to find it on the internet (obviously NSFW).  And, yes, I am getting help for that.

Yesterday Gretchen was banging on about loneliness in a post unironically entitled "Some Counter-Intuitive Facts about Loneliness".  But for anyone who has ever had much time to contemplate the topic, her findings weren't really counter-intuitive at all.  In fact, the fact that she found them counter-intuitive seemed counter-intuitive to me. 

To her credit she admitted that she hadn't thought the whole thing through, but had just "assumed that being lonely would make people warmer, more eager for connection, and more accepting of differences in others. If you’re lonely, you’re going to be open to making friends and therefore more easy-going, right?"
 
So, um, Gretchen: have you ever actually met a lonely person?  

It's a little like "all fat people are jolly, right?" 

If loneliness were simply something that "making friends" could cure (as if "making friends" were itself a simple solution), and not a complex of complexes itself that implicates all aspects of our worldview and lifestyle it would not be an issue at all. There is something slightly patronizing, if not passive-aggressive in the assumption that "being lonely would make people warmer, more eager for connection, and more accepting of differences in others." 

I mean, surely Gretchen's been lonely herself once or twice.  She must know that it doesn't make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.  Loneliness is not just being alone — you don't even have to be alone to experience it. In fact, it's often more intense when you experience it "in a crowd."  So, while the "cure" for being alone might be being around others, loneliness might actually be exacerbated by it. 

There are those who experience loneliness more often and more intensely, that's for sure.  And for them it can be a debilitating vicious circle.  Painfully shy, awkward, and self-conscious people find themselves alone and lonely partly because they're painfully shy, awkward, and self-conscious in the first place.  People prone to depression are not always "open to making friends and therefore more easy-going, right?"

We are not a society that really excels at caring for the especially sensitive or vulnerable among us.  We are more likely to view someone with crippling self-consciousness, for whom even ordinary social interaction is a high-stakes game, with contempt than compassion.  We are more accepting of bullying, and more likely to blame the bullied for it.  We idealize — and idolize — power and individuals who embody it, but we despise the loner, the straggler, the stranger.

As a consolation prize the more conscientious among us (like Gretchen) sentimentalize the losers.  Because our national self-help fairy tale starts with us all as beasts and ends with us all as beauties, we disavow and deny the damage we do and are done by it in reality.  Inside every beast is a beauty — warm, eager for connection, accepting of difference in others.  Right?  There's no damage that can't be undone with a little fairy dust.  Right?

I have to wonder about any insight an observer of human behavior could possibly offer who is so cripplingly sentimental that they'd be genuinely surprised that loneliness “sets us apart by making us more fragile, negative, and self-critical.” Or that "when people feel lonely they are actually far less accepting of potential new friends than when they are socially contented.”  Anyone who finds any of this counter-intuitive can't have much of a sense of intuition to speak of.

I've always found it funny that we seem to have to drain those we find pitiable of all other qualities. It's almost as if we couldn't pity them otherwise.  The logic goes something like this: lonely people must be pitiable, because loneliness is sad.  You see this all the time with the marginalized or dispossessed. "I feel sorry for homeless people," you might say, without ever having met one. 

It's a kind of emotional pornography.  Once you actually start mingling with them, it's not that they are less pitiable, it's that they are other things, too. They cease to be subjects that merely answer an emotional need of ours, and become agents in themselves, who bring their own needs and assumptions to the table.  Their personalities take on complexity and nuance that often makes it harder for us to pity them, merely, than when we didn't know them at all, when they were merely representative of a social problem.  Suddenly other feelings — the whole spectrum of human emotions — intrude on our sense of moral clarity.  

"Oh, poor guy!  He looks like he's had a rough life!" gives way to "Hey! That old sonuvabitch just whacked me with his cane for patting him on the head!" 



Todd Solondz's classic Welcome to the Dollhouse is an excellent primer on modern loneliness and its impact on the loneliest among us (for a much awfuller unflinching look, try the documentary A Certain Kind of Death).  What makes Welcome to the Dollhouse so wickedly funny and in the end so powerfully moving a film is how it rejects all our easy, abstract, sentimental notions about how people become marginalized and how they react to marginalization.  We want them to be victims, merely, even when we know that victims often grow up to be victimizers, that those who are bullied often bully others all down the social food chain.

The emptying of "lonely people" of all but their loneliness, identifying them so completely with their "malady" (and how we are supposed to feel about it generally) is something akin to how people who are seriously ill are often identified so completely with their illness that those around them sometimes seem incapable of accepting that their personalities actually persist.  We are supposed to "feel sorry" for people who are ill, but being ill doesn't always make people more sympathetic.  And "feeling sorry" for them may not be as high up on the their list of wants and needs as it is on ours. 

The problem doesn't lie in those who are ill so much as in the degree to which we associate their illness with them, how completely we submerge them in our own conception of suffering when we're not suffering ourselves.  We are so used to pathologizing illness that we sometimes miss the simple truth that whatever the pathology it cannot describe the experience of the patient, whose personality persists in spite of it.  Still, it's easier to pat them on the head and say, "poor dear" than to acknowledge that people in pain are often raging inside, however passive, even placid they may appear to us on the outside.
 
I tend to think about loneliness in existential terms.  We're born alone and we die alone, and I think it's reasonable to expect a little loneliness in between.  But the experience of loneliness, which I find it hard to believe anyone is entirely ignorant of, can be painful, and that pain, anymore than any other kind of pain, doesn't make for a laid-back, groovy mood.  If it persists, like all pain it can make us doubt everything and despise everyone.

This should surprise no one, and yet in our post-Prozac society it seems counter-intuitive to many. "Why must I and everyone else on Facebook be so insufferably happy?" Kara Baskin asked inthe Globe Sunday Magazine a couple weeks ago.  Because, Kara, it's not MySpace.  We're not angsty teens anymore.  We're supposed to have six hundred friends and always be happy =))) even when we're sad.

If I've learned anything from Gretchen Rubin's primer on happiness I guess it's that ignorance really is bliss. I mean, to assume, after a year of intensive study, that loneliness — a basic human condition which is at the very least a consciousness of our isolation — "will make people warmer" shows a lack of insight that you could, in a charitable mood, call blinding optimism.