The cure for loneliness

The November 2005 issue of Yoga Journal had an article that really pissed me off. (I believe that being angered by an issue of a magazine devoted to yoga officially qualifies me for the 2005 World Championship of Ironic Non-Enlightenment.) The article was entitled “A Real Cure for Loneliness: Sweet Solitude.” Great! I thought. Disconnection and alienation are such problems for modern industrial cultures, maybe they’ll have some wisdom to offer. I certainly have struggled with loneliness and a lack of social connection, as an immigrant to a new culture. So I was mightily disappointed when the article was focused entirely on the individual. Here was the author’s startling insight: time spent alone doesn’t have to be lonely. You can use it for spiritual practice, and as an opportunity to focus on the spiritual essentials that really matter. I expect more from a yoga magazine than platitudes that were obvious to me in high school. I expect a bit more depth of analysis.

It’s all well and good to focus on time spent in the "inner world", but such an analysis of loneliness misses the underlying cause, i.e., a society that is out of balance, in which people are disconnected from each other. Instead, the implicit message is that if loneliness is a problem for someone, he or she just isn’t being spiritual enough. It points to the individual him- or herself as the cause of the problem. Modern industrial cultures are structured to alienate people from each other. Our culture focuses on people as consumers rather than as relate-ers, shunting people towards activities like watching TV and playing video games that involve not interacting with other people. Given our society’s profound inability to foster meaningful lasting social connections, writing an article like this one is like saying that the problem with people on the Titanic was that they just didn’t have a spiritual enough attitude towards drowning in freezing water.

We are social primates. We need social contact, a sense of belonging, a sense of community and being valued by other people. Hunter-gatherer cultures and traditional agricultural cultures have this. (See entry of May 25, click here.) Maybe if we worked on enriching the social connections in our culture rather than everyone staying alone and gazing at their navels, a.k.a., inner worlds, we could heal the underlying cause of disconnection. Then we could focus on the inner world fruitfully. The wisdom traditions of the world recognize the need for community. Yogis, or Buddhist monks and nuns don’t try to do their practice in isolation, but within a spiritual community, or sangha. Even a monk in a cave depends on food and water brought by members of his sangha, and will return to that sangha to share the wisdom from his practice in the cave. It’s only Americans, thinking they can shop for spiritual wisdom piecemeal, who cling to the idea of practicing in isolation. Individualism is a part of American culture that gets grafted onto Eastern practices when they come to America, but that doesn’t mean it’s part of the Eastern tradition.