The Rise of Emotional Divestment
We have grown ever more capable of subsisting without others. We can endure for days in cities of 10 million people without uttering a word. Yet we have lost the art of admitting our sorrows to others and of building connections based on vulnerability. We are lucky if we can lay claim to even one or two people we can call on when disaster strikes.
Alain de Botton • A Therapeutic Journey
A paradox: People are more connected now than ever — through phones, social media, Zoom and such — yet loneliness continues to rise. Among the most digitally connected, teenagers and young adults, loneliness nearly doubled in prevalence between 2012 and 2018, coinciding with the explosion in social media use.AdvertisementContinue reading the main s
... See morenytimes.com • How Loneliness Is Damaging Our Health
And what shadow of fear or anger—what imagined impotence—is keeping us from a deep emotional and spiritual connection to the people around us? Is the world really torn and dark, or does it just appear that way to us because we are taking it in through a torn mind and a hardened heart?
Alan Lew • This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation
Trying repeatedly to do something so potentially devastating requires being finely attuned to other people, tapped into your own ability for intimacy. And our culture of extreme individualism and extreme alienation, our culture of loneliness, doesn’t exactly make that easy.
Miriam Gordis • In defense of feeling
There it is again, that ill-fated delusion: to be special is to belong. To be spotlit, and comfortable there, is to finally be home. I want it to go on and on and on because it’s who I am. There’s a rigidity to the dynamic between a public figure and the public, no matter how porous and genuine we believe the figure to be. Which isn’t to say the dy... See more