The world has never been so lonely. People in so-called “developed” countries live in boxes and spend most of their time in front of screens to forget their loneliness. Loneliness is an evil that is eating away at society, yet it is also a tremendous opportunity for companies that have decided to monetize it.
Your Solitude Has A Market Value
There’s no doubt that humans are social animals, just like pigs, chickens or dogs. Living in a cage is a pain, but man is a battery-bred animal with a wallet, so his solitude is taken into account.
Forget Your Loneliness
Companies in the technology industry don’t pretend to make you less lonely; what they want is simply to make you forget that you are. So they create a system in which you are constantly distracted, stimulated, distracted from reality. And it works. You forget that you’re going to bed alone after watching 2 hours of video on Youtube. You forget your lack of human contact as you scroll endlessly through the profiles of potential matches on dating apps. You end up living in a hyper-reality that prevents you from distinguishing the real from the fake. Things become blurred, and you can’t really pinpoint who you are or what you do. The days repeat themselves and are characterized by a monotony you just can’t shake off. Time goes by and you sink deeper into the meanders of this solitary existence.
False Solitude
There is such a thing as real and false solitude. There’s the kind of solitude that allows us to grow and become better people, and there’s the kind we endure without facing up to it.
The commercial world needs you to escape your loneliness
If you take advantage of your solitude and live it to the full, you’ll become wiser and more resilient. Conversely, if you run away from your loneliness by subterfuge, you won’t improve, you’ll sink into a parallel reality from which it will be increasingly difficult to extricate yourself. Merchants need you to need them. They offer you the comfort of dopamine through the applications they make available to you. They sell you services that allow you to forget your loneliness.
Learning To Tame Loneliness
“If you feel lonely when you’re alone, it’s because you’re in bad company.” Sartre.
Solitude is fruitful when it’s put to good use. There’s a kind of solitude we suffer, and there’s a kind we choose. The wise man is the one who manages to love the solitude imposed on him. All the great spiritual masters have used solitude to deploy their spiritual power. They improved through solitude. We live in an age that is not very spiritual, so solitude is discredited and becomes a commodity.
Changing The Way We Look At Solitude
We naturally feel anxious in solitude. As a social species, Homo Sapiens has conditioned its survival on belonging to a group. Time immemorial, human solitude meant death and the impossibility of reproduction. This fear is still deeply rooted in us, but it can be tamed.
Solitude Is The Place Of Our Spiritual Transformation
If you have an enlightened eye, you can see solitude as a springboard to a more spiritual self. Solitude is an ordeal which, if overcome, can help you develop your cosmic self. The problem is that most of the time, we don’t see solitude as an opportunity.
