Forever Alone Together
A recap of “How To Be Alone With Yourself,” a House of Beautiful Business Living Room Session
Currently one in five people globally is under lockdown, and many more are self-isolating in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Though modern technologies help us meet our need for social connection through new virtual social networks, blind dates with strangers, and dance parties, the sense of loneliness couldn’t be more apparent. It doesn’t help that around the world, we’re increasingly living in one-person households.
The rapid restrictions of the past weeks have brought social-and-business-as-usual life to a halt — and here we are, realizing how much we have been out of touch with one another, and with our own selves.
Perhaps it has always been there, this loneliness monster, waiting under our beds to come haunt us. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self,” said American poet and novelist May Sarton. Or in other words, your definition of loneliness may depend on your subjective sentiment. You can be alone in the woods and feel intimately connected to loved ones, indeed the hum and thrum of the entire universe, and you can be in a noisy room, surrounded by friends, and feel lonely, as House Resident Dr. Elaine Kasket, psychotherapist and author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: Illusions of Immortality in the Digital Age, pointed out.
Kasket joined us for this week’s Living Room Session on “How To Be Alone With Yourself,” and asked us to think of creative ways of shoring up our sense of self, now that we’ve lost the external scaffolding that, for many of us, helped us feel recognized and valued.
House board member and INSEAD associate professor Gianpiero Petriglieri called our instinct to throw ourselves into productivity as a hedge against loneliness as “Panic-Working” (vs. panic-shopping). We hope work will reward us with a brief moment of happiness, usefulness, a sense of purpose, or simply “avoid thoughts of death.”
But this present loneliness crisis is also an oxytocin crisis, as a recent article by The New Yorker argues, so work alone won’t solve it. This feel-good hormone is released mainly through human touches such as hand-holding, hugs, orgasm, and other physical ways of bonding — all hard to do when alone.
And as our brains are hardwired to survival mode, 60–70 percent of our thoughts are negative by default, Kasket emphasized, so we need to practice mental resilience, and go easy on ourselves and others.
“There’s never been a better time to be open to engaging in compassion for oneself and the other, reaching out to our communities, connecting with our values — all of these things might directly pertain to loneliness or they might not, but they are incredibly important in a time where the external world has become so constrained.”— Elaine Kasket
We might also learn from those who have faced extreme isolation in even more radical ways.
In our Living Room Session, we heard from former prisoner Erwin James, a writer, author of Redeemable: A Memoir of Darkness and Hope, and columnist for The Guardian, who survived 20 years of isolation, and who will be speaking at the forthcoming House of Beautiful Business annual gathering this fall.
James referred to his first moments in prison as “a lonely place, even when being surrounded by fellow mates, because you are lonely in your mind.” The option you can choose, which is what he did, is to force yourself to adjust.
“I had to accept the reduction of my existence. I slowed the pace of my thinking as my choices and opportunities were utterly reduced. Rather than setting yourself goals and expectations, ask yourself: what can I do with the day that I have?”
Now in lockdown in the UK along with the rest of the country, James shared how he can feel himself readjusting to the mental abilities he developed during his years in confinement. When asked for advice for dealing with our current situation, he encouraged revisting to great thinkers past and present:
“I discovered the world in prison — through books. I can only recommend turning to philosophy, because to understand philosophy, you have to be in isolation.”
Finally, to begin such adjustment, as we do not know if there will be a definitive end to the coronavirus crisis, we can all start small.
To help us learn to care better for our wellbeing, and to experience a sense of communion while together apart, Esther Blázquez Blanco, founder of Deep Business Connection and Carola Zafarana, singer and actor, both based in Barcelona, concluded the Living Room Session with a special exercise. If you like, get a pen and paper and come up with blessings for the following people, and share them with a friend, neighbor, or colleague:
A blessing for everyone alone
A blessing for your colleagues
A blessing for the people you love
A blessing for the people who are exposed to the virus
A blessing for a woman giving birth today
A blessing for a child being born today
A blessing for your sense of humor
A blessing for yourself when you don’t like yourself
A blessing for someone you really miss
View all upcoming Living Room Sessions and sign up for free.
Living Room Sessions are part of a Residency at the House of Beautiful Business, a global think tank and community with the mission to make humans more humans and business more beautiful. In response to the global coronavirus crisis, we’ve opened up Living Room Sessions to the public until the end of April.
Monika Jiang is the head of content and community at The Business Romantic Society and a co-curator of the House of Beautiful Business.
The Journal is a production of The Business Romantic Society, hosts of the House of Beautiful Business.
The House can be found on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram, and in Lisbon, Portugal from October 31– November 3, 2020. Please apply for House Residency here.
