The Crab Theory of Loneliness

Why you might feel insane right now.

Recently I have been feeling lonely. The reasons are probably obvious: the political state of the world; witnessing violence on a mass scale; being told that the violence is good by your leaders over and over again. That can all drive a person to feel crazed, and feeling crazed is a good precursor to feeling isolated. 

When the dissonance between your life—being asked to behave normally, go to work, not express your justified anger at yet another U.S.-backed atrocity—and the rhetoric of those in control of your life (politicians, the media, et al), feels particularly mismatched, as it has these last few months, I think that can exacerbate our feelings of isolation. The normal reasons we all feel isolated—social media, over-work, bad urban planning—are enough. Adding to that the feeling that no matter what we do, we are alone in a struggle against violence, can all drive a person and population to feel powerless, and thus very alone. 

Of course, even in times that don’t feel like crisis, we are still in crisis. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, we are in a loneliness epidemic. We spend far less time with friends and loved ones than we did 20 years ago. And that’s directly leading to deaths of depression and general unhealthiness. 

But it only occurred to me recently that our political crisis and our loneliness crisis might be not only two sides of the same coin, but one and the same—that we are lonely not (only) because of our deteriorating social conditions, but because our political system has become more obviously violent, and thus harder to identify with, leaving us without a feeling of belonging. 

If we do not wish to be identified with an actively violent state, we increasingly no longer feel like part of a collective whole. We no longer feel like a country, we no longer feel like a people. This, given the aforementioned deteriorating social conditions, has been happening for decades, but recently, we, I think, have reached an inflection point wherein our collective whole no longer feels good to be a part of in essentially any way. The often-pleasurable motions of American life or Western life generally can no longer make up for the violence that undergirds them.