is Latin for “Never less alone than when alone.”
The feeling of loneliness is due to the desire for company. The desire for company is due to our perception of others, or possibly the memory of a time when we were no so alone.
I believe what that quote means is if we completely remove the presence of others, physically and mentally and theoretically, then there is no such thing as loneliness.
If we were each hatched on a deserted island with no human contact, we would never know loneliness simply because we would never know that we’re expected to be anything else. We wouldn’t watch movies about perfect Hollywood romances or read books about divine lovers or, best of all, we wouldn’t have family & friends all telling us that they understand us when clearly nobody can ever truly understand anyone. Like those photoshopped pictures of models & moviestars with perfect bodies, we are taught to crave an impossible ideal. And often like our reactions to the impossible physical ideal, we kill ourselves trying to attain it and beat ourselves up for not.
We are each alone. Some of us can find temporary islands of comfort with others, but eventually we all end up alone, whether loved ones die, whether they leave us, whether we push them away, or whether they never really got into our hearts in the first place. We each return to the emptiness of solitude, and it hurts like hell because all our lives we’ve been told that it does.
here’s to dying alone.
5 comments
“never less alone than when alone” just means “alone even when not alone.”
It’s all rooted in desire and expectation.
If you remove the desire for the company of others (through whatever means), then you won’t desire the company of others, and will therefore not feel lonely; whether alone or not.
However, if you take it too far, you find desire to be alone, desire to avoid others, desire for isolation and solitude… which is sometimes unattainable, due to the nature of human social constructs, and the ways this world functions, and how our very survival depends quite heavily upon interaction with others. So if you find yourself wanting to never be around anyone, you’ll feel quite frustrated anytime you are “forced” to interact with anyone; especially if it’s someone you really dislike.
But then… if you manage to find the middle ground, and desire neither company nor solitude… then how can passion exist?
The fact is that we all want, we all desire, and many of us spend large chunks of our lives trying to adjust our environments to facilitate access to our desires, or ourselves, when the environment is immutable or beyond our control. We’re always trying to change stuff, to reach some destination, some ideal, or acquire some set of possessions or circumstantial parameters…
And somewhere along the way, we forget to actually Live… and some of us are disallowed from actually living, by others who have become consumed by their own idealistic, unrealistic desires.
For a long time, i’ve thought the idea of “dying alone” was actually a good thing; i don’t want to be bothered by inane drivel or emotional blubbering, while on my death bed, about to slip away. The problem is that i don’t want to Live alone. In death, we are all alone. But in life, we have a frequently squandered opportunity to experience companionship, brotherhood, camaraderie… but people are too busy chasing fairytales, to appreciate the value of life itself. And it certainly doesn’t help that large contingents of people seem content to utterly deny any possible value of life. Life itself is priceless; it’s the ways people live, the ways things are done, in these systems established by those who wish to control everyone else for their own gains, which is the root of the problem. And if the systems remove or prevent the opportunities for experiencing life’s fulfilling potentials… then those systems have indeed squandered, even prevented, the value of countless lives. And people just keep buying into it, and willingly participating in the perpetuation of the problems, instead of doing something to change it.
@clevername, that was well wrote, and triggers reflection of the past in myself. There are parts in what you wrote that i have lived and never want to relive. the question is how to balance between need and wants. and will i ever be able to not let the thoughts of needless wants waste my life.
The thing is, we’re pack animals. I’d wager the need for company is in our DNA.
The desert island example is infeasible, because when we’re born we’re completely dependent on our mothers for a long, long time.
I’ve been alone for a large part of my adult life, I’m not really sure why, I just drifted into it. And I can say, for me at least, that I have achieved a fraction of the things I could have, if I had been more outgoing.
Alone time is fine, but I’ve heard of studies which show that loneliness is deadlier than obesity.
We’re playing with fire here.
+1 clevername
I don’t think the desert island example necessarily holds. Like muspelhem said, humans could very well have some primitive instinct for company rooting back to prehistoric times. Many animals certainly have this feat. For example dogs and certain birds become really depressed if they are alone. This happens often when someone doesn’t have enough time for his or her pet.