I wonder how much the “great loneliness for creatures like us” is a necessary outcome of realizing that you are an individual, and how much it is a consequence of e.g. not having the kinds of friends you want to have, i.e. something that you wouldn’t feel under the right circumstances.
From my perspective, what I miss is people similar to me, living close to me. I can find like-minded people, but they live in different countries (I met them on LW meetups). Thus, I feel more lonely than I would feel if I lived in a different city. Similarly, being extraverted and/or having greater social skills could possibly help me find similar people in my proximity, maybe. Also, sometimes I meet people who seem like they could be what I miss in my life, but they are not interested in being friends with me. Again, this is probably a numbers game; if I could meet ten or hundred times more people of that type, some of them could be interested in me.
(In other words, I wonder whether this is not yet another case of “my personal problems, interpreted as a universal experience of the humankind”.)
Yet another possible factor is the feeling of safety. The less safe I feel, the greater the desire of having allies, preferably perfect allies, preferably loyal clones of myself.
Plus the fear of death. If, in some sense, there are copies of me out there, then, in some sense, I am immortal. If I am unique, then at my death something unique (and valuable, at least to me) will disappear from this universe, forever.
My quick response is that all of these sources of loneliness can still be downstream of using closed individualism as an intuitive model. The more I am able to use the open model the more safe I feel in any situation and the more connected I feel to others no matter how similar or different they are to me. Put one way, every stranger is a cousin I haven’t met yet, but just knowing on a deep level that the world is full of cousins is reassuring.
I wonder how much the “great loneliness for creatures like us” is a necessary outcome of realizing that you are an individual, and how much it is a consequence of e.g. not having the kinds of friends you want to have, i.e. something that you wouldn’t feel under the right circumstances.
From my perspective, what I miss is people similar to me, living close to me. I can find like-minded people, but they live in different countries (I met them on LW meetups). Thus, I feel more lonely than I would feel if I lived in a different city. Similarly, being extraverted and/or having greater social skills could possibly help me find similar people in my proximity, maybe. Also, sometimes I meet people who seem like they could be what I miss in my life, but they are not interested in being friends with me. Again, this is probably a numbers game; if I could meet ten or hundred times more people of that type, some of them could be interested in me.
(In other words, I wonder whether this is not yet another case of “my personal problems, interpreted as a universal experience of the humankind”.)
Yet another possible factor is the feeling of safety. The less safe I feel, the greater the desire of having allies, preferably perfect allies, preferably loyal clones of myself.
Plus the fear of death. If, in some sense, there are copies of me out there, then, in some sense, I am immortal. If I am unique, then at my death something unique (and valuable, at least to me) will disappear from this universe, forever.
My quick response is that all of these sources of loneliness can still be downstream of using closed individualism as an intuitive model. The more I am able to use the open model the more safe I feel in any situation and the more connected I feel to others no matter how similar or different they are to me. Put one way, every stranger is a cousin I haven’t met yet, but just knowing on a deep level that the world is full of cousins is reassuring.